The importance of the island arose from its being the great money bank of the natives, who here collected the zimbo, buzio, cowrie, or cypraea moneta.  Ample details concerning this industry are given by the old writers.  The shell was considered superior to the “impure or Braziles,” brought from the opposite Bahia (de Todos os Santos), though much coarser than the small Indian, and not better than the large blue Zanzibar.  M. Du Chaillu ("Second Expedition,” chap, iv.) owns to having been puzzled whence to derive the four sacred cowries:  “They are unknown on the Fernand Vaz, and I believe them to have come across the continent from eastern Africa.”  There are, indeed, few things which have travelled so far and have lasted so long as cowries—­they have been found even amongst “Anglo-Saxon” remains.

The modern Muxi-Loandas hold aloof from the shore-folk, who return the compliment in kind.  They dress comparatively well, and they spend considerable sums in their half-heathen lembamentos (marriages) and mutambe (funerals).

As might be expected, after three centuries of occupation, the Portuguese, both in East and West Africa, have naturalized a multitude of native words, supplying them with a Lusitanian termination.  The practice is very useful to the traveller, and the despair of the lexicographer.  During the matumbe the relations “wake” the toasted, swaddled, and aromatized corpse with a singular vigour of drink and general debauchery.

I arrived with curiosity at the capital of Angola, the first Portuguese colony visited by me in West Africa.  The site is pleasing and picturesque, contrasting favourably with all our English settlements and with the French Gaboon; for the first time after leaving Teneriffe, I saw something like a city.  The escarpment and the sea-bordering shelf, allowing a double town like Athenae or Thebae, a Cidade Alta and a Cidade Baixa, are favourites with the Lusitanians from Lisbon to the China seas, and African Sao Paulo is reflected in the Brazilian Bahia.  So Greece affected the Acropolis, and Rome everywhere sought to build a Capitol.  The two lines follow the shore from north-east to south-west, and they form a graceful amphitheatre by bending westward at the jutting headland, Morro de Sao Miguel, of old de Sao Paulo.  Three hundred years of possession have built forts and batteries, churches and chapels, public buildings and large private houses,white or yellow, withample green verandahs—­each an ugly cube, but massing well together.  The general decline of trade since 1825, and especially the loss of the lucrative slave export, leave many large tenements unfinished or uninhabited, while the aspect is as if a bombardment had lately

026—–­ taken place.  Africa shows herself in heaps of filthy hovels, wattle and daub and dingy thatch; in “umbrella-trees” (ficus), acacias and calabashes, palms and cotton-trees, all wilted, stunted, and dusty as at Cairo.  We are in the latitude of East African Kilwa and of Brazilian Pernambuco; but this is a lee-land, and the suffering is from drought.  Yet, curious to say, the flora, as will appear, is here richer than in the well-watered eastern regions.