4. Zanzibar and its Unhealthiness.
There is no act to which the credit of Bishop Tozer and his advisers is more distinctly pledged than to the choice of Zanzibar as the point of departure of the Central African Mission. He was very severely censured for this choice, in words, by Dr. Livingstone, but was absolved by that great traveller, in deeds, when he himself chose Zanzibar as his starting-point whence to revisit the river Shire and the Lake Nyassa. The matter is not one on which Missionaries have any real choice; the centre of any considerable missionary operations must be the centre fixed beforehand by the many circumstances which together have determined the position of the chief city. Missionaries must travel along the usual roads, and their lines of communication can only be those created by commercial intercourse. The great objection made to Zanzibar is the unhealthiness shown by so many deaths among the members of the Mission. This is a very startling consideration, and one naturally asks oneself, how can so unhealthy a place be so great a centre of commerce, and how can it be that European merchants consent to live there, as they undoubtedly do? The answer is a remarkable one; it is that the great mortality is confined to the members of the Mission. There have been a much larger number of other Europeans residing in the town, but the Mission has lost five members while they have
