12 
ZANZIBAR SLAVE-MARKEI 1 . 
keepers, chiefly Indians, were respectful even to a pain- 
ful degree, rising as we passed them. The bazaar is very 
abundantly supplied with vegetables, fruit, and dried 
fish ; little butcher-meat, but hquor- shops abound, 
and water has to be purchased — the best quality being 
carried fully a mile from a hot spring, which bubbles 
from under rock, and tastes unpleasantly warm. Men 
in the marketplace have an odd way of hawking about 
their goods for sale. Goats, carved doors, beds, knives, 
swords, &c, are all paraded up and down, and their 
prices shouted out. The market for human beings is 
a triangular space surrounded by rickety huts, thatched 
with cocoa-nut leaves ; and the parties of slaves (negro 
men and women brought originally from the interior 
of Africa), on being exhibited, are guarded by men 
with swords. Some of the unhappy groups sit calmly 
in the marketplace, looking very clean, well fed and 
dressed, but with a depressed anxious look, saying to 
you with their eyes, " Buy me from this yoke of 
slavery ! " It is a very striking though most humiliat- 
ing sight to observe one of the Zanzibar rakish-looking 
crafts (felucca-rigged) arrive from Ibo, on the main- 
land, crammed with naked slaves for the market — all 
as silent as death. The Arab owners, gaily dressed, 
stand at the stern, and one holds the colours, in seem- 
ing defiance of the British Consulate, as he sails past. 
The price of slaves was low in 1860 — only £3 each; 
and many Arabs would have taken less, as Colonel 
Bigby had released upwards of four thousand, who 
became independent, living in a newly-made part of 
the town, and gaining a livelihood by fetching water 
and selling the produce of the island. 
The Sultan was most polite in sending riding-horses 
