were in the country of the Man-gnaja, a tribe of
negroes who were continually harried by the fiercer and more powerful
neighbour-tribe of Ajawa, great slave-catchers, who supplied the slave-
hunters who came out from Tette to collect their human droves. These
were mostly Arabs, with some Portuguese admixture; and the blacks, after
being disposed of in the market at Tette, were usually shipped off to
supply the demand in Arabia and Egypt, where, to tell the truth, their
lot was a far easier one than befell the slaves of the West, the toilers
among sugar and cotton.

A crusade against slave-catching could not be carried on without, at
least, a show of force; and, this granted, a further difficulty presented
itself, in the fact that, out of the scanty number of white men, one was
a bishop and two were priests of the English Church, and one a
Presbyterian minister. In all former cases, the missionaries had freely
ventured themselves, using no means of self-defence, and marking the
difference between themselves and others by the absence of all weapons.
But, in those places, it was self-defence that was given up; here the
point was, whether to deliver the captive, or, by silence, to acquiesce
in the wrong done to him; and if his rescue were attempted, it was in
vain, unless the clergy assisted; and thus it was that the mission party
did not march so much as men of peace as deliverers of the captive and
breakers of the yoke. The captives had no power of returning home, and
chose to remain with their deliverers; and the next day the party reached
a negro village, called Chibisa's, after the chief who had ruled it at
the time of Dr. Livingstone's first visit. He was now dead, but his
successor, Chigunda, begged the white men to remain, to protect him from
the Ajawa, who were only five or ten miles off, and from whom an attack
was expected.

It was decided to forestall it by marching towards them. On the way
another great convoy of slaves was encountered, and with the merest show
of force, no bloodshed at all, more than forty were liberated--the men
from forked clogs to their necks, consisting of a pole as thick as a
man's thigh, branched at the top like the letter Y, so that the neck of
the prisoner could be inserted, and fastened with an iron pin.

The large number of these liberated captives made it necessary to choose
a home, but Chibisa's was not the place selected, but a spot some sixty
miles further on, called Magom