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Updated: June 11, 2025
Then the rest of the passengers went ashore and spent several hours at the custom house. All personal luggage was passed through, and we embarked on a little train for Mombasa. The next day we registered our firearms and had Smith, Mackenzie and Company do the rest. This firm is ubiquitous in Mombasa and Zanzibar.
This, the most desirable location of all, has remained open to them because heretofore the fierce wars with which Mombasa, "the Island of Blood," has been swept have made the exposed seaward lands impossible. No idle occupation can be more fascinating than to wander about the mazes of this ancient town. The variety of race and occupation is something astounding.
For be it remembered it was not until he was carried to Mombasa, nearly two months after he was hurt, that he reached any place where there was a telegraph. By this time also, those at Mombasa had plenty of fresh casualties to report, and indeed were not aware, or had forgotten what exact story had been sent home concerning Godfrey who could not speak for himself.
Whether the funny little narrow-gauge railroad exists for Nairobi, or Nairobi for the railroad, it would be difficult to say. Between Mombasa and this interior placed-to-order town, certainly, there is nothing, absolutely nothing, either in passengers or freight, to justify building the line. That distance is, if I remember it correctly, about three hundred and twenty miles.
There was Cock-eye Corbett, an ex-sailor, who was immoral and a Lancashireman, and knew more about blackbirding and copra and Kanakas, and the rum-holes from Nagasaki to Mombasa, than it is healthy for a civil servant to know. Every Sunday a sad-faced man with ash-colored hair and bony fingers, who had been a lieutenant in the Peruvian navy, a teacher in St.
We landed at Mombasa September sixteenth, seventeen days out from Naples. Mombasa is a little island about two by three miles in extent. It is riotous with brilliant vegetation, and, as seen after a long sea voyage through the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean, it looks heavenly except for the heat.
Altogether, Mombasa has in the past well deserved its native name of Kisiwa M'vitaa, or "Isle of War"; but under the settled rule now obtaining, it is rapidly becoming a thriving and prosperous town, and as the port of entry for Uganda, it does a large forwarding trade with the interior and has several excellent stores where almost anything, from a needle to an anchor, may readily be obtained.
There were hospital ships, cargo vessels, transports, war-ships, monitors, tugs, river boats, oil-driven lighters the ones we made the landing from at Suvla, with a coat of new paint and the letters ML instead of K barges, launches, native dhows which travel to Mombasa and Bombay and innumerable lesser craft. Basra itself lies up a creek, and is invisible from the river.
New York to Cape Town, South Africa, 6,900 miles, thirty days' straight-away run, and thence another twenty-four days' sail to Mombasa, on a 7,000-ton cargo boat, deliberate and stately rather than fast of pace, but otherwise as trim, well groomed, and well found as a liner, with an official mess that numbers as fine a set of fellows as ever trod a bridge.
If you look at a map of British East Africa you will be amazed at the number of names that are marked upon it. You would quite naturally think that the country was rather thickly settled, whereas in fact there are very few places of settlement away from the single line of railroad that runs from Mombasa to Victoria Nyanza.
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