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Updated: June 11, 2025
We dreaded Mombasa before we arrived, but were soon agreeably disappointed to find it not only beautiful and interesting, but also pleasantly cool and full of most hospitable social life. When our ship anchored off Kilindini there was a great crowd assembled on the pier.
The new governor was accompanied by two staff officers, one a Scotchman and the other an Irishman, and both of them with the clean, healthy look of the young British army officer. There would be a big reception at Mombasa, no doubt, with bands a-playing and fireworks popping, when the ship arrived with the new executive. Stephenson, Mr. and Mrs. Akeley and Mr. McCutcheon.
The town of Mombasa itself naturally occupied most of my attention. It is supposed to have been founded about A.D. 1000, but the discovery of ancient Egyptian idols, and of coins of the early Persian and Chinese dynasties, goes to show that it must at different ages have been settled by people of the very earliest civilisations.
The Arabs, as represented by the Sultan of Zanzibar, remain in nominal possession of Mombasa to the present day; but in 1887 Seyid Bargash, the then Sultan of Zanzibar, gave for an annual rental a concession of his mainland territories to the British East Africa Association, which in 1888 was formed into the Imperial British East Africa Company.
By this time railhead had reached a place called Machakos Road, some two hundred and seventy-six miles from Mombasa and within a few miles of the great Athi Plains, the latter being treeless and waterless expanses, bare of everything except grass, which the great herds of game keep closely cropped.
The first occurred in Mombasa, and concerns the strange conduct of two little white dogs that flashed in and out of our lives. One day when I returned to my room in the hotel at Mombasa I was surprised to find that two small dogs had established themselves therein. The room boy knew nothing about them; the people around the hotel did not remember having ever seen them before.
The other German cruisers were also short-lived. Her disappearance long a mystery to the Allies was due to an internal explosion, just as she was about to crown her exploits by a raid on the island of Barbados. The Königsberg, on the east coast of Africa, surprised and sank the British light cruiser Pegasus while the latter lay at Mombasa, Zanzibar, making repairs.
At this time Ruy Lorenzo was parted from him in a storm which drove him to Mozambique, whence he held on his course for Quiloa, where he took some small prizes. Being ambitious to distinguish himself, he went to the island of Zanzibar, twenty leagues short of Mombasa, where he took twenty small vessels.
There is no denying the fact that there is considerable drinking in Nairobi. There was as much before we got there as there was after we got there, however. After the arrival of the European steamer at Mombasa business is brisk for several days as the different parties sally forth for the wilds. On our ship there were four different parties.
From the windows of the car as he journeys from Mombasa to Nairobi, three hundred and twenty-seven miles, he may definitely count upon seeing at least seven of these species: Wildebeest, hartebeest, Grant's gazelle, Thompson's gazelle, zebra, impalla, and giraffe, with the likelihood of seeing in addition some wart-hogs and a distant rhinoceros, and the remote possibility of seeing cheetah, lion, and hyena.
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