576 THE ZAMBESI IN FLOOD Chap. XXVIII. 



Bishop Mackenzie was placed, and who certainly had not 

 given up their own right of appeal to the sword of the 

 magistrate, was, that the new head of the Mission had gone 

 to extremes in the opposite direction from his predecessor ; 

 not even protesting against the one monstrous evil of the 

 country, the slave-trade. The most heartless axiom that 

 ever issued from a Missionary's mouth, "one black face is 

 as good as another to me," was never uttered by Mackenzie ; 

 nor did it find a chord of sympathy in true English hearts. 

 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 

 native population. The difference between shaping 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 carry- 

 ing 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 



