Page:Travel letters from New Zealand, Australia and Africa (1913).djvu/381

 steamship; he is not more than forty years old, and probably under that age. He is a famous man on the line because of the dignified interest he takes in passengers. He told me last night that during the present trip he hadn't had an hour of bad weather; and he left Hamburg February 25, and came through the dreaded Bay of Biscay and the stormy English channel Chindi is the port of entry for Nyasaland and Northern Rhodesia, and the Zambesi river enters the ocean there. Small boats ply on the river, and there are sugar plantations in the interior. It is generally believed that Chindi will be greatly harmed by a new railroad to be built from Beira Nyasaland is one of the modern achievements in colonization. Although in the heart of the Dark Continent, and given over only a few years ago to the most appalling barbarism, it now has a railway service, settlements lit by electricity, vast tracts of land under scientific cultivation, an improved wagon-road 100 miles long, a stable government, and cheap land, on which may be grown corn, cotton, and tobacco. I hear even at this distance of one planter who made $10,000 in one year from tobacco In order to reach Nyasaland at present, travelers leave ships five miles off Chindi, being transferred to tenders in baskets. At Chindi they take small boats for Port Herald, two hundred miles up the Zambesi river. The negro engineers on these steamboats get $3.75 a month. The captain of the boat is a white man, and an engineer, but natives have learned his trade, and now do all the work in the engine-room. This is true all over Africa: the white men show the negroes, and the negroes pick up all the