CHAPTER XI. 



Stay at Tete. — Senna. — Arrival at Kilimane. — Letters to Sir Roderick Murehison 

 Concerning the People of South and Central Africa, their Language, etc., 

 etc. — Departure for England. 



AS Livingstone was in a very emaciated state, and fever was raging at Kili- 

 mane, the point on the coast to which he was bound, he was induced to 

 remain at Tete for a month, during which time he occupied himself by mak- 

 ing several journeys in the neighbourhood, visiting a coal-field, etc., etc. 

 The village of Tete he found to consist of a large number of wattle-and-daub 

 native huts with about thirty European houses built of stone. The place had 

 declined greatly in importance through the introduction of the slave trade. 

 In former times considerable quantities of wheat, maize, millet, coffee, sugar, 

 oil, indigo, gold dust, and ivory were exported, and as labour was both abun- 

 dant and cheap the trade was profitable. Livingstone says, "When the slave 

 trade began, it seemed to many of the merchants a more speedy mode of 

 becoming rich to sell off the slaves, than to pursue the slow mode of gold- 

 washing and agriculture ; and they continued to export them until they had 

 neither hands to labour nor to fight for them. . . . The coffee and sugar 

 plantations and gold-washings were abandoned, because the labour had been 

 exported to the Brazils." The neighbouring chiefs were not slow to take 

 advantage of the impoverished state of the Portuguese and half-caste 

 merchants of Tete. " A clever man of Asiatic and Portuguese extraction, 

 called Nyaude, had built a stockade at the confluence of the Luenya and 

 Zambesi; and when the commandant of Tete sent an officer with his company 

 to summon him to his presence," they were surrounded and bound hand and 

 foot. The commandant " then armed the whole body of slaves and marched 

 against the stockade of Nyaude," but before they reached it, Nyaude despatch- 

 ed a strong party under his son Bonga, who attacked Tete, plundered and 

 burned the whole town, with the exception of the house of the commandant 

 and a few others, and the church and fort. The women and children having 

 taken refuge in the church were safe, as the natives of this region will never 

 attack a church. The news of this disaster caused a panic among the party 

 before the stockade of Nyaude, and they fled in confusion, to be slain or 

 made captives by Katolosa the head chief of the district to the west of Tete. 



Another half-caste chief, called Kisaka, on the opposite bank of the river, 

 near where the merchants of Tete had their villages and principal plantations, 



