Juma afterwards apologized for the mistake, and presented us with rice, meal, sugar-cane, and a piece of malachite.  We returned his visit on the following day, and found him engaged in building a dhow or Arab vessel, to replace one which he said had been wrecked.  This new one was fifty feet long, twelve feet broad, and five feet deep.  The planks were of a wood like teak, here called Timbati, and the timbers of a closer grained wood called Msoro.  The sight of this dhow gave us a hint which, had we previously received it, would have prevented our attempting to carry a vessel of iron past the Cataracts.  The trees around Katosa’s village were Timbati, and they would have yielded planks fifty feet long and thirty inches broad.  With a few native carpenters a good vessel could be built on the Lake nearly as quickly as one could be carried past the Cataracts, and at a vastly less cost.  Juma said that no money would induce him to part with this dhow.  He was very busy in transporting slaves across the Lake by means of two boats, which we saw returning from a trip in the afternoon.  As he did not know of our intention to visit him, we came upon several gangs of stout young men slaves, each secured by the neck to one common chain, waiting for exportation, and several more in slave-sticks.  These were all civilly removed before our interview was over, because Juma knew that we did not relish the sight.

When we met the same Arabs in 1861, they had but few attendants:  according to their own account, they had now, in the village and adjacent country, 1500 souls.  It is certain that tens of thousands had flocked to them for protection, and all their power and influence must be attributed to the possession of guns and gunpowder.  This crowding of refugees to any point where there is a hope for security for life and property is very common in this region, and the knowledge of it made our hopes beat high for the success of a peaceful Mission on the shores of the Lake.  The rate, however, in which the people here will perish by the next famine, or be exported by Juma and others, will, we fear, depopulate those parts which we have just described as crowded with people.  Hunger will ere long compel them to sell each other.  An intelligent man complained to us of the Arabs often seizing slaves, to whom they took a fancy, without the formality of purchase; but the price is so low—­from two to four yards of calico—­that one can scarcely think this seizure and exportation without payment worth their while.  The boats were in constant employment, and, curiously enough, Ben Habib, whom we met at Linyanti in 1855, had been taken across the Lake, the day before our arrival at this Bay, on his way from Sesheke to Kilwa, and we became acquainted with a native servant of the Arabs, called Selele Saidallah, who could speak the Makololo language pretty fairly from having once spent some months in the Barotse Valley.