KILIMANE. 227 



contact with Europeans. The well-known preference that fever manifests 

 for the natives of Northern Europe, and the indisposition it exhibits to make 

 victims of Africans, would lead persons resident in one region of this continent 

 to say that the white race was doomed to extinction. However to be explained, 

 the Africans who have come under my observation are not subject to many of 

 the diseases which thin our own numbers. Smallpox and measles paid a 

 passing visit through the continent some thirty years ago ; and though they 

 committed great ravages, they did not remain endemic nor return. They did 

 not find a congenial soil; and though the period preceding the rains is 

 eminently epidemic in its constitution, excepting hooping cough, no epidemic 

 known in Europe appears. There is an indisposition independent of climatic 

 influences, which becomes, I imagine, evident, when a certain loathsome dis- 

 ease is observed to die out spontaneously in Africans of pure blood ; and those 

 of mixed blood are subjected to all its forms with a virulence exactly pro- 

 portioned to the amount of European blood in their veins. 



" Strangers are so liable to be unintentionally misled by the careless 

 answers of uninterested inhabitants, I would fain have subjected every 

 important point to the test of personal examination, but except in the cases 

 of gold, coal, iron, and a hot fountain, which did not involve any additional 

 fatigue, I had to rely on the information of others alone. The difference of 

 climate must account for the disproportionate exhaustion experienced by 

 myself and companions from marches of a dozen miles, compared with that 

 produced in our naval officers by those prodigious strides we read of having 

 been performed in the Arctic Circle. Indeed I was pretty well 'knocked up' by 

 not much more than a month on foot ; the climate on the river felt hot and 

 steamy, water never cools, clothes always damp from profuse perspiration ; 

 and as the country is generally covered with long grass, bushes, and trees, the 

 abundance of well-rounded shingle everywhere renders it necessary to keep 

 the eyes continually on the ground. Pedestrianism under such circumstances 

 might be all very well for those whose obesity calls for the process of Press- 

 neitz ; but for one who had become as lean as a lath, the only discernible 

 good was that it enabled an honest sort of man to gain a vivid idea of ' a 

 month on the treadmill.' " 



Dr. Livingstone soon concluded that Kilimane was not the proper posi- 

 tion for the port of the Zambesi, but he was not then aware that another and 

 a better mouth of the river, only known to themselves, was used for the ex- 

 portation of slaves. He says : — 



" The Portuguese, in extenuation of the apparent disadvantage of building 

 the ' capital of the rivers of Senna' (Kilimane) where it possesses such slender 

 connection with the Zambesi, allege that the Miitu in former times was large, 

 but it is now filled up with alluvial deposit. The bar, too, was safer then than 

 it is now. To a stranger it looks remarkable that the main stream of the 



