The
Difference Between Shipping Slaves And Receiving These Free Orphans
Struck Us As They Came On Board.
As soon as permission to embark was
given, the rush into the boat nearly swamped her - their eagerness to
be safe on the "Pioneer's" deck had to be repressed.
Bishop Tozer had already left for Quillimane when we took these
people and the last of the Universities' Missionaries on board and
proceeded to the Zambesi. It was in high flood. We have always
spoken of this river as if at its lowest, for fear lest we should
convey an exaggerated impression of its capabilities for navigation.
Instead of from five to fifteen feet, it was now from fifteen to
thirty feet, or more, deep. All the sandbanks and many of the
islands had disappeared, and before us rolled a river capable, as one
of our naval friends thought, of carrying a gunboat. Some of the
sandy islands are annually swept away, and the quantities of sand
carried down are prodigious.
The process by which a delta, extending eighty or one hundred miles
from the sea, has been formed may be seen going on at the present
day - the coarser particles of sand are driven out into the ocean,
just in the same way as we see they are over banks in the beds of
torrents. The finer portions are caught by the returning tide, and,
accumulating by successive ebbs and flows, become, with the decaying
vegetation, arrested by the mangrove roots. The influence of the
tide in bringing back the finer particles gives the sea near the
mouth of the Zambesi a clean and sandy bottom.
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