Shot after shot continued to be fired on the helpless and perishing.  Some of the long line of heads disappeared quietly; whilst other poor creatures threw their arms high, as if appealing to the great Father above, and sank.  One canoe took in as many as it could hold, and all paddled with hands and arms:  three canoes, got out in haste, picked up sinking friends, till all went down together, and disappeared.  One man in a long canoe, which could have held forty or fifty, had clearly lost his head; he had been out in the stream before the massacre began, and now paddled up the river nowhere, and never looked to the drowning.  By-and-bye all the heads disappeared; some had turned down stream towards the bank, and escaped.  Dugumbe put people into one of the deserted vessels to save those in the water, and saved twenty-one, but one woman refused to be taken on board from thinking that she was to be made a slave of; she preferred the chance of life by swimming, to the lot of a slave:  the Bagenya women are expert in the water, as they are accustomed to dive for oysters, and those who went down stream may have escaped, but the Arabs themselves estimated the loss of life at between 330 and 400 souls.  The shooting-party near the canoes were so reckless, they killed two of their own people; and a Banyamwezi follower, who got into a deserted canoe to plunder, fell into the water, went down, then came up again, and down to rise no more.

My first impulse was to pistol the murderers, but Dugumbe protested against my getting into a blood-feud, and I was thankful afterwards that I took his advice.  Two wretched Moslems asserted “that the firing was done by the people of the English;” I asked one of them why he lied so, and he could utter no excuse:  no other falsehood came to his aid as he stood abashed, before me, and so telling him not to tell palpable falsehoods, I left him gaping.

After the terrible affair in the water, the party of Tagamoio, who was the chief perpetrator, continued to fire on the people there and fire their villages.  As I write I hear the loud wails on the left bank over those who are there slain, ignorant of their many friends now in the depths of Lualaba.  Oh, let Thy kingdom come!  No one will ever know the exact loss on this bright sultry summer morning, it gave me the impression of being in Hell.  All the slaves in the camp rushed at the fugitives on land, and plundered them:  women were for hours collecting and carrying loads of what had been thrown down in terror.

Some escaped to me, and were protected:  Dugumbe saved twenty-one, and of his own accord liberated them, they were brought to me, and remained over night near my house.  One woman of the saved had a musket-ball through the thigh, another in the arm.  I sent men with our flag to save some, for without a flag they might have been victims, for Tagamoio’s people were shooting right and left like fiends.  I counted twelve villages burning this morning.