“Ptolemy places the Prasum promontorium, or Green Cape, the extreme southern boundary of ancient knowledge of the east coast of Africa, in lat. 15” 30’ S. and the Portuguese universally assume Mozambique as Prasum, by which classical name it is distinguished in the Lusiad of Camoens, in reference to the voyage of De Gama, and the near coincidence of situation gives great probability to this supposition. [Greek:  prason] signifies a leek, and is also used to denote a sea-weed of a similar green colour, and the name may either have been derived from the verdure of the point, or from the sea-weeds found in its neighbourhood.  At all events, Prasum cannot be farther south than Cape Corientes, or farther north than Quiloa or the Zanguebar islands.  The harbour of Mozambique has seldom less than eight or ten fathom water, which is so clear, that every bank, rock, or shallow can be easily seen.

“The Moors, so often mentioned, are supposed by Bruce to have been merchants expelled from Spain by Ferdinand and Isabella, who first fixed their residence on the western coast of Africa, and extending themselves eastwards, formed settlements in Arabia and Egypt, till the oppressions of Selim and Soliman, the Turkish emperors, interrupted their commerce, and obliged them to disperse along the coast of Abyssinia and eastern Africa.  Besides the impossibility, chronologically, for the assigned causes having produced the supposed effect, there is no necessity for having recourse to this improbable hypothesis.  From being best acquainted with their Moorish conquerors, the Spaniards and Portuguese have always been accustomed to name all the Arabians Moors, wherever they found them, and even gave at first the name of black Moors to the Negroes, whence our old English term Black-a-moors.  It is well known that the Arabs, especially after their conversion to Mahometanism, were great colonizers or conquerors; even the now half-christian kingdom of Abyssinia was an early colony and conquest of the pagan Arabs, and its inhabitants are consequently white Moors in the most extended Portuguese sense.  The Arab, or Moorish kingdoms along the African coast of the Indian ocean, are branches from the same original stem, and the early Mahometan missionaries were both zealous and successful in propagating Islaemism among the most distant pagan colonies of their countrymen.  As all zealous Mussulmen are enjoined the pilgrimage of Mecca, and commerce mixes largely with religion in the holy journey, by which the faithful from every distant region often meet at Mecca, and induce each other to extend their commercial adventures to new regions, it may possibly have been, that some Moors originally from Spain, may even have reached Mozambique before the time of De Gama; but it is ridiculous to suppose that all the Moors on the African coast had been Spaniards.  The overthrow of the great Moorish kingdom of Granada only took place five or six years before the present voyage.