All about the lake was now examined with earnest eyes.  The population was denser than he had seen anywhere else.  The people were civil, and even friendly, but undoubtedly they were not handsome.  At the north of the lake they were lawless, and at one point the party were robbed in the night—­the first time such a thing had occurred in Livingstone’s African life[61].  Of elephants there was a great abundance,—­indeed of all animal and vegetable life.

[Footnote 61:  In The Zambesi and its Tributaries, Livingstone gives a grave account of the robbery.  In his letters to his friends he makes fun of it, as he did of the raid of the Boers.  To Mr. F. Fitch he writes:  “You think I cannot get into a scrape....  For the first time in Africa we were robbed.  Expert thieves crept into our sleeping-places, about four o’clock in the morning, and made off with what they could lay their hands on.  Sheer over-modesty ruined me.  It was Sunday, and such a black mass swarmed around our sail, which we used as a hut, that we could not hear prayers.  I had before slipped away a quarter of a mile to dress for church, but seeing a crowd of women watching me through the reeds, I did not change my old ’unmentionables,’—­they were so old, I had serious thoughts of converting them into—­charity!  Next morning nearly all our spare clothing was walked off with, and there I was left by my modesty nearly through at the knees, and no change of shirt, flannel, or stockings.  After that, don’t say that I can’t get into a scrape!” The same letter thanks Mr. Fitch for sending him Punch, whom he deemed a sound divine!  On the same subject he wrote at another time, regretting that Punch did not reach him, especially a number in which notice was taken of himself.  “It never came.  Who the miscreants are that steal them I cannot divine, I would not grudge them a reading if they would only send them on afterward.  Perhaps binding the whole year’s Punches would be the best plan; and then we need not label it ‘Sermons in Lent,’ or ‘Tracts on Homoeopathy,’ but you may write inside, as Dr. Buckland did on his umbrella, ‘Stolen from Dr. Livingstone.’  We really enjoy them very much.  They are good against fever.  The ‘Essence of Parliament,’ for instance, is capital.  One has to wade through an ocean of paper to get the same information, without any of the fun.  And by the time the newspapers have reached us, most of the interest in public matters has evaporated.”]

But the lake slave-trade was going on at a dismal rate.  An Arab dhow was seen on the lake, but it kept well out of the way.  Dr. Livingstone was informed by Colonel Rigdy, late British Consul at Zanzibar, that 19,000 slaves from this Nyassa region alone passed annually through the custom-house there.  This was besides those landed at Portuguese slave ports.  In addition to those captured, thousands were killed or died of their wounds or of famine, or perished in other ways, so that not one-fifth of the victims became slaves—­in the Nyassa district probably not one-tenth.  A small armed steamer on the lake might stop nearly the whole of this wholesale robbery and murder.