In 1879, Sayyid Barghash ibn Saʿid, ruler of the Zanzibar Sultanate, sent an expedition to explore the route from Menangene (present-day Palma, Mozambique) to Lake Nyasa, to locate a rumored coalfield, assess the feasibility of building a railroad on that route, and to settle disputes among the indigenous population. One of the leaders of the expedition, Shaykh ʿAbd al-ʿAziz al-Amawi, was commissioned with chronicling the journey and describing the indigenous people they encountered. This was one of six journeys taken by al-Amawi on Barghash’s behalf during the period from 1878 to 1885. Al-Amawi was a highly respected religious scholar and judge, as well as a counselor and roving ambassador for Sayyid Barghash. He hailed originally from Barawa, in present-day southeastern Somalia, but traveled to Zanzibar in his teens, where he received his first judicial appointment at a precociously early age. Al-Amawi was one of the most influential Sufi shaykhs and Shafiʿi scholars on the Swahili coast in the nineteenth century. He wrote numerous works on many of the disciplines in Arabic and Islamic studies, but many of his works were lost in the turmoil following the Zanzibar Revolution of 1964. I discovered a number of mainly incomplete manuscripts of his writings in a private library in Oman, including portions of al-Amawi’s second and sixth journeys in the Ruvuma River region, which currently forms the boundary between Tanzania and Mozambique. These chronicles offer a unique, non-European perspective on a region for which there are few sources from that time period. They speak of the Zanzibar government’s ambitions and perspective regarding its territories on the African mainland, at a time when most authors focus on European explorations and ambitions and the direct annexation of Zanzibar’s mainland territories after the Berlin conference of 1884-85. Al-Amawi’s chronicles also shed light on such disputed questions as the manner and extent of Zanzibar’s influence on the mainland at that time and the location of the boundary between the Zanzibar Sultanate and Portuguese East Africa.