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Updated: May 7, 2025
We raised our hats to them and tried to cheer, but it was more of a salute than a cheer. The lieutenant now is the commander of a cruiser, and the consul, a consul-general; and they write me that the editor of the Chinde newspaper, on his editorial page, has complained that he, also, should be included among the respectable members of Chinde Society.
"That which brings most men to wild places, Mr. Quatermain trouble. If you want to know, I had a misfortune and piled up my ship. There were some lives lost and, rightly or wrongly, I got the sack. Then I started as a trader in a God-forsaken hole named Chinde, one of the Zambesi mouths, you know, and did very well, as we Scotchmen have a way of doing.
You see, I have these chaps at Chinde to talk to, and up at Tete there's the Portuguese governor, but Sparks has only six white men scattered along Nyassa for three hundred miles." I had heard of Sparks and the six white men. They grew so lonely that they agreed to meet once a month at some central station and spend the night together, and they invited Sparks to attend the second meeting.
We tried to comfort ourselves by thinking that we were undoubtedly occupying the same mud-bank which had been used by the strategic Judson to further the course of empire. The Kanzlar could not cross the bar to go to Chinde, so the Adjutant, which belongs to the same line and which was created for these shallow waters, came to the Kanzlar, bringing Chinde with her.
We knew that they were the only respectable members of Chinde society, because they told us so themselves. On her lower deck she brought two French explorers, fully dressed for the part as Tartarin of Tarascon might have dressed it in white havelocks and gaiters buckled up to the thighs, and clasping express rifles in new leather cases.
Slipping out from Chinde at the outbreak of war, she made her way to Dar-es-Salaam. From there she essayed another escapade only to fall into our hands. Transformed into a gunboat, she harried the Germans in the Delta of the Rufigi, until, greatly daring, one day she ran ashore on a mudbank in the river.
For three hours they smiled with satisfaction as though they felt that to have escaped from Chinde, for even that brief time, was sufficient recompense for a thorough ducking and the pains of sea-sickness. On the bridge of the Adjutant, in white duck and pith helmets, were the only respectable members of Chinde society.
It rang down the curtain on the mirage which once a month comes to mock Chinde with memories of English villages, of well-kept lawns melting into the Thames, of London asphalt and flashing hansoms. With a jangling of bells in the engine-room the mirage disappeared, and in five minutes to the exiles of Chinde the Kanzlar became a gray tub with a pennant of smoke on the horizon line.
Finding the "Pearl's" draught too great for that part of the river near the island of Simbo, where the branch called the Doto is given off to the Kongone on the right bank, and another named Chinde departs to the secret canal already mentioned on the left, the goods belonging to the expedition were taken out of her, and placed on one of the grassy islands about forty miles from the bar.
They have opened up this country with little railroads, with lonely lengths of telegraph wires, and with their launches and gunboats they have joined, by means of the Zambesi and Chinde Rivers, new territories to the great Indian Ocean. His strip of land, which bars them from the sea, is still unsettled and unsafe, its wealth undeveloped, its people untamed.
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