116 THE PRAZOES 



uneasiness to the Captain-General at Mozambique. 

 Finally an officer was despatched to restore order, 

 and to demand the surrender of certain prazoes 

 which had been taken possession of by force of arms. 

 But his authority was too feeble ; the prazo-holders, 

 strong in their position of feudal chieftains, laughed 

 him to scorn. In short the position was chaotic, 

 anarchical, and, worse than all, so exhausted were 

 the resources at the command both of Portugal and 

 Mozambique that not a man could be spared to 

 chastise these law-breaking outcasts. 



At length the singular expedient was devised 

 of sending out from Portugal a number of young 

 women to the Zambezi, for reasons which are not 

 very clear, but who were apparently intended to 

 purify the blood of the existing half-breed prazo- 

 holders. These latter, in consideration of obtaining 

 the prize of a European helpmate, were to covenant 

 that the succession of their property should go in 

 the female line instead of through their sons ; thus, 

 the eldest daughter was to inherit and marry a 

 pure Portuguese, whose eldest female child should 

 do likewise, until, at the death of the third heiress, 

 the prazo was to revert to the Crown. The success 

 or failure of this original scheme has not, so far as 

 I am aware, come down to us, and the old order 

 continued for many years, until finally the great 

 landed proprietors of the period we have been 

 considering signed their own death-warrants by 

 excessive participation in the slave-traffic, which so 

 decimated their prazoes and exhausted their powers 

 of resistance, that automatically they sank in course 

 of time to a point whereat they ceased to be the 



