It was necessary to go down to Kongone for the repair of the ship.  Livingstone was greatly disappointed with it, and thought the greed of the vendor had supplied him with a very inferior article for the price of a good one.  He thus pours forth his vexation in writing to a friend:  “Very grievous it is to be standing here tinkering when we might be doing good service to the cause of African civilization, and that on account of insatiable greediness.  Burton may thank L. and B. that we are not at the other lakes before him.  The loss of time greediness has inflicted on us has been frightful.  My plan in this Expedition was excellent, but it did not include provisions against hypocrisy and fraud, which have sorely crippled us, and, indeed, ruined us, as a scientific Expedition.”

Another delay was caused before they went inward, from their having to wait for a season suitable for hunting, as the party had to be kept in food.  The mail from England had been lost, and they had the bitter disappointment of losing a year’s correspondence from home.  The following portions of a letter to the Secretary of the Committee for a Universities Mission gives a view of the situation at this time: 

     “RIVER ZAMBESI, 26_th Jan._, 1860.

“The defects we have unfortunately experienced in the ‘Ma-Robert,’ or rather the ‘Asthmatic,’ are so numerous that it would require a treatise as long as a lawyer’s specification of any simple subject to give you any idea of them, and they have inflicted so much toil that a feeling of sickness comes over me when I advert to them.

“No one will ever believe the toil we have been put to in woodcutting.  The quantity consumed is enormous, and we cannot get sufficient for speed into the furnace.  It was only a dogged determination not to be beaten that carried me through....  But all will come out right at last.  We are not alone, though truly we deserve not his presence.  He encourages the trust that is granted by the word, ’I am with you, even unto the end of the world.’...

“It is impossible for you to conceive how backward everything is here, and the Portuguese are not to be depended upon; their establishments are only small penal settlements, and as no women are sent out, the state of morals is frightful.  The only chance of success is away from them; nothing would prosper in their vicinity.  After all, I am convinced that were Christianity not divine, it would be trampled out by its professors.  Dr. Kirk, Mr. C. Livingstone, and Mr. Rae, with two English seamen, do well.  We are now on our way up the river to the Makololo country, but must go overland from Kebrabasa, or in a whaler.  We should be better able to plan our course if our letters had not been lost.  We have never been idle, and do not mean to be.  We have been trying to get the Portuguese Government to acknowledge free-trade on this river, and but for long delay in our letters the negotiation