Beira was occupied by the Companhia de Mozambique with the idea of feeding Salisbury and Buluwayo from the north, and drawing away some of the trade which at that time was monopolized by the merchants of Cape Town and Durban.  But the tse-tse fly belt lay between Beira on the coast and the boundary of the Chartered Company’s possessions, and as neither oxen nor mules could live to cross this, it was necessary, in order to compete with the Cape-Buluwayo line, to build a railroad through the swamp and jungle.  This road is now in operation.  It is two hundred and twenty miles in length, and in the brief period of two months, during the long course of its progress through the marshes, two hundred of the men working on it died of fever.  Some years ago, during a boundary dispute between the Portuguese and the Chartered Company, there was a clash between the Portuguese soldiers and the British South African police.  How this was settled and the honor of the Portuguese officials satisfied, Kipling has told us in the delightful tale of “Judson and the Empire.”  It was off Beira that Judson fished up a buoy and anchored it over a sand-bar upon which he enticed the Portuguese gunboat.  A week before we touched at Beira, the Portuguese had rearranged all the harbor buoys, but, after the casual habits of their race, had made no mention of the fact.  The result was that the Kanzlar was hung up for twenty-four hours.  We tried to comfort ourselves by thinking that we were undoubtedly occupying the same mud-bank which had been used by the strategic Judson to further the course of empire.

The Kanzlar could not cross the bar to go to Chinde, so the Adjutant, which belongs to the same line and which was created for these shallow waters, came to the Kanzlar, bringing Chinde with her.  She brought every white man in the port, and those who could not come on board our ship remained contentedly on the Adjutant, clinging to her rail as she alternately sank below, or was tossed high above us.  For three hours they smiled with satisfaction as though they felt that to have escaped from Chinde, for even that brief time, was sufficient recompense for a thorough ducking and the pains of sea-sickness.  On the bridge of the Adjutant, in white duck and pith helmets, were the only respectable members of Chinde society.  We knew that they were the only respectable members of Chinde society, because they told us so themselves.  On her lower deck she brought two French explorers, fully dressed for the part as Tartarin of Tarascon might have dressed it in white havelocks and gaiters buckled up to the thighs, and clasping express rifles in new leather cases.  From her engine-room came stokers from Egypt, and from her forward deck Malays in fresh white linen, Mohammedans in fez and turban, Portuguese officials, chiefly in decorations, Indian coolies and Zanzibari boys, very black and very beautiful, who wound and unwound long blue strips of cotton about their shoulders,