3-077-859 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Portuguese in East Africa: signalling post for steamers, and Senhor Pinto's house, Chilvane, sketch by Mr. Wallis Mackay, 1890. Sketch made at '...the Portuguese station at Chilvane, an islet on the Mozambique coast, represents the signalling apparatus at Point Singune, erected to communicate with passing steamers, and the house of a gentleman, Senhor Pinto, who is seen carried home by four native servants in a hammock. He is a Portuguese political exile, banished from Europe these thirty years past; but our recollection of the many revolutionary attempts that have occurred in Portugal, since we used to hear so much of the factions of Dom Miguel and Dom Pedro, has become too faint to recognise the occasion of Senhor Pinto's offence against the Royal Government. Other stations on the East Coast of Africa are used as penal settlements by the Kingdom of Portugal; and many convicts, whose crimes were of a very different kind, have become Colonial officials, not much to the credit of that administration'. From "Illustrated London News", 1890.