Zambezi km from the sea the Zambezi receives the drainage of Lake Malawi through the Shire River. On approaching the Indian Ocean, the river splits up into a delta. Each of the four primary distributaries, Kongone, Luabo and Timbwe, is obstructed by a sand bar. A more northerly branch, called the Chinde mouth, has a minimum depth at low water of 2 m at the entrance and 4 m further in, and is the branch used for navigation. 100 km further north is a river called the Quelimane, after the town at its mouth. This stream, which is silting up, receives
Zambezi likely what modern sources spell the Chambeshi River in northern Zambia. The Monomatapa notion (reported by Santos) that the Zambezi was sourced from a great internal lake might be a reference to one of the African Great Lakes. One of the names reported by early explorers for Lake Malawi was "Lake Zambre" (probably a corruption of "Zambezi"), possibly because Lake Malawi is connected to the lower Zambezi via the Shire River. The Monomatapa story resonated with the old European notion, drawn from classical antiquity, that all the great African rivers—the Nile, the Senegal, the Congo, now the Zambezi, too—were all