HISTORY. 



277 



of Newgate Calendar, whilst the multitude of 

 personages that appear upon the scene, and the 

 perpetual rising and falling of Imams, princes, and 

 grandees, offer to the reader a mere string of 

 proper names. Ample details concerning Mas- 

 kat will be found in the pages of Capt. Hamilton, 

 Carsten Niebuhr, Wellsted, and Salil ibn Razik, 1 

 to mention no others. Zanzibar has ever been, 

 since historic times, connected with Oman, 

 whose fortunes she has reflected ; the account of 

 the distant dependency given by travellers is, 

 therefore, as might be expected, scanty and 

 obscure. 



At an early period the merchants and trad- 

 ers of Yemen frequented the Island, and ex- 

 changed, as we read in the Periplus and Ptolemy, 

 their homes of barren rock and sand for the 

 luxuriant wastes of Eastern Africa. If tradition 

 be credible, their primitive settlements were 

 Patta (Bette), Lamu, and the Mrima fronting 

 these islets ; and here to the present day the 

 dialect of their descendants has remained the 

 purest. Themselves pagans, they lived amongst 

 the heathenry, borrowed their language, as the 



1 History of the Imams and Sayyids of Oman, from a.d. 

 661 to 1856, by Salil ibn Bazik. Translated, &c, by the Eev. 

 G-. P. Badger. Printed for the Hakluyt Society. 



