386 LIFE OF DA VID LIVINGSTONE, LL.D. 



commends itself as a sport to the most enthusiastic canoer in England, or the 

 most blase sportsman, who had ' done all that sort of thing and got sick of it,' 

 in the common routine of English sports. The Akombwi will show him 

 more pluck in half-an-hour, and more exercise of muscle, brain, and nerve, 

 than in any sport I ever saw. 



" As a race the men are magnificent. To watch the evolutions of their 

 canoes, as they pass and repass over the deep pools in which hippopotami lie, 

 is a very beautiful sight. Each canoe is manned by two men, and the har- 

 pooner's attitude, as he stands, erect and motionless, with the long weapon 

 poised at arm's length above his head, would make the painter or sculptor 

 envious of a study. Hard exercise and activity develop every muscle, and 

 the men, as a rule, have the most magnificent figures. They are as generous 

 as they are brave. They lead a wonderful life, living mostly on the rivers, 

 establishing villages for a year or two in one place or another, where 

 families build huts and cultivate a patch of ground. The flesh of the hip- 

 popotami they kill is always eagerly exchanged for grain by the natives 

 along the river, and the curved teeth, the hardest of all ivory, find a ready 

 market with the Portuguese." 



Before leaving the Shire, Mr. Young visited the graves of Bishop 

 Mackenzie and his brave companions, and reverently renewed them. They 

 found that the natives had treated them as sacred. Arrived at Shupanga, 

 he paid off his native crew who had been with him three months. Early 

 in November the party dropped down to the Kongone mouth of the Zambesi, 

 where H.M.S. Racoon called for them according to arrangement on the 1st 

 of December. In every respect the search expedition under Mr. Young's 

 command was the most successful on record. Not only did they com- 

 pletely succeed in the object of their quest, but there had been no case of 

 fever during the entire journey, and no accident to life or limb to record 

 save the attack on John Graitty by the elephant in the Shire. Well might 

 Sir Roderick Murchison say of it: — 



" To put together a boat constructed in sections, to find a negro crew 

 for the navigation of the Zambesi, to take the boat to pieces, and have it 

 carried up thirty-six miles along the sides of the cataracts to the river Shire — 

 then, after navigating the waters of the lake until the fate of Livingstone was 

 clearly ascertained, to convey her back to the Zambesi, and finally bring her 

 and the party safe back to England without the loss of a single man — this, 

 indeed, is a real triumph." 



The first accounts of his movements from Dr. Livingstone himself, reached 

 this country in the shape of a letter to a friend in Edinburgh, about the 20th 

 of April, from which we make the following extracts. It is dated the 

 country of the Chipeta, which is far to the north-west of the pc-int to which 

 the search expedition traced him, and was written on the 10th of November, 



