That justice may be done, he, now, is officially, though
tardily, created a member of Chinde's respectable society. R.H.D.]
The profession of the slave-trader, unless it be that of his
contemporary, the pirate preying under his black flag, is the one
which holds you with the most grewsome and fascinating interest. Its
inhumanity, its legends of predatory expeditions into unknown
jungles of Africa, the long return marches to the Coast, the
captured blacks who fall dead in the trail, the dead pulling down
with their chains those who still live, the stifling holds of the
slave-ships, the swift flights before pursuing ships-of-war, the
casting away, when too closely chased, of the ship's cargo, and the
sharks that followed, all of these come back to one as he walks the
shore-wall of Mozambique. From there he sees the slave-dhows in the
harbor, the jungles on the mainland through which the slaves came by
the thousands, and still come one by one, and the ancient palaces of
the Portuguese governors, dead now some hundreds of years, to whom
this trade in human agony brought great wealth, and no loss of
honor.
[Illustration: Chain-gangs of Petty Offenders Outside of Zanzibar.]
Mozambique in the days of her glory was, with Zanzibar, the great
slave-market of East Africa, and the Portuguese and the Arabs who
fattened on this traffic built themselves great houses there, and a
fortress capable, in the event of a siege, of holding the garrison
and all the inhabitants as well.
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