dagascar, are now reduced to about 2000, which are drawn from the former only. It is said by some of our naval officers, who recently visited Mozambique, that owing to the little demand in the interior, the value of three or four dollars in handkerchiefs, beads, and coarse linen, will now purchase a stout slave. It would seem, indeed, that the natives of the interior are increasing to such a degree as to threaten a retaliation; and that the Portugueze, in order to defend their plantations on the coast opposite to Mozambique, have trained an armed militia of domestic and field slaves to resist the attacks of their own countrymen. Being well treated, they are stated to be happy and contented with their lot; and their fidelity to their masters is unquestioned.

But they are threatened with retaliation of a more alarming nature from another quarter. For more than thirty years the Malagassies of Madagascar have been in the habit of making an annual expedition against some or other of the Comoro islands, for which they set out with a leading wind, and in the event of missing all the islands, they still proceed, well knowing they shall reach some part of the coast of Africa. This was the case in 1808, when they landed at Cape del Gado, burnt the town, and carried away all the black inhabitants who had not the good fortune to escape into the fort. The expeditions of these savages are most formidable. They assemble at Bombatooka bay, in Madagascar, opposite to Mozambique, to the number of a hundred boats, when bound on one of their grand expeditions which are quinquennial, though smaller marauding parties sail every favourable monsoon. These boats resemble those used in the whale fishery, are fortyfive feet in length, and from ten to twelve in breadth, each carrying from fifty to sixty men armed with muskets, which they obtain from the French in exchange for the unhappy prisoners carried off by them. The king of Johanna told Captain Tomkinson, of the Caledon, in 1809, that in the preceding year they had landed on that island in great force, laid siege to the principal town, killed all the cattle, and destroyed the crops; that the inhabitants were reduced to the most deplorable state; that nearly two hundred women and children perished of hunger, and that numbers of the latter were actually eaten by their parents. They have, in fact, nearly desolated the Comoro islands. The once happy and flourishing island of Johanna, with its 370 towns and villages, so enchantingly described by Sir William Jones, is now reduced to two walled towns, and a population of 5000 souls.

With such formidable enemies the Portugueze of Mozambique are in no condition to contend. When Captain Beaver, of the Nisus frigate, visited that settlement in 1812 with an offer of protection, he found the fort in so ruinous a condition, the guns so

honey

honeycombed, and decayed, and the garrison so inefficient, that, in his opinion, he could have taken the whole settlement with his ship's crew. The few Europeans and the mixed inhabitants betrayed the most listless apathy; and the governor, Don Antonio Manuel de Castro Mello é Mendoza, was not calculated to inspire them with much confidence. This gentleman with the long name. had just completed the third year of his government, during the whole of which Captain Beaver was told he had never once gone out of his house, or exposed himself to the sun; but it was also said, that he had contrived to amass a fortune of 300,000 piastres. Such are the descendants of a once great and enterprizing people, the remains of whose conquests and the ruins of whose establishments are described as still exhibiting traces worthy of the Gamas, the Almeidas, and the Albuquerques of other times!

The people with whom the Portugueze have the honour of sharing in this odious traffic on the eastern coast of Africa, are a miserable set of Moors or Arabs, who have possession of the sea" coast, but are themselves controuled by the Imaun of Muscat. This contemptible despot, residing at the distance of 8 or 900 leagues, coolly sends his governors, with about a dozen Arab soldiers under each, to the islands of Quiloa, Pemba, Monfia, and Zanzibar, to lord it over the Moorish king, who is the nominal sovereign both of the islands and the shores of the continent.

Quiloa was visited by Captain Beaver in 1812. He describes the island, which has been the seat of royal residence since the foundation of the kingdom, at least 700 years, as being about six miles long and three broad, low and fertile, extending longitudinally across the mouth of a deep bay, leaving at either end an opening for two arms of the sea; and these, embracing a peninsula which projects from the main land, form two safe and magnificent harbours capable of containing, in perfect security, the largest fleets. When the Portugueze,' he observes, first visited this island, its capital, of the same name, was described as large, opulent, and well built, having stone houses of several stories with terrassed roofs, protected by a citadel adorned with stately towers and surrounded by a ditch-but of this ancient splendour and magnificence not a vestige remains! The present city, if it indeed deserves that name, consists of a number of scattered huts from the borders of the sea to a mile from the shore. Here he found the Imaun's deputy with his half a dozen soldiers, perched in a round tower, mounting three guns, which pointed directly to the king's house, and at the distance of a musket shot from it-such are the means with which he keeps the king of the extensive kingdom of Quiloa in awe, and levies a tribute in slaves, ivory, gold dust, and every other article exported from this part of the coast.

Of the English his Quiloan majesty knew nothing but what he had derived from the French; he felt, however, that their triumphant flag, waving in those seas, had been the means of obstructing the traffic in slaves in the principal channel through which it flowed, and had reduced it from ten thousand, once annually exported to the French settlements in the East and West Indies, in vessels from Nantes, Marseilles, and Bordeaux, to a few hundreds, sent in Arab ships to the Persian gulph, Surat, and Guzzerat. He complained that this reduction in the number of slaves exported was not the whole extent of the evil, for that the price had fallen from thirty-two to sixteen dollars, of which the viceroy set over him' by the Imaun of Muscat took no less than eight for his share. Here then we have a favourable opportunity of abolishing this odious traffic along an extent of sea coast equal to 400 leagues, and gradually throughout the remaining 500 leagues. The king of Quiloa expressed his anxiety to get rid of his subserviency to the Immaun of Muscat; but he dreaded his hostility unless protected by some other power; and why should England hesitate to give that protection?-she has nothing to hope or to fear from the Imaun of Muscat. The loss of revenue from this souree would, we understand, be more than made up to the king by the trade, in ivory, tortoise-shell, gold dust, and timber. The forests on the main produce the finest spars for masts and yards; they abound with elephants, and the rivers swarm with the hippopotamus. They have cattle and grain and other provisions in the greatest abundance, all of which would be highly acceptable in the Isle of France, since our generosity has parted with the neighbouring island on which it mainly depended for its subsistence.

One small vessel would be quite sufficient to collect these insular deputies of the Muscat Imaun and their garrisons, which do not in the whole exceed fifty men, and to transport them to their master. They might carry a message in place of tribute, that the king of Quiloa, having formed an alliance with Great Britain, had no longer any occasion for his services, and must no longer be considered as his tributary. Two sloops of war stationed on the coast would be an ample force to secure him from any resentment on the part of the Imaun.

If the Portugueze of Mozambique, thus hemmed in between an English colony on the one side and Quiloa on the other, in neither of which was any dealing in human beings permitted, did not, through shame, abandon the odious traffic, they would soon be compelled by necessity to relinquish it. To this happy issue the missionary society might greatly contribute; proceeding from Leetakoo to the northward, and from Quiloa to the southward, they would soon unite their missions through every part of the interior

behind the Portugueze settlements on the coast, and abolition must follow civilization. From the natives, we are convinced, they would have nothing to fear. Though of Moorish mixture, so much remains of the good disposition of the original inhabitants as to leave no room to apprehend any danger from that part of the character which usually attaches to the disciples of Mahomet. We find not among them any trace of that ferocious and vindictive hatred for Christians that prevails among the Moors of northern and western Africa. Indeed they appear to be without any superstition or religion but what a dread of evil spirits inspires. They are neither Amazons nor anthropophagi, nor men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders,' as Lopez and the stupid Linścboten would have their readers to believe. It is no wonder that the Portugueze, in palliation of their infamous conduct, should describe those people as the worst of savages and cannibals, after blowing in pieces from the muzzles of their cannons some thou sands of them because they refused to discover mines of gold and silver of which they were themselves ignorant; nor is it very sur prizing, when we consider the character of the man, that the Abbé Raynal should make use of an assertion so unfounded as 'that the eastern coast of Africa affords nothing to excite the cupidity of the trader, the curiosity of the traveller, or the huma nity of the philosopher. If the most valuable productions of nature be worthy the attention of the merchant, if the yet-to-bediscovered fountains of the Nile, the termination of the Niger, and the sources of the Zair, in a country which to every visitor from the time of the Romans to the present day has produced something new, can interest the traveller;-if to release from the bonds of slavery a race of human beings, superior in all respects to the negroes, can rouse the feelings of humanity in their favourthen most unquestionably is the eastern coast of Africa just the re verse of what the Abbé Raynal describes it to be. The untimely fate of Dr Cowan and his party is no argument against future attempts of travellers or missionaries. In the absence of correct information, without knowing what the temptation was on one side, or the provocation on the other, we might be led to adopt erro neous conclusions. We still believe, as we before hinted, that they fell among the borderers that separate the free native tribes from the dealers in slaves. The former would naturally conclude that the party came into their country with the view of enslaving them; the latter might suppose that a new rival was appearing in the field to supplant them in their traffic.

The eastern coast of Africa is, besides, by much the finest and most fertile region of that devoted continent. It has more resources for commerce, which require only to be brought into activity; more points accessible by shipping; and, though the climate

in the immediate vicinity of the shore may be unwholesome, as all tropical climates are where swamps and forests are left in a state of nature, yet there is but a narrow slip of these between the coast and the bold rising country sloping to the westward, in which the air of the elevated and extensive plains has been said to be so pure that the new moon is generally visible as a fine thread; that is, as a conceited writer has quaintly expressed it, on the very day on which she had kissed her bright and bountiful brother.'

The friends of the abolition of the slave trade, whose exertions in the cause of the negroes have been so laudably employed, will not, we trust, withhold their powerful aid towards loosing the bonds of an equally deserving, and, in point of physical qualities, a much finer race of human beings. Were the experiment tried, we are so sanguine of success, as to venture an opinion that the hearty efforts of a Wilberforce and a Clarkson would effect more in three years, for the freedom and civilization of the natives of this coast of Africa, than they have yet been able to accomplish in thirty, for the negroes of the opposite coast.

ART. III. Hora Pelasgica. Part the First. Containing an Inquiry into the Origin and Language of the Pelasgi, or ancient Inhabitants of Greece; with a Description of the Pelasgic or Eolic Digamma, as represented in the various Inscriptions in which it is still preserved; and an Attempt to determine its genuine Pelasgic pronunciation. By Herbert Marsh, D. D. F.R.S. Margaret Professor of Divinity in Cambridge. Cambridge. 1815.

N attempt, at this period of the world, to bring to light the hitherto undiscovered origin of a people, who have long ceased to occupy a place in the map of nations, seems to be attended with little chance of success. No documents can now be produced, which have not for many ages been the common property of the learned; and it is besides, in almost every instance, a natural consequence of the progressive civilization of states, that their first beginnings soon come to be involved in obscurity. Before a people have arrived at such a pitch of importance, as renders it interesting, even to themselves, to inquire into their earliest origin, and to commit their transactions to durable records, the circumstances of their infant state have been forgotten, or are preserved only in that uncertain and distorted tradition, which becomes, like circles on the water, more variable and undefined, the farther it recedes from the center. The earliest historians of a state are its poets; and it is not often that the works even of these descend to posterity. Besides, the tissue of historical events forms but the woof of poetry,