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Updated: May 8, 2025
But when the Sofala happened to close with the land after sunset she would find everything very still there under the mantle of the night.
Captain Provost had too much influence in the employ. All the same, they had to give him a good character. He made bold to say there was nothing in the world against him, and, as he had happened to hear that the mate of the Sofala had been taken to the hospital that morning with a sunstroke, he thought there would be no harm in seeing whether he would not do. . . .
He had just seen to the securing of the anchor, and had remained forward idling away a moment or two. The captain was in charge on the bridge. With a slight yawn he had turned away from his survey of the sea and had leaned his shoulders against the fish davit. These, properly speaking, were the very last moments of ease he was to know on board the Sofala.
They are the Africans with whom the world of to-morrow must reckon, just as the world of yesterday knew them to its cost. Cf. "Ethiopia Oriental," by J. Dos Santos, in Theal's Records of South Africa, Vol. Barbosa, quoted in Keane, II, 482. It was called Sofala, from an Arabic word, and may be associated with the Ophir of Solomon.
In the next ten years the Portuguese had occupied more than six different points on that coast, including Sofala. Thus civilization waxed and waned in East Africa among prehistoric Negroes, Arab and Persian mulattoes on the coast, in the Zend or Zeng empire of Bantu Negroes, and later in the Bantu rule of the Monomotapa.
The eyes of his old commander had fallen on him favorably it must have been an auspicious day and in less than half an hour the white men in the "Ofiss" had written his name on a document as Serang of the fire-ship Sofala. Since that time he had repeatedly looked at that estuary, upon that coast, from this bridge and from this side of the bar.
It was his evening get-up. The proper time for the Sofala to arrive at Batu Beru was an hour before sunset, and he looked picturesque, and somehow quite correct too, walking at the water's edge on the background of grass slope crowned with a low long bungalow with an immensely steep roof of palm thatch, and clad to the eaves in flowering creepers.
The mouth of this branch runs into the sea in lat. 18° 25' S. In his passage from the Terra de Natal, or Christmas Land, so named from having been discovered on Christmas day, and named, in this account of De Gamas voyage, the Land of Good People, De Gama missed Cape Corientes, forming the S.W. point of the channel of Mozambique, or Inner Passage, as it is now called, and overshot Sofala, the southern extremity of Covilhams discoveries, at which he was probably directed to touch, as Covilhams chart might have been of some use to direct his farther progress to Aden, and thence to Calicut or Cananor, on the Malabar coast.
Then on through a brown liquid, three parts water and one part black earth, on and on between the low shores, three parts black earth and one part brackish water, the Sofala would plow her way up-stream, as she had done once every month for these seven years or more, long before he was aware of her existence, long before he had ever thought of having anything to do with her and her invariable voyages.
They also report the existence of hewn stones in the neighborhood, but these can not have been abundant, for all the stones of the fort of Sofala are said to have been brought from Portugal.
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