while we
were there. I went along on the first occasion. Upon reaching the
beach we found a guard of some forty negro soldiers, whose equipment,
as to shoes, resembled that of the Barbadian company immortalized in
Peter Simple; but in this instance there was no attempt at that
decorous regard for externals which ordered those with both shoes and
stockings to fall in in the front rank, and those with neither to keep
in the rear. They were commanded by a young Arab, who seemed very
anxious to do all in style, rising on tiptoe at the several orders,
which he jerked out with vim, and to my surprise in English. When duly
pointed, we marched off to the sound of a drum, accompanied by a
peculiar monotonous wail on a kind of trumpet; the order of the
procession being, 1, music; 2, the soldiers, led by an old sergeant in
a high state of excitement and coat-collar, which held the poor
fellow's head like a vise; and, 3, our captain and his attendants. The
visit to the sultan, two days later, was marked by additional
features, indicative, I presume, of the greater dignity of the event;
the captain being now carried in a chair with a red silk umbrella over
his head.

Between three and four years before our visit, the Confederate steamer
_Alabama_ had stopped at Johanna, and, so at least our friends told
us, Semmes had promised them a Yankee whaler or two. Whether he found
the whalers or not I cannot say; but to the Johannese it was a
Barmecide feast, or like the anticipation of Sisera's ladies--"to
every man a damsel or two." To use their own quaint English, the next
thing they heard of the _Alabama_, "he go down."

We left Johanna with the southwest monsoon, which in the Indian Ocean
and China Sea blows from June to September with the regularity of the
trade-winds of the Atlantic, both in direction and force. There the
favorable resemblance ends; for, in the region through which we were
passing, this monsoon is overcast, usually gloomy, and excessively
damp. The northeast monsoon, which prevails during the winter months,
is clear and dry. The consequent struggle with shoe-leather, and the
deterioration of the same, is disheartening. But, though surcharged
with moisture, rain does not fall to any great extent in the open sea,
nor until the atmospheric current impinges on land, when it seems to
be squeezed, like a sponge by the hand, with resultant precipitation.
Our conditions were therefore pleasant enough. Being under sail only