602 TRADE RESTRICTIONS. 



the side of power, and a candidate might feel it worth 

 while to grant a good piece of land, if thereby he could 

 secure the chieftainship to himself. When the Portu- 

 guese traders wish to pass into the country beyond 

 Katalosa, they present him with about thirty-two yards 

 of calico and some other goods, and he then gives them 

 leave to pass in whatever direction they choose to go. 

 They must, however, give certain quantities of cloth to a 

 number of inferior chiefs beside, and they are subject 

 to the game-laws. They have thus a body of exclusive 

 tribes around them, preventing direct intercourse between 

 them and the population beyond. It is strange that, when 

 they had the power, they did not insist on the free naviga- 

 tion of the Zambesi. I can only account for this in the 

 same way in which I accounted for a similar state of things 

 in the west. All the traders have been in the hands of 

 slaves, and have wanted that moral courage which a free 

 man, with free servants on whom he can depend, usually 

 possesses. If the English had been here, they would 

 have insisted on the free navigation of this pathway as an 

 indispensable condition of friendship. The present system 

 is a serious difficulty in the way of developing the re- 

 sources of the country, and might prove fatal to an un- 

 armed expedition. If this desirable and most fertile field 

 of enterprise is ever to be opened up, men must proceed 

 on a different plan from that which has been followed, 

 and I do not apprehend there would be much difficulty 

 in commencing a new system, if those who undertook it 

 insisted that it is not our custom to pay for a highway 

 which has not been made by man. The natives them- 

 selves would not deny that the river is free to those who 

 do not trade in slaves. If, in addition to an open frank 

 explanation, a small subsidy were given to the paramount 

 chief, the willing consent of all the subordinates would 

 soon be secured. 



On the ist of April I went to see the site of a former 

 establishment of the Jesuits, called Micombo, about ten 

 miles S.E. of Tete. Like all their settlements I have seen, 

 both judgment and taste had been employed in the selec- 

 tion of the site. A little stream of mineral water had been 

 collected in a tank and conducted to their house, before 

 which was a little garden for raising vegetables at times 

 of the year when no rain falls. It was now buried in a 

 deep shady grove of mango-trees. I was accompanied 



