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Type:
Articles
Place:
Eritrea
Mits'iwa (Eritrea)
Date:
1865
Notes:
Illustrations.
Illustrations include a dervish and a peasant woman; a woman carrying water; a Faki man; ruins of palaces at Mider and Gherar; and several landscapes.
Article in 18 parts.
Describing the journey through Sahmar, Lejean sees a Bedouin cemetery, Konfaldjeme, encounters Beni-Amer traders on their way to Massawa, and visits a cluster of tombs called Koubbât es Salatin belonging to a lost people called the Rôm. He meets the long-lost bishop Massaja, who is having troubles with the Abyssinian emperor Theodore II. Half of Massawa is occupied by the remains of cisterns, made of coral and said to have been built centuries ago by the Persians. Interesting local surnames reflect non-Muslim origins. In town stands a mosque that was once possibly an Abyssinian church visited by the Portuguese in 1520. Lejean describes the resident Hindu merchants and the small European community.
Lejean meets Raffaële Barroni, an Italian business man who fought the slave trade at great personal risk, and gives some details of that trade and of the equivocal response to it by a British official. He relates the history of the French consular presence at Massawa beginning in 1841. Abyssinia, the Ottoman Empire, France, French commercial interests, and Christian missionaries were all trying to assert themselves along this commercially important coastline.
