It might be good policy to hire a respectable Arab to engage free porters, and conduct the Mission to the country chosen, and obtain permission from the chief to build temporary houses.  If this Arab were well paid, it might pave the way for employing others to bring supplies of goods and stores not produced in the country, as tea, coffee, sugar.  The first porters had better all go back, save a couple or so, who have behaved especially well.  Trust to the people among whom you live for general services, as bringing wood, water, cultivation, reaping, smith’s work, carpenter’s work, pottery, baskets, &c.  Educated free blacks from a distance are to be avoided:  they are expensive, and are too much of gentlemen for your work.  You may in a few months raise natives who will teach reading to others better than they can, and teach you also much that the liberated never know.  A cloth and some beads occasionally will satisfy them, while neither the food, the wages, nor the work will please those who, being brought from a distance, naturally consider themselves missionaries.  Slaves also have undergone a process which has spoiled them for life; though liberated young, everything of childhood and opening life possesses an indescribable charm.  It is so with our own offspring, and nothing effaces the fairy scenes then printed on the memory.  Some of my liberados eagerly bought green calabashes and tasteless squash, with fine fat beef, because this trash was their early food; and an ounce of meat never entered their mouths.  It seems indispensable that each Mission should raise its own native agency.  A couple of Europeans beginning, and carrying on a Mission without a staff of foreign attendants, implies coarse country fare, it is true, but this would be nothing to those who, at home amuse themselves with fastings, vigils, &c.  A great deal of power is thus lost in the Church.  Fastings and vigils, without a special object in view, are time run to waste.  They are made to minister to a sort of self-gratification, instead of being turned to account for the good of others.  They are like groaning in sickness.  Some people amuse themselves when ill with continuous moaning.  The forty days of Lent might be annually spent in visiting adjacent tribes, and bearing unavoidable hunger and thirst with a good grace.  Considering the greatness of the object to be attained, men might go without sugar, coffee, tea, &c.  I went from September 1866 to December 1868 without either.  A trader, at Casembe’s, gave me a dish cooked with honey, and it nauseated from its horrible sweetness, but at 100 miles inland, supplies could be easily obtained.

The expenses need not be large.  Intelligent Arabs inform me that, in going from Zanzibar to Casembe’s, only 3000 dollars’ worth are required by a trader, say between 600_l._ or 700_l._, and he may be away three or more years; paying his way, giving presents to the chiefs, and filling 200 or 300 mouths.  He has paid for, say fifty muskets, ammunition, flints, and may return with 4000 lbs. of ivory, and a number of slaves for sale; all at an outlay of 600_l._ or 700_l._ With the experience I have gained now, I could do all I shall do in this expedition for a like sum, or at least for 1000_l._ less than it will actually cost me.