We entered the Zambesi about the end of November and found it unusually low, so we did not get up to Shupanga till the 19th of December.  The friends of our Mazaro men, who had now become good sailors and very attentive servants, turned out and gave them a hearty welcome back from the perils of the sea:  they had begun to fear that they would never return.  We hired them at a sixteen-yard piece of cloth a month—­about ten shillings’ worth, the Portuguese market-price of the cloth being then sevenpence halfpenny a yard,—­and paid them five pieces each, for four-and-a-half months’ work.  A merchant at the same time paid other Mazaro men three pieces for seven months, and they were with him in the interior.  If the merchants do not prosper, it is not because labour is dear, but because it is scarce, and because they are so eager on every occasion to sell the workmen out of the country.  Our men had also received quantities of good clothes from the sailors of the “Pioneer” and of the “Orestes,” and were now regarded by their neighbours and by themselves as men of importance.  Never before had they possessed so much wealth:  they believed that they might settle in life, being now of sufficient standing to warrant their entering the married state; and a wife and a hut were among their first investments.  Sixteen yards were paid to the wife’s parents, and a hut cost four yards.  We should have liked to have kept them in the ship, for they were well-behaved and had learned a great deal of the work required.  Though they would not themselves go again, they engaged others for us; and brought twice as many as we could take, of their brothers and cousins, who were eager to join the ship and go with us up the Shire, or anywhere else.  They all agreed to take half-pay until they too had learned to work; and we found no scarcity of labour, though all that could be exported is now out of the country.

There had been a drought of unusual severity during the past season in the country between Lupata and Kebrabasa, and it had extended north-east to the Manganja highlands.  All the Tette slaves, except a very few household ones, had been driven away by hunger, and were now far off in the woods, and wherever wild fruit, or the prospect of obtaining anything whatever to keep the breath of life in them, was to be found.  Their masters were said never to expect to see them again.  There have been two years of great hunger at Tette since we have been in the country, and a famine like the present prevailed in 1854, when thousands died of starvation.  If men like the Cape farmers owned this country, their energy and enterprise would soon render the crops independent of rain.  There being plenty of slope or fall, the land could be easily irrigated from the Zambesi and its tributary streams.  A Portuguese colony can never prosper:  it is used as a penal settlement, and everything must be done military fashion.  “What do I care for this country?” said the most enterprising