Abyssinia Gallery

Scenes from Mozambique, 1820s

Vasco da Gama meeting Muslim natives in Mozambique 64, Francisco Barreto tricked over sliver mines by natives at Chicoa, Mozambique 65, and Portuguese cheating natives with trinkets for gold dust 65. Handcoloured copperplate engraving from Rev. Isaac Taylor's Scenes in Africa for the Amusement and Instruction of Little Tarry-at-Home Travelers, Harris and Son, London, 1820

© Florilegius

Tattooed man of Halmahera, Maluku Islands

Tattooed man of Halmahera (Gilolo), Maluku Islands (Moluccas), and Berilla, an Edjow Galla, Abyssinia (Caucaso-Ethiop). Copied from an illustration in Henry Salt's A Voyage to Abyssinia, 1814. Handcoloured steel engraving by Lizars after an illustration by Charles Hamilton Smith from his Natural History of the Human Species, Edinburgh, W. H. Lizars, 1848. Date:

© Florilegius/Mary Evans

The Dreadnought Hoax, report in The Sketch

Page from The Sketch magazine reporting on the Dreadnought hoax. The incident was a joke played by a group led by Horace de Vere Cole, including the writer Virginia Stephen (Woolf, seen far left in the bottom picture) who dressed up as the Emperor of Abyssinia and his party, and turned up out of the blue to inspect the battleship Dreadnought'. The group were received with the usual courtesies accorded to distinguished visitors, and were shown over the vessel. The Dreadnought hoax was not the first time this group had played the joke. The top photograph shows the Abyssinian princes on an occasion when they visited the Mayor of Cambridge as the Sultan of Zanzibar and his suite. Date: 1910

© Illustrated London News Ltd/Mary Evans