If A Man Wished To Curry Favor
With A Batoka Chief, He Ascertained When A Stranger Was About To Leave,
And waylaid him at a distance from the town, and when he brought his head
back to the chief, it
Was mounted as a trophy, the different chiefs
vieing with each other as to which should mount the greatest number of skulls
in his village.
If, as has been asserted, the Portuguese ever had a chain of trading stations
across the country from Caconda to Tete, it must have passed
through these people; but the total ignorance of the Zambesi
flowing from north to south in the centre of the country,
and the want of knowledge of the astonishing falls of Victoria,
which excite the wonder of even the natives, together with
the absence of any tradition of such a chain of stations,
compel me to believe that they existed only on paper. This conviction
is strengthened by the fact that when a late attempt was made
to claim the honor of crossing the continent for the Portuguese,
the only proof advanced was the journey of two black traders
formerly mentioned, adorned with the name of "Portuguese".
If a chain of stations had existed, a few hundred names of the same sort
might easily have been brought forward; and such is the love of barter
among all the central Africans, that, had there existed a market for ivory,
its value would have become known, and even that on the graves of the chiefs
would not have been safe.
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