had we
previously received it, would have prevented our attempting to carry a
vessel of iron past the Cataracts. The trees around Katosa's village
were Timbati, and they would have yielded planks fifty feet long and
thirty inches broad. With a few native carpenters a good vessel could be
built on the Lake nearly as quickly as one could be carried past the
Cataracts, and at a vastly less cost. Juma said that no money would
induce him to part with this dhow. He was very busy in transporting
slaves across the Lake by means of two boats, which we saw returning from
a trip in the afternoon. As he did not know of our intention to visit
him, we came upon several gangs of stout young men slaves, each secured
by the neck to one common chain, waiting for exportation, and several
more in slave-sticks. These were all civilly removed before our
interview was over, because Juma knew that we did not relish the sight.

When we met the same Arabs in 1861, they had but few attendants:
according to their own account, they had now, in the village and adjacent
country, 1500 souls. It is certain that tens of thousands had flocked to
them for protection, and all their power and influence must be attributed
to the possession of guns and gunpowder. This crowding of refugees to
any point where there is a hope for security for life and property is
very common in this region, and the knowledge of it made our hopes beat
high for the success of a peaceful Mission on the shores of the Lake. The
rate, however, in which the people here will perish by the next famine,
or be exported by Juma and others, will, we fear, depopulate those parts
which we have just described as crowded with people. Hunger will ere
long compel them to sell each other. An intelligent man complained to us
of the Arabs often seizing slaves, to whom they took a fancy, without the
formality of purchase; but the price is so low--from two to four yards of
calico--that one can scarcely think this seizure and exportation without
payment worth their while. The boats were in constant employment, and,
curiously enough, Ben Habib, whom we met at Linyanti in 1855, had been
taken across the Lake, the day before our arrival at this Bay, on his way
from Sesheke to Kilwa, and we became acquainted with a native servant of
the Arabs, called Selele Saidallah, who could speak the Makololo language
pretty fairly from having once spent some months in the Barotse Valley.

From boyhood upwar