We Believed That We Ought To Leave The English Name In The Same Good Repute Among The Natives That We

Had found it; and in removing the poor creatures, who had lived with Mackenzie as children with a father, to

A land where the education he began would be completed, we had the aid and sympathy of the best of the Portuguese, and of the whole population. The difference between shipping slaves and receiving these free orphans struck us as they came on board. As soon as permission to embark was given, the rush into the boat nearly swamped her - their eagerness to be safe on the "Pioneer's" deck had to be repressed.

Bishop Tozer had already left for Quillimane when we took these people and the last of the Universities' Missionaries on board and proceeded to the Zambesi. It was in high flood. We have always spoken of this river as if at its lowest, for fear lest we should convey an exaggerated impression of its capabilities for navigation. Instead of from five to fifteen feet, it was now from fifteen to thirty feet, or more, deep. All the sandbanks and many of the islands had disappeared, and before us rolled a river capable, as one of our naval friends thought, of carrying a gunboat. Some of the sandy islands are annually swept away, and the quantities of sand carried down are prodigious.

The process by which a delta, extending eighty or one hundred miles from the sea, has been formed may be seen going on at the present day - the coarser particles of sand are driven out into the ocean, just in the same way as we see they are over banks in the beds of torrents. The finer portions are caught by the returning tide, and, accumulating by successive ebbs and flows, become, with the decaying vegetation, arrested by the mangrove roots. The influence of the tide in bringing back the finer particles gives the sea near the mouth of the Zambesi a clean and sandy bottom. This process has been going on for ages, and as the delta has enlarged eastwards, the river has always kept a channel for itself behind. Wherever we see an island all sand, or with only one layer of mud in it, we know it is one of recent formation, and that it may be swept away at any time by a flood; while those islands which are all of mud are the more ancient, having in fact existed ever since the time when the ebbing and flowing tides originally formed them as parts of the delta. This mud resists the action of the river wonderfully. It is a kind of clay on which the eroding power of water has little effect. Were maps made, showing which banks and which islands are liable to erosion, it would go far to settle where the annual change of the channel would take place; and, were a few stakes driven in year by year to guide the water in its course, the river might be made of considerable commercial value in the hands of any energetic European nation.

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