The greatest number of foreign vessels trading with this port are American, principally from New York and Salem.  After the American come the German, then come the French and English.  They arrive loaded with American sheeting, brandy, gunpowder, muskets, beads, English cottons, brass-wire, china-ware, and other notions, and depart with ivory, gum-copal, cloves, hides, cowries, sesamum, pepper, and cocoa-nut oil.

The value of the exports from this port is estimated at $3,000,000, and the imports from all countries at $3,500,000.

The Europeans and Americans residing in the town of Zanzibar are either Government officials, independent merchants, or agents for a few great mercantile houses in Europe and America.

The climate of Zanzibar is not the most agreeable in the world.  I have heard Americans and Europeans condemn it most heartily.  I have also seen nearly one-half of the white colony laid up in one day from sickness.  A noxious malaria is exhaled from the shallow inlet of Malagash, and the undrained filth, the garbage, offal, dead mollusks, dead pariah dogs, dead cats, all species of carrion, remains of men and beasts unburied, assist to make Zanzibar a most unhealthy city; and considering that it it ought to be most healthy, nature having pointed out to man the means, and having assisted him so far, it is most wonderful that the ruling prince does not obey the dictates of reason.

The bay of Zanzibar is in the form of a crescent, and on the south-western horn of it is built the city.  On the east Zanzibar is bounded almost entirely by the Malagash Lagoon, an inlet of the sea.  It penetrates to at least two hundred and fifty yards of the sea behind or south of Shangani Point.  Were these two hundred and fifty yards cut through by a ten foot ditch, and the inlet deepened slightly, Zanzibar would become an island of itself, and what wonders would it not effect as to health and salubrity!  I have never heard this suggestion made, but it struck me that the foreign consuls resident at Zanzibar might suggest this work to the Sultan, and so get the credit of having made it as healthy a place to live in as any near the equator.  But apropos of this, I remember what Capt.  Webb, the American Consul, told me on my first arrival, when I expressed to him my wonder at the apathy and inertness of men born with the indomitable energy which characterises Europeans and Americans, of men imbued with the progressive and stirring instincts of the white people, who yet allow themselves to dwindle into pallid phantoms of their kind, into hypochondriacal invalids, into hopeless believers in the deadliness of the climate, with hardly a trace of that daring and invincible spirit which rules the world.