Lord of Darkness

1

Almighty God, I thank Thee for my deliverance from the dark land of Africa. Yet am I grateful for all that Thou hast shown me in that land, even for the pain Thou hast inflicted upon me for my deeper instruction. And I thank Thee also for sparing me from the wrath of the Portugals who enslaved me, and from the other foes, black of skin and blacker of soul, with whom I contended. And I give thanks too that Thou let me taste the delight of strange loves in a strange place, so that in these my latter years I may look back with pleasure upon pleasures few Englishmen have known. But most of all I thank Thee for showing me the face of evil and bringing me away whole, and joyous, and unshaken in my love of Thee.

I am Andrew Battell of Leigh in Essex, which is no inconsiderable place. My father was the master mariner Thomas James Battell, who served splendidly with such as the great Drake and Hawkins, and my mother was Mary Martha Battell, whom I never knew, for she died in giving me into this world. That was in the autumn of the year 1558, the very month when Her Protestant Majesty Elizabeth ascended our throne. I was reared by my father’s second wife Cecily, of Southend, who taught me to read and write, and these other things: that I was to love God and Queen Elizabeth before all else, that I was to live honorably and treat all men as I would have myself be treated, and that we are sent into this world to suffer, as Christ Jesus Himself suffered, because it is through suffering that we learn. I think I have kept faith with my stepmother’s teachings, especially in the matter of suffering, for I have had such an education of pain, in good sooth, that I could teach on the subject to the doctors of Oxford or Cambridge. And yet I am not regretful of my wounds.

I was meant by my father to be a clerk. My brothers Thomas and Henry and John followed my father to the sea, as did my brother Edward, who was drowned off Antwerp, only fourteen years old, the week before my birth. That news, I think, broke my mother’s heart and weakened her so that the birthing of me killed her. My father, doubly grieved, resolved to send no more sons a-sailing, and so I was filled with knowledge out of books, even some Latin and some Greek, in the plan that I should go up to London and take a post in Her Majesty’s government.

But the salt air was ever in my nostrils. My earliest memory has me in my stepmother’s arms at the place where the Thames flows into the sea, and shaking my fist at a gull that swooped wildly to and fro above me. Leigh is such a town, you know, as will manufacture mariners rather than clerks. Since early days we have had a famous guild of pilots here, taking charge of the inward-bound traffic, while the men of Deptford Strond in Kent provide pilots to the outward bound. It was the Kentish guild and ours that King Henry VIII of blessed memory incorporated together as the Fraternity of the Most Glorious and Indivisible Trinity and of St. Clement, which we call the Trinity House, and it is the brethren of Trinity House that keep all England’s ships from going on the reefs. My father Thomas held a license of that guild, which took him a dozen years in the winning; and his son Thomas, now dead like all my clan, was a pilot, too. And a time came when even I found myself dealing with quadrants and astrolabes and portolans in strange waters, though such piloting as I knew was in my blood and breathed into my lungs, and not taught to me in any school. It was God who made me a pilot, and the Portugals, but not Trinity House.

Another early thing that I remember was a visitor my father had, a great-shouldered rough-skinned man with hard blue eyes and a shaggy red beard and a stark smell of codfish about him, though not an unpleasant one. He snatched me up—I was then, oh, seven or eight years old, I suppose—and threw me high and caught me, and cried, “Here’s another mariner for us, eh, Thomas?”

“Ah, I think not,” said my father to him.

And this man—he was Francis Willoughby, cousin to Sir Hugh that was lost in Lapland seeking the northeast passage to China—shook his head and said to my father, “Nay, Thomas, we must all go forth. For this is our nation’s time, we English, going out to be scattered upon the earth like seeds. Or thrown like coins, one might better say: a handful of coins flung from a giant’s hand. And O! Thomas! We are bright glittering coins, we are, of the least base of metals!”

I do recall those words most vividly, and seeing in my mind the giant walking to and fro upon the continents and over the seas, and hurling Englishmen with a mighty arm. And thinking then, too, how frightening it must be to be hurled in such a way, but how wondrous to come to earth in some far land, where the sunlight is of another color and the trees do grow with their roots in the air, and their crowns below!

My father nodded his agreement, and said, “Aye, each race has its special destiny, and the sea now is ours, as empire-making was for Rome, and conquest was for the Normans. And I think our people will indeed go far into the world, and embrace it most exuberantly, and bring this little isle of ours into a clasp with every distant land. And the Queen’s mariners will know a good many strange places, and peradventure some strange fates, too. But not my Andy, I think. I think I will have him stay closer by me, to be a comfort for my older age. I may hold one son back, may I not? May I not, Francis?”

And I thought it most unfair, that if all we English were to be flung by the giant, and exuberantly embrace distant lands, that I alone should be kept from the sport. And I told myself in private, while my father and Francis Willoughby jested and laughed and drank their ale, that I, too, would have my turn at those strange places and strange fates. That I remember. But I also remember that when Francis Willoughby had taken his leave, and the warmth of the moment had cooled, I allowed those dreams to fade in me for a time.

I was, as I say, destined to be a clerk. But as I studied, I watched the coming and going of the ships and listened to the talk of my father and brothers, and a different desire arose in me. My brother Henry it was in particular, the first privateer of our family, that led me to the sea. Henry was the second son, bold and impatient. He fought greatly with my father, they tell me. (All this happened when I was small, for that I was so much younger than my brothers.) “You may happily ply between Leigh and Antwerp, between Antwerp and Leigh, if you like,” declared this brazen Harry, “but I long for a broader sea.” He went out from home and was not seen for a time, and then one day he was back, taller than my father now and his skin almost black from the tropical sun and a cutlass-scar across his cheek, and he jingled a purse of gold angels and threw it on the table in my father’s house and said, “Here, this pays for the lodging I have had at your hands!”

He had been to sea with John Hawkins of Plymouth, to raid the Portugals in West Africa of blacks, and sell them in the New World to the Spaniards as plantation slaves. And he came back rich: more than that, he came back a man, who had gone away little more than a boy. John Hawkins went again to Africa the next year with five ships, and Henry was with him again, and also John my brother, and when they returned, sun-blackened and swaggering, they had pouches of pearls and other treasures. I was still a child then. My brother Henry walked with me along the shore and told me of fishes that flew and of trees that dripped blood, and then he gave me a pearl that looked like a blue tear, hung from a beaded chain, and put it about my throat. “With this pearl you may buy yourself a princess one day,” said my brother Henry.

Again Henry and John went to sea out of Plymouth and took slaves from Guinea and carried them to Hispaniola, but this time the Spaniards were sly and the English captain, John Lovell, was a dullard, and they came home with neither gold nor pearls, but only the tint of the hot sun on their skins to show for their pains. “All the same,” said Henry to my father, “the voyage was not entirely a loss, for there was a man aboard our ship who has the grace of a king, and he has plans and schemes for doing wonders, and I will follow him wherever he sails.” That man was the purser aboard Lovell’s vessel, and his name was Francis Drake. I lay awake upstairs listening as Henry and John told my father of this man, of how he bore himself and how he laughed and how he swore and how he meant to grow rich at King Philip’s expense, and I imagined myself going off to sea with my brothers when they signed on with Francis Drake.

That was mere fantasy, for I was not yet ten. But Drake and John Hawkins sailed, and my two brothers sailed with them on Drake’s Judith, and now my third brother Thomas, the eldest, went also with them. How my father raved and raged! For Thomas was licensed by Trinity House after his years of study, and was guiding those who traded at Channel ports, when this fit of piracy came over him. “Who will be our pilots at home,” my father demanded, “if all the mariners rush to the Indies?” Yet it was like crying into the wind to ask such things. Thomas had seen the pearls. Thomas had seen the angels of gold and the gleaming doubloons. And methinks he envied our brothers their scars and their swarthy skins.

Everyone knows the fate of that voyage, where Hawkins and Drake were forced by storms to take shelter at San Juan de Ulloa on the Mexican coast, and there by Spanish treachery were foully betrayed, so that they barely escaped alive and many of their men were slain. One of those who perished was my brother Thomas. You might think that my father would draw dark vindication from such news, as people do when their warnings are ignored, but my father was not of that sort. He mourned his firstborn son properly, and then he sought out Francis Drake and said, “I have given three sons to your venture, and one of them the Spaniards slew, and now I ask if you have need of a skilled pilot who is not young when next you go to raid their coasts.”

What, you say? Was my father maddened by grief? Nay, he was only transformed. The mere hunger for treasure had not been enough to draw him from his duties in the Channel and the North Sea. But the cowardly and lying way the Spaniards had fallen upon unsuspecting Englishmen, with the loss of so much precious life, had altered his direction. He wanted nothing now but to help Drake take from Spain whatever he could, in partial repayment for the life of his son. “There are more ways of serving God and the Queen,” my father told me, “than by piloting ships into the mouth of the Thames.”

So in 1570 he was with Drake on the Swan to harry the Spanish Main, and again in 1571, and a year later he was one of those from Drake’s Pasha that seized the royal treasury at Nombre de Dios on the Isthmus of Panama. The torments of that voyage, the fevers and disasters, were God’s own test indeed, but my father must have prospered beneath such burdens, for when he returned after a year and a half he looked miraculously younger, more a brother than a father to Henry and John, and all three lean and hard and dark as Moors. I went to Plymouth to meet their returning ship. I was then nearly fifteen and grown suddenly tall myself, and I think the disease of piracy was already bubbling in my veins. I embraced my father and my brothers and then they thrust me toward a robust man of short stature with a fair beard and dainty garments, whom I took to be some lord or gallant, and gallant indeed he was. “You see, Francis,” my father said, “I have kept one son in reserve.” And Drake cuffed me lightly on the arm and ran his hand the wrong way up my newly sprouting soft beard and said, “God’s blood, boy, you have the gleam in your eye! I know it well. I tell you this, that you will journey farther than all your brothers,” and so I have, into a realm of darkness so terrible and so strange as never a man of Essex imagined.

For the next few years there was little privateering. Her Majesty had no stomach for war with Spain, and patched up a peace with King Philip, and not even Drake dared to tamper with it. My father returned to his piloting, my brother Henry went off with Frobisher to seek the Northwest Passage, and I know not what became of my brother John, though I think he may have gone to Ireland, where he died in some wild feud ten years after. And I? I had my first taste of the water. At sixteen I was hired aboard the George Cross, a 400-ton carrack in the merchant trade, that hauled casks of claret from Bordeaux. She was a slow and clumsy old tub, three-masted, square-rigged on fore and main with lateen mizens, not much like your pirate brigantine or your caravel of exploration: a coarse heavy thing. But when you are at sea for the first time you find any vessel a wonder, most especially when land is out of sight and the hard waves wash at the hull. Knowing that my father had from my birth intended that I live a safe life ashore, I felt some fear when I came to him for permission to sign on. He looked at me long and said, “Henry has put the Devil in you, eh? Or was it Drake?”

“Sir?”

“When we landed at Plymouth, and we saw how you had grown, Henry said to me, Master Andrew is too sturdy now for a lubber’s life. He must have said something of the same to you. And then Drake, with his prophesying of your travels—he overheated your soul, did he not?”

“Aye, father. It was like that.”

“Tell me the sea is calling you. Tell me that it is a pull you are unable to resist.”

I shifted from one leg to another, uneasily, not knowing if I were being mocked.

I said, “It is not entirely like that.”

“But?”

“But I would go.”

“Then go,” he said amiably. “You’ll be in no jeopardy in the Channel, and you may learn a bit. Will you be scrubbing decks, d’ye think?”

“I have some learning, father. I will be tallying records, and making bills of lading.”

He shook his head. “I would rather have you scrubbing decks, and I myself had the learning put into you, too. That was an error. You were meant for the sea, boy. But I suppose no harm is done, if you have a sailor’s body, and a clerk’s wit. Better that than the other way round, at any rate.”

And with that somewhat sidewise blessing he let me sign on.

I look back across forty years at that boy and I confess I like what I see. Green, yes, and foolish and silly, but why not, at such an age? Quiet, and diligent, and tolerant of hardship, such little hardship as I had known. I had stubbornness and devotion and the will to work, and I had some intelligence, and I had steadfastness. From my father I had inherited something else, too, the wit to know when it is time to change one’s course. There are those who sail blindly ahead and there are those who tack and veer when they must tack and veer, and I am of that latter sort, and I think it has been the saving of my life many a time.

For eleven months I served on the George Cross. I knew some seamanship before I went aboard, from what I had heard at home and seen in the Thameside docks; that is, I knew not to piss to windward, and which side was larboard and which starboard, and what was the quarterdeck and what the forecastle, and not a whole much more. I had little hope of learning a great deal waddling about between Dover and Calais, but as it happened the old carrack went wider than that, to Boulogne and Le Havre and once to Cherbourg, so I saw something of storms and concluded a few conclusions about winds and sails. That would be useful to me, though I knew not then why. There was aboard the ship a certain Portugal as the carpenter, one Manoel da Silva, very quick with his hands and with his tongue, who long ago had married an English wife and given up Papistry. He had a fondness for me and often came to the cabin where I struggled with invoices and accounts, and in his visits he spoke half in English and half in Portuguese, so that by and by I picked up the language from him: um, dois, tres, quatro, and so forth. I learned that I had a skill with language. And that would be useful to me one day also.

In those months I grew a liking for good red wine, I discovered the way of walking a deck without sprawling, I had my first real fight and gave better than I got, and, long overdue, I left my aching virginity in the belly of a dark-haired French whore. Thereafter I worried about the pox for days, without need. I found I could sleep well on hard planks and I came not to mind the drench of salt spray. My body hardened and my legs lengthened, and I told myself I was now a man, and the sound of that had a good ring in my ears. Betimes I imagined myself a thousand leagues from home, on my way to the Japans or Hispaniola or Terra Australis on a voyage that no one would ever forget. Well, and I was only plying a tub between England and France, ferrying wine.

Nor did I even then think to make the sea my trade. For all my eagerness to straddle the globe and see strange lands and marvels and fill my purse with Spanish gold, my true and deepest notion was to set by some pounds and one day buy me the freehold of a farm, and marry and prosper, and live comfortably in hard work and the bosom of a family, reading books for pleasure and attending the plays betimes in London, like a gentleman. At the end of my year’s voyage I found I had set by not as much as I had expected—two shillings less than two pounds. But even that seemed a fair fortune for a lad of seventeen, and more than I could have earned ashore, for in those days a skilled workman—a thatcher, say—could hope for no more than seven and sixpence a week, out of which must come rent and clothing and food and all, and a young clerk hardly that much. So I went to sea again after two months at home.

This time it was a farther voyage, to Flanders and Norway, and the year after that all the way to Russia aboard a vessel of the Muscovy Company, and a cold time I had of it then. But these journeys were making a complete sailor of me, for each time I did less clerking and more seamanship, and I was finding my way around the maps and charts, the compasses and leads, not because it was asked of me but because my curiosity led me to know at first hand what sort of trade my father and his son Thomas the pilot had plied. So the years of my early manhood went.

In those years the Spaniards began once more to break the truce between their lands and ours, and the Queen sent Drake out to punish them with the loss of gold and silver. This was in 1577, and it was destined to become a voyage around the world, though that was not Drake’s first plan. My brother Henry was with him aboard his flagship, the Pelican, that Drake would rename The Golden Hind in mid-passage. My father, too, applied for command of another ship, the pinnace Christopher, but he was refused with thanks, on account of his age. I also would have gone, but my father would not let it, saying, “Thomas is dead and John is fled to Ireland and Henry sails with Drake, and I want one son for England.” I could have thwarted him in that, but I had no heart for it. He was suddenly old, and he did not so much forbid me as implore me, and how could I say him nay?

So Henry Battell went with Drake through Magellan’s Strait and up to Valparaiso and on to loot the gold of Peru, and to unknown northern lands of horrid fog and cold, and out into the South Sea to the Spice Islands and Java and Africa, and home again in just short of three years, leaving his left arm behind, that had become inflamed by a poison dart on some tropic isle. In the meanwhile Andrew Battell sailed four times to Antwerp and thrice to Sweden and once to Genoa. Which I suppose is no small travelling, but hardly a patch on going to the Spice Islands or Java, and often I thought ruefully of Drake’s prediction of how far I should journey. Who could possibly go farther than Henry, who had encompassed the globe? But there is voyage outward and there is voyage inward, as I would learn, and my twenty years inward to the heart of African deviltry took me farther indeed than Drake himself could have gone, as I will relate.

Yet I thought my sailing days were over by the time Drake and his men had come home. I was two-and-twenty, and by thrift and sweat I had earned my freehold, and I had my land and I had my wife. Her name was Rose Ullward of Plymouth, and she was small and dark, with sparkling eyes. I blush when I tell you that that is almost all I remember of her, save that she was a barmaid at the licensed house that her father kept by the docks. We lived as man and wife a year and some months. Together we went to Deptford that spring day in 1581 when Queen Bess made Francis Drake a knight; because my brother was a man of The Golden Hind, we were allowed on board, and I stood so close to the Queen that I could see the pockmarks on her cheek. She was a fine royal woman, quite tall and handsome, and I was almost weeping for being so near her. A great crowd attended on that day, so that the bridge laid from shore to the ship collapsed, and two hundred people were thrown into the Thames, though none was injured or drowned. I jumped in to save several, and Henry also, thrashing about valiantly with his one arm. Sir Francis embraced me as I shivered on deck afterward, and said, “I know you, fellow,” which amazed me, for he had met me only once and that many years before. But the men of my family have all had a single face, and he must have seen Henry on my features. It was a happy moment.

Soon my Rose’s belly was swelling, which gave me joy but also fear, for I remembered how my mother had died with me in childbed. Such misplaced worry! In brooding about imagined perils we often fail to see the real foe stealing upon us. Three months before her time Rose took the smallpox, and perished swiftly of it, and my unborn child of course with her. In that same dark season my father died, of an apoplexy, in his sixty-third year.

I have never known such bleakness. For the only time in my life all heart left me, all faith, all strength. I wandered as if in a dream, wifeless and fatherless and childless. In my foolish sorrow I turned to the taverns, and neglected my farm and drank up my savings and drank also the six pounds I inherited of my father, which is no small quantity of drinking, and in time everything was gone and the bailiffs came to tell me I had lost my land. Then did I sign on in Leigh as a clerk in the customs-house. I was barely four-and-twenty and thought of my life as almost ended, though in truth it had hardly begun.

At the lowest ebb the tide turns. In the year 1586, after an interminable dreary time of this waking slumber, I came to my senses and looked about me and saw that the world was still beautiful, and I began to recover into life. I fell in love, I pledged myself to marry again, I began once again to amass the money to buy me a freehold; in short, the interruption of defeat and black dejection was put at an end for me. And out of these renewed hopes and ambitions I came by easy stages to take up my long-abandoned career at sea, for how else could I come quickly by the wealth I needed? And by one step and another I set myself all unknowingly on the path that would carry me far from home for so many years, to Africa, to the torments the Portugals laid upon me, to the royal courts of Kongo and the Angola, to the jungles of coccodrillos and elephantos and the broad plains spangled with zevveras and gazelles; I began my long journey to the side of that diabolical Jaqqa cannibal, Imbe Calandola, the incarnation of the Lord of Darkness, whose lieutenant I became and whose monstrous wisdom rings to this day in my soul like terrible discordant music.

2

How did it happen? Why, I fell in love.

Her name was Anne Katherine Sawyer. She was but fifteen. Her hair was golden, not mere yellow like mine but the golden gold of the gold of Ophir, and her skin was fair and her lips were sweet. She was the daughter of the registrar of customs. I had seen her about the place as a pretty child, and then one day I woke and saw she was a child no more, and I felt the blood coursing again in my veins, that had been slow and sluggish since the day my wife Rose closed her eyes. I strolled with Anne Katherine along the docks, I spoke with her of Antwerp and Muscovy, I told her of my brother, who had sailed with Drake, and my father, who had seized Spanish treasure at Nombre de Dios, and I touched her shoulder one day and her elbow the next and her hand after that, like a boy afraid of frightening his girl with overmuch forwardness.

A bit of a coquette is what she was, and as things grew more urgent she held me lightly apart from her body when first I attempted her. But desire burns in woman as it does in man—let no fool tell you otherwise— and in time she yielded her maiden treasure to me, which was not a shameful thing, for I knew I would have her to be my wife. I gave her, for a token, the pearl on a beaded chain that I had had long ago from my brother. All the next day I was dizzied with the memory of my hands to her silken thighs and my lips to her round pale breasts, and the sound she made—soft, soft—when I went at last into her. And I dreamed of doing such things, night after night, all the nights of our life together.

But first there was money to put by all over again and land to buy, perhaps even the same that I had earlier lost in my folly. And also it was unseemly to marry her so young, sixteen or seventeen being more fitting. I looked about for service on some merchantman, but there was little to be found, as times were hard then in England. Nor was there even piracy to turn to. God’s death! That was a terrible time for me, and no one to blame but myself.

What brought me up out of despond was the mighty audacity and vacuity of King Philip, that sent the Armada of Spain against England in the summer of 1588. When our great captains gathered to meet that troublesome attempt—Drake and Hawkins and Frobisher and the rest— every seaman in the land was there to do the work, and there among them was I. If I had had my way I would have been on board Drake’s flagship Revenge, next to my brother Henry, but I was too obscure for that, and had my berth on a lesser though not contemptible vessel, the privateer Margaret and John, of two hundred tons and a pretty turn of speed.

I need not retell here how we English, with the help of the winds and storms, scattered and routed the silly Dons and sent them fleeing up around Scotland to smash themselves on the Irish shores: you know all that. For me the weeks of battle were an especial joy, both for giving my strength for Queen and country and for getting the whiff of the sea into my nostrils once more. You should know that until that summer I had secretly thought myself but half a man, since I had sailed only in clerkish ways while my father and brothers were by way of being heroes, and since in my life at home I had lost my land and made myself a figure of shame. But all that was mended now. I had sailed heavy seas; I had fought our enemies without fear; I had enrolled myself among the heroes of the realm.

There was aboard the Margaret and John a man of Leigh, one Abraham Cocke, who had much to do with the shaping of my life thereafter. This Cocke was a sour sort, with a ragged brown beard and one eye asquint, who had known my brother Thomas in boyhood and later had taken up the trade of piracy. Ill luck it brought him, for he went raiding along the coast of the Brazils in the ship of Drake’s cousin John, and a little short of the Rio de la Plata was captured by the Portugals, who kept him prisoner several years. From this captivity he was delivered at last by the Earl of Cumberland, who while marauding on that same Brazilian coast fell in with a Portuguese vessel aboard which this Cocke was serving, and rescued him back to England. That was in 1587. Cocke’s sufferings taught him nothing but greater greed for Spanish gold, and he hungered to return to the lands where he had come to such grief. He told me this on a summer day of dead calm and heavy sluggish air as we followed the Armada from Portland Bill to Calais Roads.

“This war will be the shattering of Spain,” said Cocke to me. “King Philip has pissed away much treasure on the building of these doomed galleons of his, and he will need to milk the Indies for gold aplenty to renew his coffers. When this work is done, I will put myself between King Philip and his gold. Will you join me in that, Battell?”

“Aye,” I said, and in that single short word I spoke away twenty years of my life.

Cocke told me that every year great store of treasure is transported overland out of Peru to the port of Buenos Aires on the Rio de la Plata, and from there it is shipped along the coast to Bahia in Brazil, where four or five caravels wait to carry it to Spain. It was Cocke’s intent to intercept the treasure-ships between Buenos Aires and Bahia, not by brutal force but by making a lightning swoop with two small vessels of great swiftness. I saw this plan as being much to my favor. If God gave us strength, I could earn as much in that one piracy as in ten years of scribbling invoices aboard merchantmen, and I could have my land and my Anne Katherine, and finally set about the making of sons and the reading of books. And then farewell to maritime life, for I was somehow come to be thirty years of age now, and longed for the shore and my warm bed and Anne Katherine beside me in it.

When the business of the Armada was finished and the Spaniards were ruined, I spoke of my intent to Anne Katherine. I feared she might object to my going privateering, as women sometimes take exception to such doings, but not she. With a smile as broad as the sun she said, “By all means, go and harvest gold. For the Spaniards only steal it from the poor Indians, and have but the Devil’s claim on the stuff themselves. Why should we not have some of the use of it, too, who are peaceful folk whom God loves?”

Henry, too, gave me his blessing. I think I was an embarrassment to him—the unlucky younger brother—and he hoped this voyage would settle me in life at last. He himself was becoming a great man then, having fallen in with Walter Ralegh, and planning with him an expedition in search of the great treasure of El Dorado in Guiana. Which some years later it seems he undertook, and my brother left his bones along the banks of the Orinoco for his troubles, but I know little of that.

Cocke raised his money and bought two pinnaces of fifty tons each, the May-Morning and the Dolphin. We sailed from the River Thames the twentieth of April, 1589, I having spent all the night before in the arms of my Anne Katherine, and the fragrance of her sweet breasts still in my nostrils as we stood forth into a greasy fog. “When will you be back?” she asked me at the hour before dawn, and I said, “Before Christmas, with pouches of golden doubloons, and we will marry by Twelfth Night.” Though that she had had not a moment’s sleep her eyes were bright and her face was fresh and clear, and I saw the love and God’s grace in her good smile. She was of eighteen years then, already growing a little old for marriage, and I bitterly begrudged the year’s delay. But without gold I could not be marrying, if we were to live properly ever after.

In all my wanderings ahead, the image of Anne Katherine burned brighter in my memory than do the faces of the saints among the Popish. But many a strange thing befell me before I saw that face again, and when I came at last to the seeing of that face it was a passing strange thing in itself, a seeming miracle. Of that tale in its proper moment, though.

On the sixth and twentieth of April we put into Plymouth, where we took in some provision for the voyage. The seventh of May we put to sea, and with foul weather were beaten back again into Plymouth, where we remained some days, and then proceeded on our voyage. As England fell from sight behind us I saw the great curving green sphere of the open sea and cried out for joy, for I was on my way into the world at long last, that vast round thing so full of wonders and splendors and marvels.

Running along the coast of Spain and Barbary we put into the road of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, one of the islands called Canary. Here I breathed the soft air of the lands of eternal springtime, with so many perfumes upon it that it made me wild. Jesu! Such beauty and such strangeness! I had a friend aboard ship, Thomas Torner of Essex, who had been the Tenerife way before, and Torner said to me, “This is the isle of the Raining Tree, which is enveloped by a cloud every day at noon. The tree’s great branches absorb much moisture, which travels quickly downward to gush in great streams from its roots into certain cisterns placed nearby. And the whole water supply of the island is had from this one tree.”

My eyes went wide and my heart thundered. For I had come on this voyage to gain gold, aye, but also to see marvels. The Raining Tree of Tenerife! Well, so be it. God wot, I saw no such tree there, though I found another of which I had heard much. This was the famous Dragon’s-Blood Tree, that dripped scarlet blood. Thus I described it to Torner, as it had been described to me. But he only laughed and said, “Andy, Andy, it is no such thing! Come and see!”

He pointed to me the Dragon’s-Blood Tree, and there were many of them indeed on the isle. A fine peculiar tree it was, too, fat-boughed and swollen, with leaves like long daggers, and when you pulled the leaves off, there was a bit of a red stain left behind. I wonder how many of the other travelers’ tales have been inflamed and magnified in that fashion, from Marco Polo’s day to ours. Yet I swear to you by the wounds of God that I tell you nothing but the truth in this my narrative, and if anything I make what I experienced seem more sober than in truth it was.

We were carrying with us the kind of little vessel called a light horseman, or rowing-boat, which we had in two pieces. On the quiet shore of Tenerife we assembled this craft and thenceforth carried it alongside us, for in-shore venturing. When that was accomplished we put to sea.

Not far south of the Canaries is the usual place for turning westward for the Atlantic crossing. We did not do that. Instead we clung to the coast of Guinea and rounded the great hump of Africa, as if Captain Cocke planned to take us to some destination other than Brazil. I know not why that was, whether it was sheer incompetence on his part, or honest error, or hope of encountering some treasure-ship of the Portugals in those waters.

It was a bad time for us. We were becalmed, because we were too near the coast. For days we were driving to and fro without puff or wind. In this time most of our men fell sick of the scurvy by reason of the extreme heat of the sun, and the vapors of the night. From that misery I was spared, owing to my faith in God or more likely the strength of my frame, but it was hardly easy for me, standing double and triple watches, and going about among the sufferers to give them ease. We baked under the great yellow eye of fire above us. My skin was darkening as my brothers’ skin had, and I knew I would cut a swaggering figure with it in Essex now, but this was not Essex, and I felt as though I were turning to leather, fit only to bind books in. We ate little but salted meat and dried peas in those days.

When we were within three or four degrees of the equinoctial line we fell in with the Cape de las Palmas, a happy place far down the side of Africa where it has its grand curving to the eastward. The people of this cape made much of us, saying that they would trade with us; but it was but to betray us, for they are very treacherous, and were like to have taken our boat, and hurt some of our men.

From this cape we lay south-west off; but the current and calms deceived us, so that we were driven down to the isle of São Tomé, believing that we had been farther out to the sea than we were. I knew we were astray badly, and at night I often lay awake in the heat thinking of my Anne Katherine’s fair white breasts with their little delicate pink tips that grew so hard under my hands. I was getting no closer to Anne Katherine in this journey past the African shore, and getting no closer either to the Spanish gold that was to be my marriage-money. So I felt sadness and sometimes a choking rage. And when I thought of her breasts growing hard I grew hard myself, elsewhere, and rolled myself on my belly and eased myself with my hand, as sailors must do.

Yet for the heat and my sorrowful loneliness and the scurvy and the wearisome salt cod and all the rest, still would I not have traded places with a landsman for anything. For this was the great adventure of my life that I was embarked upon.

Being in distress for wood and water, we went in between São Tomé and a smaller island called Las Rolas, a mile off the southern tip. With our light horseman we went on shore at this small and high and densely wooded island, thinking to fill our casks with sweet water. Here we found a village of blacks, for the Portugals of São Tomé are accustomed to sending their sick or weak slaves to this island to let them recover their strength. We took from them a great store of oranges, and also the fruit known as plantain, which is long and yellow, and starchy in the mouth. Beynonas is what the Portugals call this fruit. But of water we got none, since there are no springs on this island and all their supply comes from the rainfall, which is not often. They drink also the wine of the palm-trees in place of fresh water. We sampled that, but for all its virtue it was no substitute for water. Having refreshed ourselves with the fruit of this island, we burned the village. And running on the east side of São Tomé we came before the town there, which is a slave-depot for the Portugals. But we dared not go close to it, for the castle was well fortified with heavy guns, and they fired at us until we were far beyond range.

Then we lay east and by south toward the mainland, and after a time swung about back toward the island of São Tomé, for our casks held only rusty dregs now and our need of water was pressing. On the west side of the island we came to a little river which runs out of the mountains, and we went on shore with our light horseman, with six or seven butts to fill with water.

But the Portugals were waiting for us with one hundred men lying in ambush. When we reached shore they came upon us, and killed one of our men and hurt another. The dead man was a boy of Southgate whose name I forget, with exceeding pale fine hair, almost like flax. A Portuguese ball caught him high on the forehead and I remember the brightness of the blood staining that fair hair, though his name is gone from me. He could have been no more than seventeen, and in that moment all the beauties of the world were lost to him forever. It was the first time I had ever seen sudden death, though not, God wot, the last. We fled to our boat and got aboard, and afterward we stole ashore at another place and took the water we wanted.

Now at last commenced our westward journey.

We lay west-south-west into the sea: and being some fifty leagues off, we fell into a shoal of dolphins, which did greatly relieve us, for they did follow our ship all the way till we fell in with the land on the other side. There was joy in seeing these great fishes sporting and leaping in the sun, and seeming almost to laugh, or perhaps to smile, at their own agility. But the crossing had many hardships for us. During the long passage on the vast gulf, where nothing but sea beneath us and air above us was to be seen, we often met with adverse winds, unwelcome storms, and even less welcome calms, and being as it were in the bosom of the burning zone, we felt the effects of sultry heat, not without the frights of flashing lightnings, and terrifyings of frequent claps of thunder. These were the horse latitudes we were in, or the doldrums. No breezes blew and the ships were often stilled and idle. One awful day we were given the other side of the Devil’s hand, when terrible gales abruptly struck us, and we dipped so far to our sides that the yardarms touched the waves. On the masts danced a weird blue glow, blinding in its brilliance, that gave me terror. But a sailor calmed me, saying, “It is Saint Elmo’s fire, that speaks of divine protection.” He dropped to his knees and prayed. As did I, and the sea grew calm, and we went onward at a good pace.

The heat was great and the deck was like an oven, and the tar melted in the seams. We slept poorly. We had little to do, and that was a trial. And yet there was no anguish in this crossing for me. I felt gratitude that I was strong and healthy and able to do my sailing, into a realm of dolphins and blue fire and even the pale and glistening flying fishes of which my brother had told me when I was a boy, and which I now saw with mine own eyes as they soared above the breast of the sea.

In thirty days we sighted land. The dark line before us was Brazil. I looked toward that place and a kind of dizziness came over me, and such ecstasy as I think the poets must feel. For in the eye of my mind I saw the lands west of Brazil sweeping on and on toward the sunset, over to Peru, and I knew from my brother Henry’s tales that the great South Sea lay beyond, and on the far side of that sea such places as Cathay and India and the Japans, and then Africa. In brief, I had a vision of the whole world as a single ball, league upon league of miracles, God’s own fullness of marvel. And I had another vision of England’s sturdy men sailing on those seas to all corners of the globe, and planting the flag and making themselves homes and increasing our wealth and pride. How wondrous to be alive at this time, in so great an adventure!

And then I remembered that I was only a penniless man of Essex who wanted nothing more than a wife and a farm, and that I had come to this strange place to take from the Spaniards and the Portugals the gold they in turn had taken from the Indians. And I laughed at my own swollen grandeurs and set about mending a sail, which was my task for that day.

We ran along the coast of Brazil until we came to Ilha Grande, southward of the Line. This is a fine lofty island most green and lavish with trees. We put in on the mainland side and haled our ships on shore, and washed them and shoveled out the ballast so we might scrub the bilges, a foul job but a needful one. We refreshed ourselves and took in fresh water. No inhabitants did we see in this part of the island, but it is very fruitful. When we had been there some twelve days there came in a little pinnace heading south, to water and to get some refreshments. We surprised it in our harbor and took it prisoner, and brought from it a Portugal merchant, who seemed in fear for his life.

Abraham Cocke sent for me and said, “You speak the Portuguese tongue. Ask him when the treasure-ships come.”

Now such Portuguese as I knew had years of rust upon it, and this Portugal was in such terror he all but beshit his pants and he chattered in the teeth when he tried to speak. So our conversation was like that of blind men discussing whether the sky be red or green. But the words returned to me, enough to comfort him that he would not be slain by us, if only he dealt honestly with us. Even then he only shivered and prayed and named all the saints a hundred times each.

“He is out of his wits in fright,” I told Cocke.

The captain nodded his head. “It is because he knows what would happen if matters were the other way round, and one Englishman were taken by a ship of Portugals. Tell him we gave up burning Papists long ago, and want only information from him, not his soul.”

I spoke as I could and finally the man grew calm and said two treasure-ships would leave Buenos Aires within two months to sail to Bahia, near this Ilha Grande. He also said without being asked that on the other side of this island lived a degradado, a banished man, with a plantation full of fruits that would nourish us. Since our bread and our victuals were almost all spent, we allowed the Portugal to lead us there. And indeed we found the plantation and its owner, and took from him great stores of plantains, and a few hogs and hens and other things.

Captain Cocke now divided our party, putting some of the men of the Dolphin aboard our May-Morning, and leaving the Dolphin behind at Ilha Grande while the rest of us went south to meet the treasure-ships at the Rio de la Plata. That seemed foolish generalship to me at the time, as had so many other of Cocke’s doings. We had few enough men as it was, and to split our number was hard to understand. I have had more than twenty years to reflect on that, and still I have no answer to the mystery, and I know I never shall. What became of the Dolphin and her men I also do not know, though I think they stayed only a few days more at Ilha Grande and went home to England. At any rate we filled our hold with the degradado’s plantains and departed from his island. Cocke spoke long and loudly of the gold that soon would replace the plantains belowdecks. When you looked at his face—which was not easy, since that his eyes went in different ways and would not meet yours—you saw in it a glow of avarice, as if he were staring at mountains of doubloons. So it was; yet there is a good old English saying, “A crowing cock lays no eggs,” and thus it was with this our good Cocke. For in my life I saw as many cock’s eggs as I did doubloons out of that voyage.

3

A long bleak time we had of it going down that fertile coast.

The third night, or the fourth, there was such a strong south-easterly wind and squalls that it threw us awry, and we sought a sheltered spot to anchor in. But where we came to shore there were a dozen Indians waiting. They were dark brown and naked, and had no covering for their private parts, and they carried bows and arrows in their hands.

They all came with determination toward our boat. Nicholas Parker, the second mate, made a sign to them to put down their bows, and they held them down. But he could not speak to them or make himself understood in any other way because of the waves which were breaking on the shore. He merely threw them some baubles and a little cap, which pleased them, and one of them threw him a hat of large feathers with a small crown of red and gray feathers, like a parrot’s. I think they perceived that we were not Portugals and therefore would not harm them.

These Indians had holes in their lower lips and a bone in them as broad as the knuckles of a hand and as thick as a cotton spindle and sharp at one end like a bodkin. Some were covered in a motley way with stripes of paint of a bluish black. We made gestures to them and they to us, and then four or five girls appeared out of the woods. They were very young and most pretty, especially to men who had not touched soft skin in many months. They had abundant long hair down their backs, and their private parts (of which they made no privacy) were tightly knit and almost without hair, and so comely that many women in our country would be ashamed, if they saw such perfection, that theirs were not equally perfect. “I will buy one or two maidens from them,” said Nicholas Parker, laughing broadly, and we encouraged him in this, for these girls were well made and rounded. “What price will they have? Something shiny, I think,” he said.

But then the Devil took a hand in the dealings. A sailor from Portsmouth, a huge clumsy lout or ox, chose to stumble forward to put his hands on one of the Indian maids. That was bad enough; but as he lumbered toward her a vine in the sand caught his boot and he fell headlong. His musket began to fly from his hand. He seized it as he dropped, but such was his position that it appeared to the timid Indians that he was getting ready to fire. They fled in an instant and favored us with a shower of arrows from afar, which did no harm but put an end to our parley, and we purchased no tender maidens that day or any other. After that we did not find Indians, or for that matter any good harbors, nor did we see hide nor hair of the Spanish treasure-ships out of Buenos Aires, though we tacked back and forth in the sea-road searching for them. Abraham Cocke began to look coldly upon me, as if he thought I had let the Portugal merchant beguile me with lies, or had misunderstood his language. And so we were six-and-thirty dreary days of it until we came to the Isle of Lobos Marinos, which is in the mouth of the Rio de la Plata.

This island is half a mile long, and has no fresh water, but abounds with seals and a larger animal, a sort of sea-horse. There were so many of these creatures that our light horseman could not push through them to the shore unless we beat at them with our oars: and the island is covered with them. Upon these seals we lived some thirty days, lying up and down in the river, and were in great distress of victuals apart from that meat. Then we determined to run up to Buenos Aires, and with our light horseman to capture one of the pinnaces that waited at that town. But, being so high up the river as the town, we were struck by a mighty storm at south-west, which drove us back again, and we were fain to take refuge at the Isla Verde—that is, the green island— which is in the mouth of the river on the north side.

Lack of victuals discomforted us mightily, and we were not able long to remain there. So downcast were we that we gave over the purpose of the voyage altogether, and made a melancholy retreat back to the northward to reconsider our intentions. Now we came to the Isle of São Sebastiao, lying just under the Tropic of Capricorn. There we went on shore to catch fish, and some of us, I among them, went up into the woods to gather fruit, for we were all in a manner famished. And on this island my life as a free man ended.

I think it befell on Twelfth Night, this calamity. There is cold irony in that, for I had promised my betrothed Anne Katherine we would be wed that night, in all my innocence, not knowing that Abraham Cocke would foolishly sail halfway down the side of Africa before making toward Brazil, or that we would waste weeks here and there and here and there without finding the treasure-ships. In the tropics all is upside-down, and Twelfth Night falls in the dead of summer, and it was a day of most fearsome heat, that made me fond for snow. I stood high on the hillside plucking a soft sweet purple fruit from a tree with leaves bright as mirrors, and O! I heard cries and screams, and looked downhill to see a band of naked Indians rushing upon our people from hiding. These were no childlike folk with gifts of feathers. All had bows and arrows and some carried knives that they must have had from the Portugals, and they attacked so fast there was no time to put match to powder, but only to flee. Flee! Aye, so it was. Within a moment there were corpses on the beach and Englishmen clambering into the boat or merely swimming desperately out to the May-Morning.

Well, that is fair enough, to take flight when surprised and sore beset. I thought I knew what would happen next, that is, that Cocke would turn the guns of the ship against the Indians, and terrify them to surrender, and then send the light horseman back to the island to collect our dead and to recover those of us who had been picking fruit in the hills. But that is not what happened. The light horseman reached the ship and the men scrambled aboard; and before my stupefied gaze the May-Morning hoisted anchor and rigged her sails and made briskly for the open sea. I could not believe it. I dared not cry out, knowing it would only bring the Indians upon me, and anyhow my voice would have been blown apart in the wind. But something in my soul cried out, and loudly, so that I thought my forehead would burst from the roar and thunder of it. Treachery! Cowardice! Had Cocke forgotten me, or was he so pissing his pants with terror that he would make no attempt to regain me, or was it simply that he did not care? I was abandoned, that was the sum and total of it.

Jesu! How I wanted to rend and tear things asunder in my fury!

But I am, God wot, a man of balance and even temperament, and my first fine rage passed quickly, and I examined my situation. Was I a castaway? Well, then, I was a castaway, and not the first since the beginning of time in such a pickle. Perhaps there were others nearby of the same lot. I squatted down beside a plant that was all barbs and prickles, so I would not be seen by the Indians who still infested the beach, and considered the case.

Primus, Cocke might not yet have fully abandoned me. Perchance he would take a census of his men when safe out from shore, and in counting the missing would recall he had left a few to gather fruit, and would come back for me. Perchance. And perchance the Queen would marry the Pope, but I did not intend to wager high stakes on it.

Secundus, so long as I lived I was not yet dead, even though abandoned. I must try to survive, and find other English, and build some sort of boat to take me across to the mainland. For we were only five leagues from Santos, where the Portugals had a town of fair size.

Tertius, if I had allies perhaps I might capture a pinnace in Santos, and sail away from Portuguese territory. For the Portugals were my enemy, ever since King Philip of Spain had conquered their land nine years past and made himself king over it, too. God’s eyes! How hard all this would be, and how needless! Between one moment and the next our lives can be wholly transformed, while our backs are turned.

Out of fear of Indians I spent the night on the hillside. I made a gloomy dinner of purple fruits and slept in snatches, standing watch and watch with myself, so to speak, now awake and now taking some winks. In the morning all seemed quiet and the Indians were nowhere about, nor, I do say, was the May-Morning, not even a dot of white against the far horizon.

I went cautiously down the slope to the beach, tearing my trousers often on the demonic fanged plants. Six of our men lay dead with arrows in them, men whose names I knew and whose friendship I had valued. Their bodies were twisted and wretched of their last agonies, which told me that the arrows must have been tipped with poison, as is the custom here. I resolved to bury the dead men in the afternoon, but it was one of those bold resolutions easier to make than to keep, for I had nothing to dig with but my hands and some seashells, and a grave must be six feet deep. I put the task aside for another time.

I went around a little headland to the far side, where the shore was rocky. Here I saw things stirring by the seaside, as the tide went out, and I crept on my hands and feet like a child, and when I drew near I beheld many crabs lying in holes in the rocks. I pulled off one of my stockings and filled it with crabs, and I carried it to a hollow fig-tree where I found an old fire smouldering from some lightning-stroke. Casting the crabs on the coals, I cooked them and made my dinner out of them, and so the day passed.

So I lived three or four days alone. Again I tried to bury the dead, but the earth ashore was hard and full of rock, and at the beach the sand slipped and fell about as I dug it, so that I could not make graves. I would have tied rocks to the men and buried them in the sea, but I had no cords for tying, and it seemed un-Christian merely to push them into the water, where they would float and bloat in the surf and be eaten by vermin. So I did nothing, except feel shame that I left them unburied. The stink of them became noisome and the sight of them was a reproach, so I moved on around the edge of the island and passed by a fair river that ran into the sea.

Here I thought to make my abode because of the fresh water. But I had not been there scarce the space of half a quarter of an hour, but I saw a great thing come out of the water, with great scales on the back, with great ugly claws and a long tail. I knew it not, though later I would learn that it is the animal known as the coccodrillo, or in some parts called the allagardo.

This monster put me into a fright close to perishing. It came toward me and I would not flee, nay, could not, but strangely went and met it, as though drawn by sorcery. When I came near it I stood still, amazed to see so monstrous a thing before me. It was like a diabolus, a mage, something from Hell come to fetch me, and I yielded utterly to its malign power. Hereupon this beast seemed to smile, and opened his mouth, and thrust out a long tongue like a harpoon. I commended myself to God, and thought there to be torn in pieces, but the creature turned again and went into the river. And I burst out into laughter, not that I saw any jest, but only the deep jest that is the frailty of our flesh, the ease with which at any moment our bodies may be parted from our souls.

The next day I walked farther around the island, fearing to tarry in that place, and I found a great whale lying on the shore like a ship with the keel upwards, all covered with a kind of short moss from the long lying there. As I examined this marvel a familiar voice cried out, “Andy, for the love of Jesus!” It was Thomas Torner, who had made his camp on the whale’s far flank.

An immensity of joy rose in me at the sight of him, for he gave me hope that I might escape this place, which would not be easy for two but was well nigh impossible for one. We embraced like brothers.

“I feared I was left alone,” I told him.

“Nay, there are several of us,” said Torner, and led me around the whale’s heavy flukes. “Look ye,” he said, and I beheld three others of our company, Richard Jennings and Richard Fuller and one other whose name the years have washed from my memory. These men had been in divers separate places at the moment of the Indian attack and each had fled a different way into the forest, and one by one had come together here. “God’s wounds,” cried Richard Jennings, a great burly man half as high as an oak tree, “Do you know, Battell, that we were betrayed and abandoned by Cocke the cockless, and will live the rest of our lives among these crabs and other insects?”

“Aye,” I replied, “I know of our betrayal, for I saw the ship depart. But as to the second part I say you nay, friend. I think we will see England again.”

“Do you now? Will dolphins carry us there?”

“God will provide. And if He do not, we must provide for ourselves, or indeed these crabs will be our neighbors forever. Are there others of us here?”

“Just we four,” said Torner, “and you are the fifth. I think there are no others in the part of the island behind us. Were there more in your direction?”

“Only six dead men, rotting and unburied on the beach. But five of us are enough to build a boat and take it to the mainland,” I said, and explained my plan of capturing a Portuguese pinnace in Santos and using it to cross the ocean by small hops and skips and jumps. They listened intently and without scoffing. Fuller was a carpenter’s mate, which gave us a great advantage in this project. We spoke of searching for a fallen tree, and hollowing it for our hull, and such things, and as we talked I understood that I had silently been elected the leader of these men. It surprised me greatly, for I had only a deckhand’s skills and had never held authority of any sort, indeed had in some ways been cramped and diminished by being the youngest of so many brothers. But that counted for nothing here. I was thirty years of age, and strong of body, and such failings or smallnesses of spirit that might have afflicted me in youth were unknown to my companions and had no bearing. I think also it was my determination to reach England again that gleamed like a beacon out of my soul, and gave them courage, and had them turn to me; for until I came upon them, these four had been concerned only with finding food and shelter, and had given no thought to a plan of recovery.

We lunched on the meat of the whale, which was still unspoiled though not much to my liking, and talked long and earnestly of our strategies, and afterward we commenced a search for wood with which to build our craft. Whether we would have fulfilled this project is a question I can never answer, but I tell you that the planning of it gave us hope, without which life would have been cruel indeed for us. An ocean separated me from my Anne Katherine. A tropic sun burned my skin. Buzzing things hovered in clouds, and bit and stung. Nightmare creatures dwelled in the rivers and could march upon us in any moment. Yet I did not despair, for what use has despair? And my strength became the strength of the others. I talked of schemes that even I knew were sheer madness, and made them sound plausible. The one I most clearly remember was a notion of journeying up the whole coast of this southern America, and from isle to isle in the West Indies, and northward aye to Virginia, where Walter Ralegh had founded a colony on Roanoke Island. In my mind that distance was not so great, although in fact it is nigh as far as sailing to Africa, and we would be in enemy waters all the way. But the idea, rash or not, sustained us for a few days. And in the end the rashness of it mattered not at all, since we never had a chance to put it in practice, owing to the return of the Indians to the island.

They came upon us as stealthy as cats. A canoe laden with them landed on the west side of our island, and they made their way through the woods and emerged out of the mists of dawn, surrounding us in a ring with drawn bows. Their bows were long and black and their arrows long also, with heads of sharpened cane, and they would have skewered us wonderfully had we given any resistance. But to resist was folly. These Indians were naked, and some were painted in quarters with their paints, others by halves, and others all over, like a tapestry. They all had their lips pierced; some had bones in them, though many had not. All were shaven to above the ears; likewise their eyelids and eyelashes were shaven. All their foreheads were painted with black paint from temple to temple, so that it seemed they were wearing a ribbon round them two inches wide. Their chieftain spoke to us in jabber, or so it seemed, “Umma thumma hoola hay,” and words like that, which he repeated five or seven times.

Torner said to me, “You have the knack of languages, Andy. Tell him we mean no harm, that we are enemies of the Portugals, and hope to be friends of his folk.”

“Shall I say it in umma and thumma?” I asked.

The chief spoke again. I tried to imitate it, though learning a language at the point of an arrow is wondrously ticklish. We might have spoken nonsense back and forth at each other all morning, until they lost patience and slew us, but then the chief said a few words in unmistakable Portuguese, and the words were, “You come with us.”

To my comrades I said, “These are tame Indians, that belong to the Portugals, I think. We will not be slain, but I think will be made slaves.”

“Better to be slain,” muttered Richard Jennings.

“Nay,” I said, “dead men never escape, but lie dead forever. Slavery is less permanent. And these Indians do but save us the trouble of getting ourselves to Santos.”

So the Indians took us over to the mainland in their canoe, a boat that they had made of a whole tree. When we came to the shore of that place we saw a town of some hundreds of people, very silent, and out of the silence we heard the ringing of a bell. “It must be Sunday,” said Torner, and we all spat, for we knew by that bell that the Portugals were at their Mass, and at that same instant the friar was holding up the bread of sacrament before the people for them to worship it. So it was, for the Indians marched us right to the church, and would have thrust us clear inside. But a Portugal in leather breeches came out and forbade it, saying, “You may not enter. You are not Christians.”

I translated that for the others and high color came to Richard Fuller’s face and he cried, “I would not enter that building even to shit in it!” and such. The Portugal, I think, understood some English, or else he knew the essence of Fuller’s words from his tone, for his eyes grew very cold and he took from his neck a heavy crucifix of silver, and put it in front of Richard Fuller’s mouth and commanded him to kiss it. I knew what Fuller was apt to do, and I began to say, “Have care,” but it was too late, for Fuller had already gathered in his mouth a gob of spittle and let it fly over the image of Jesus and the Portugal’s hand. Whereupon the Portugal took his silver idol and struck it across Richard Fuller’s mouth to split his lips and break his teeth and send blood into his beard, and then thrust its end into Richard Fuller’s gut so hard that the man retched and puked; and then he waved his hand and the Indians took Fuller away toward some trees behind the town. We never saw him again. I could not then believe that one European would have another one slain in this strange land for mere disrespect for a Popish idol, except perhaps a Spaniard might, but I thought higher of the Portugals. So I believed they only had Fuller kept in solitary confinement to punish him for impiety. But since those days I have seen much of the world and its cruelties, and I now know that blood is shed for even more trivial reasons, sometimes for no reasons at all, by Portugals and Spaniards and French and Dutch and everyone else, and even an Englishman is capable of murdering a man for a fancied or real slight to his religion, though perhaps he would hold court on him first. Did not King Henry have a man’s head struck off for eating meat on Fridays, and others for denying certain tenets of the Creed, and did not Queen Mary burn good Protestants like roasting-oxen for speaking out against the Pope? I think this is not the way of Jesus, but it is the way of princes and men, and not uncommon.

The rest of us they made captive in the cellar of a storehouse for a few days, chaining our wrists and ankles with manacles, and letting us eat by giving us bowls of the mashed root called manioc, that we had to lick with our tongues like dogs. The governor of that place came to us and spoke with me, asking why we were intruding in the territory of the Portugals, were we spies or only pirates, to which I made reply that we were settlers going to the Virginia colony, blown far off course and shipwrecked in the Brazils. “So you will be,” he said, “shipwrecked a long while in the Brazils.”

I think he wanted no part of us, for very shortly a sloop arrived at Santos and took us off to a larger town that the Portugals had built to the north, in the mouth of the river called the Rio de Janeiro. On this journey we passed the Ilha Grande, where Cocke had left the Dolphin, and saw no trace of it. In the Rio de Janeiro we remained four months. Here there were two things of importance, a Jesuit college and a great sugar-mill on an isle called the Island of the Governor. Jennings and the other man were sent to be servants at the College of Jesus, I suppose swabbing the floors so the friars would not soil their robes when they knelt, and Torner and I were turned out to the sugar-mill. I know not which pair of us fared worse, those that slaved for the Popish scholars or those that broke their backs to feed that mill: I dare say Torner and I suffered greater pain of the body, and the other two a larger pain of the soul. But we had no chance to compare notes, because after we were separated I never encountered the other two afterward, and for all I know they are still there, maybe Jesuits themselves by this time, old and bowed and fluent in Latin and skilled at singing the Mass, God pity them.

For me it was an education of a different kind. They had me on a bark going day and night up and down for sugar canes and wood for the mill. I had neither meat nor clothes, but as many blows as a galley-slave would receive, and Torner as well. We talked daily of escape, but there was little chance of that, the mill being on an island and the surrounding waters said to be full of man-eating fishes. We were desperate enough before long to risk testing if that were true, except that the case seemed hopeless, there being nowhere safe to flee. The Portugals had enslaved certain tribes of Indians and made them do their bidding, but a little way beyond the town the Indians were wild, and they too were man-eaters. Cannibal fishes by sea and cannibal men by land: prudence argued that we stay awhile where we were, since we were only being beaten, which is less barbarous a fate than being eaten.

I know not whether the warm and gentle waters of that estuary indeed do hold man-eating fishes, but of the cannibal Indians I have no doubt. In the second month of my captivity I and Torner and a dozen Portugal soldiers were despatched inland a short way, to collect timber of a certain rare kind, and we were set upon by a tribe called the Taymayas or Tamoyas, who are the most heated enemies the Portugals have in these parts. They tethered us and carried us away deeper into the forest, and a Portugal named Antonio Fernandes said to me, “Make your peace with your God, for these people mean to eat us at their festival.” We were kept in their village, near a river full of allagardos and huge serpents, and other strange beasts. I recall one as big as a bear, and like a bear in the body, but with a nose of a yard long, and a fair great tail all black and gray. This beast puts his tongue through ant-hills, and when the ants are all upon his tongue, he swallows them up. Torner said, “And can you find such joy in monsters, when you are about to die?”

I made answer: “I live all my life as though I am about to die, and find such joy meanwhile as I can. And you and I are too stringy and tough from our labor to make good meals. They will dine on the Portugals first.”

In sooth I could not credit that men could have a taste for the flesh of other men. The more fool I, for this world is full of cannibals that happily devour all they can hold, as I have come to know better now than any Englishman who ever lived. But I was right in one thing, that these Taymayas would eat the Portugals first. Their devilish feast began that night. The Indians came to us and selected the most plump of the Portugals, who cried out, “Jesu Maria!” and other such things, and called upon the saints. He could just as well have called upon the trees, or the allagardos in the river. They drew him forward by his rope and a lusty young man came behind him and struck him two terrible blows with a club, cracking open his skull and killing him. Then they took the tooth of some beast and unseamed his skin, and held him by the head and the feet over their fire, rubbing him with their hands, until the outer skin came off.

I watched this thinking I was in a dream, and thinking also that at this same moment my Anne Katherine was quietly reading a book, and the great Queen Elizabeth might be sitting with her courtiers, and actors are on the stage of the Globe, speaking the lines of a play, that is, there is a civilized world somewhere that knows nothing of these matters, and here is Andrew Battell of Leigh in Essex sitting in a wild jungle watching a plump young Portugal being trussed for dinner. Truly this was no dream, and never did I feel further from the world into which I had been born than in this first episode of great horror, which by God I wish had been my last.

They took from him his head and gave it to their chief, and then the entrails to the women, after which they jointed him joint by joint, first hands, then elbows, and so all the body. After which, they sent to every house a piece; then they fell a-dancing, and all the women brought forth a great store of wine. And later they boiled every joint in a great pot of water, and made a broth of it. I witnessed all these things in such shock and disgust that I thought I would die of it. For the space of three days the Indians did nothing but dance and drink, day and night. After that they killed another Portugal in the same manner as the first. But they did not get to enjoy his bounty, because a rescue party of Portugal troops burst upon the village just then with muskets blazing, and set us free.

Free, aye, but for me it was only the freedom to escape the dinner-pot, for they had me swiftly back at the mill slaving like a weary mule. Torner beside me said, “I almost regret being saved, for that was a quick death, and this is a living hell that may engulf us for fifty years.” And then he smiled and said, “Nay, Andrew, spare me your talk of preferring life to death at any cost. I know you too well by now, your stubbornness, your perseverance, your faith that all will end happily.”

“Would you truly rather have died, then?” I asked.

“Nay, I think not,” he said, and we went back to our toil.

But though I never yielded to despair, yet did I feel it nibbling at my soul, for the weeks were passing and I longed for England and Anne Katherine and the cool gray skies and the clear sweet streams that were not all deadly with coccodrillos and the like. Why, it must be spring in England now, I thought, April or May of the year 1590, the land greening and the flowers bursting, and I am here in a land that knows no winter, a slave, and unto what purpose? A year of my life had passed away from England: how I lamented that!

A year of my life! Yet my captivity was only beginning.

In our fourth month at the Rio de Janeiro a Jesuit friar came to Tomer and me, one who spoke some English, and said, “Will you embrace our faith, and come to our Mass?”

I did not strike him, as another man might. I did not spit. I did not cry out that the Catholic faith is treason to England and I was no traitor. I am not excitable in that way. Though I felt all these things, I said only, “I would not. We have our own English faith, and we prefer it, for it is the only consolation we have just now.”

The friar sighed. He was not a cruel sort. “We could keep you here at our College, if you took up our way. But otherwise you are to be sent from here, for they want no heretics at the mill.”

“Where are we to be sent?” asked Thomas Torner.

“ São Paulo de Loanda,” replied the Jesuit.

“Jesu!” cried Torner. “To Africa?”

4

To Africa, indeed, to that dark and steamy land from whose vast bosom gushes a milk of mysteries and horror.

The Portugals had seized a foothold there long ago, sailing south and south and south until they rounded the continent’s tip, that was the Cape of Bona Speranza, and went on to India. Thus they had built a vast empire the spread of which makes the mind grow dizzy in contemplation of it. This was at a time when we English foolishly had no interest in going far to sea, but were content to sail only to Flanders or Portugal or France, or sometimes to Iceland or Newfoundland for the fishing. Up and down both coasts of Africa the Portugals had founded cities and fortresses for their trade, which was in all the wondrous goods of the land, gold and spices and the ivory of elephantos, but most especially slaves: and it was to one such outpost, nine degrees south of the equinoctial line in the land called Angola, that Torner and I now were shipped.

It was a long and worrisome voyage, for the winds were contrary and the gales blew in our teeth much of the time. We rode a broad and heavy carrack, some three hundred fifty tons or maybe larger, with an ingenious great lot of sail, spread on masts patterned after the Dutch scheme. That is, there were topmasts with caps and fids, carrying topsails of great size and topgallants above them, which I had never seen before at close inspection. But for all that, the vessel was hard pressed to beat her way eastward, and we wallowed miserably in rough and sinister seas.

Cold furies and hot rages ran through my spirit. I could not bear being a prisoner. I wanted England, and Essex, and Anne Katherine, and my patch of land; and I could not have them; and often I thought of throwing myself into the sea, if only I had the chance. But that was only hollow bravado, I knew. For all my pain I would not have surrendered myself to death, not then or ever.

Torner was my bulwark. This sole remaining companion was ten years my elder, a staunch weatherbeaten man who had sailed in many seas. Ofttime he lost heart himself, but at a different time from me, so that we cheered one another alternately. “See, now, we’ll be home before you can say Jack Sprat!” he cried. “As we strike forth into the Atlantic some good English brigand will swoop upon this old scow and take it prisoner, and ship us aboard!”

That did not befall. But it was pleasant to dream upon it.

The first three days Torner and I were kept in chains, as though the Portugals feared we would seize the ship if left to our own. The metal was rusty and rough and chafed us most cruelly, so that our wrists bled and blazed with pain. We lay on deck like cords of timber, bound and stacked, and the seamen walked around us and paid us no mind, or sometimes glared and spat, or made the horns at us with their fingers, or did the cross with their hands as if to ward off the malign influence of demons.

I hated that hatred of theirs. What had I done to them? Refused to praise God in the Romish way? Sworn my allegiance to an English Queen instead of to their crazed King Philip, whom they despised themselves? That was the only true difference between us, that I was an Englishman and they Portugals, and yet they looked upon me as if I were a Turk, or some ravening fiend out of the nether hells. Why? Why? God’s truth, I had no hate for them, only for their religion. I do plead guilty to a certain dislike for their oily Portugal looks, but that only because such folk were unfamiliar to me and I preferred the good clean open-hearted look of Englishmen.

The sea-spray stung my eyes and in the rolling of the ship I was often bruised and once some great bird with a white breast and blazing red devil eyes flew slowly across the deck and dropped its dung on my forehead. Which gave the Portugal sailors much to laugh upon, and they did pound the decks with the flats of their palms in amusement at my expense.

But when the first heavy weather struck, there was need for all hands to work the rigging, even us. We were set free, rubbing our cramped tethered limbs to ease some blood back into them, and sent aloft to tug at the cords. And so we toiled beside those who had mocked us so sharply. It would have been no huge task to nudge one or two of them with an elbow and send them tumbling to their dooms as we scrambled about the topmasts; but that was madness, gaining me nothing but a watery death myself, or worse, and I forgot the scheme. And in a day or two the hatred of these men for us subsided: now we were fellow hands, was all. Though we ate apart and dined on slops, we were not again chained, and no one seemed to care that we were supposed to be prisoners. Aye, and where could we have escaped in mid-sea, save into the mouths of the sharks?

Our shipmates were a sullen and a surly lot. They fought often with one another and spoke in foul curses, and made mock of their officers behind their backs. Sometimes to their faces as well, and one morning in mid-ocean I heard loud shouts between a black-bearded crookbacked seaman and the second mate, which grew more angry until suddenly the seaman struck the second mate to the deck with a blow that shattered his nose and sent blood spurting an amazing distance. When that happened everything stood still upon the ship: the men in the rigging froze, and those working the pumps stood like statues, and those tightening the lanyards and tackles let go the ropes. The man who had struck the blow looked at his own hand as though he had never seen it before. For one does not strike officers at sea and live.

The man was seized and within an hour he was tried and his fate was set, and it was to be the lash. Every hand not needed to work the ship was called into assembly, and the seaman was tied to a mast, and a gigantic Portugal with arms as thick as anyone else’s legs was the wielder of the whip.

Now I am not one of your Londoners who goes out to every execution and stands with the crowd from earliest dawn, waiting to get a good view. I see no entertainment to be had from attending a beheading, with all that gore and welter and the dead head held high afterward, or going to a burning, and seeing good human flesh char to a crisp while hideous cries break the air. And though I know the favorite of the crowds is the drawing and the quartering, where they hang some poor soul until he is half dead, and cut him down and cut from him his privy parts and take from him his entrails and burn them in his view, and only then to behead him and divide his body in sections, it was never my pleasure to witness such a festivity. It is not that I am overly womanish and finicky and easily sickened by harsh sights, but only that I am a man of Essex, never raised to enjoy the city amusements: let the wicked be properly punished, say I, but I will take my sport elsewhere. But this flogging I did watch—I had no choice, for all hands attended, and I could not help but look on. The crookbacked sailor was one I notably disliked: he was one of those who had most jeered us when we were in chains, and I had felt his spittle and worse, and once when Torner and I were given a little wine to drink he had knocked my bowl from my hand, in seeming accident. So I scarce regretted that they were doing him to death. Yet flogging is a terrible way to die.

They ripped from him his shirt, laying bare his ill-matched shoulders and his little hump, and the lashes commenced falling. You know that the whip used at sea is no small horse-flicking thing, but a great horrific leather monster, and as it rose and fell and rose and fell it cut the villain’s flesh apart like a saber. Sweat oiled the body of the enormous whipper until he glistened like a buttered statue. I heard the whistling of the whip in the air and the crack against flesh and muscle, and on the fifteenth lash the man seemed to lose consciousness, and on the twentieth he stopped moaning, and still the whip descended, with scarce a pause for the whipper’s breath. It cut the man to tatters. There was no need to go all the way to one hundred, for bone was showing by the fiftieth or earlier, and the deck was stained; but to the end they went, and then the ship’s priest gave Popish blessings to what certainly was a dead man, and they sacked him and put him over the side. For days afterwards I saw when I closed my eyes that whip coursing through the air. And I saw also the anatomy lesson that they had made out of the sailor’s back, that discourse on flesh and muscle and bone. To Torner I said, “If they ever ask me to choose my death, remind me to select the headman’s axe.”

“Aye. Who would not? But only a fool strikes an officer, and a flogging is a good education for a fool.”

“And for all the other fools who saw it done,” I said.

After that there was less bickering on board, and ready obedience to the orders of the mates. The stains remained in the boards for many a day. Well, and the English fleet must do its floggings just as grimly; but I am in no hurry to observe the niceties of the method a second time.

Of all the Portugals only one spoke sociably to us the whole voyage. This was a certain Barbosa, a peaceful man with a pleasant way, who was some sort of tax-collector for King Philip, and traveled an endless weary route between Brazil and Africa. He was older than the others, with a fine taste in clothing and an elegant broad-brimmed hat that he wore cavalier-fashion, shoved down over one eye. He spoke good English, and often at dusk he came to us as we stood by the rail, and talked of the land toward which we were going.

The Portugals, he said, had but a tiny purchase there. They had gulled several of the African kings into taking them in, and even into swallowing the holy bread and wine of the Romish rite and christening themselves with Portuguese names, so that this blackamoor monarch was now Don Affonso and that one Don Alvaro, and the Duke of This and That, the Marquess of That and This. But for all that there were mere little islands of Portuguese civilization on the African coast surrounded by great dark pools of monstrous night, and warfare was constant between the Portugals and their unwilling hosts, and also with a cannibal tribe called the Jaqqas that roved like demons in the back country. Barbosa was of two minds of all this. “It is a deadly land, full of vile malarias and secret venoms. And yet it has beauty and riches, and we will make of it, if God give it to us, another Mexico, another Peru.”

“King Philip has enough of those already,” I said.

“Aye, but this will not be King Philip’s! He does not meddle in the lands overseas that were Portugal’s before the two kingdoms were joined,” said Barbosa, “and King Philip will not rule Portugal forever.” And he looked about, perhaps wondering if he had been overheard, though why any other of these Portugals should mind that Barbosa was treasonous toward the Spanish king is hard for me to comprehend.

A day came when Africa darkened the horizon, weeks later. And as our vessel glided on a glassy sea into the harbor at São Paulo de Loanda in the land of Angola, the boatswain came to us with our chains and indicated with tosses of his head that we should submit to them once more.

This São Paulo de Loanda lies on a great bay, called the Bay of Goats, that provides a tolerable haven for shipping. The closing of this harbor is made by a certain island known as Loanda, which means in the language of the place “bald,” or “shaven,” because it is a very low place without any hills. Indeed, it scarce raises itself above the sea. This island was formed of the sand and dirt of the sea and of a rivermouth a little south of the town, the River Kwanza, whose waves meeting together, and the filthy matter sinking down there to the bottom, in the continuance of time it grew to be an island. It may be about twenty miles long, and one mile broad at the most, and in some places only a bow-shot’s width from side to side.

As we passed by this island Barbosa said to Torner and me, “On that isle the black King of the Kongo has his money-mine, and pulls forth each year great store of wealth.”

“Gold, you mean?” said Torner.

This Barbosa laughed. “Nay, good friend. Shells of the sea is what these simple folk prize the most!”

He laughed as if to scorn it, a great curling hard-eyed laugh of contempt, and told us how women go on the beaches and at depths of two fathoms and more they scoop up sand in their baskets, and afterwards take little curved shells, smooth and bright, from the waste matter. These are the money of the land. “Gold and silver and other metals are not money here,” declared Barbosa. “In sooth, with these shells you can buy gold and silver, or anything else! But these are only silly savages, do you see?”

We laughed with him, Torner and I, for we saw it as comic, and passing strange, that pretty-colored shells should be valued even above gold.

But at that time I was still new to the far corners of the world, and I looked at everything with the blinkered eyes of ignorance and narrow compassion. Time has given me a shade more of wisdom, and I think now that there is no one righteous path in anything, but that each path is righteous in its own way, and so why should pretty shells not be beloved to these people even as pretty yellow or white metals are to us? All are scarce goods to find, that must be scavenged from the earth with toil, and all have beauty, and none has much use except as an article of commerce. Yet I could not have argued such matters with Barbosa at that time. Nor, by the bye, do I share with him now the thought that the people of this land are mere silly savages; but all this wisdom was very costly in the learning.

Angola shimmered in the clear torrid daylight like a land of dreams, none of them happy ones.

Torner had drawn me a rough map. Angola sits along the southwestern coast of Africa, about midway between the great bulge of Guinea to the north and the Cape of Bona Speranza to the south. Running above Angola on the coast is the kingdom of the Kongo, joining to it as Spain joins to Portugal, and above that is another kingdom known as Loango, and there are sundry other smaller kingdoms inland from these three in those parts.

Strange names. Rumbling mouthfuls of sound. Mpemba, Mbamba, Mbata, Nsundi, Mpangu, Soyo. The province of the Ambundu. The territories of Wembo, Wando, Nkusu, Matari. The regions of the wild men, the flesh-eating Jaqqas, Calicansamba, Cashil, Cashindcabar. Devil-names. Names of harsh music, full of drums and shrill skirling outcry.

Some of these names Torner told to me, as we peered on the map he had scrawled. Some of them I heard later after, whispered to me in the forest by frightened men. I bear scars to remind me of those names now. Drops of my blood lie in the dark moist soil of those places, and from my blood great ollicondi trees have sprouted in these years past, and cedars and palms, and trees without any names at all. I have seen with my eyes the province of Tondo and the great city of Dongo and the river called Gonza, and more, so much more that my brain fills and overflows with the bursting memories of it all. Kingdoms: Angola, Kongo, Loango. Dreamlands.

Nay, though, not dreamlands to their own people, but right and proper dominions, such as are Portugal and France and Sweden in our world, or England herself. The King of the Kongo is the supreme monarch, whose title is Manikongo, and both Angola and Loango are deemed subject to him. But the powers of that king have greatly been diminished of late, and in any event the Portugals have made a jest of all the solemnities of these kingdoms by imposing their own government and their own worship and their own customs as far as possible upon the black folk.

Captive though I was, dismally far from home with no hope of returning, yet did I behold this new place with eyes of wonder. And the sky-high green-crowned trees ashore were things of miracle to me, and the heat of the air, and the smells, the sounds, the dazzle of the light.

Our weighty vessel made its way as deep into the harbor as it dared, and cast its anchor. And then small boats with oars and sails came to fetch us. These were made of palm-tree wood, joined together and framed after the manner of our boats. As we were conveyed to the mainland we saw the channel full of these boats, taking fish, for these are rich waters, heavy with sardines and anchovies, and also sole and sturgeon and an abundance of wholesome crabs.

We drew up to the shore. And saw a grim platoon of somber-faced Portugals waiting for us, dark-haired, dark-eyed, swarthy-skinned little men, sweltering in their full armor under the terrible sun. As though we were a company of great Judases, Torner and I, that durst not be let escape.

They glared most foully at us. Their hard cold staring eyes were stones that they would have hurled at us to pierce our skins. I felt the pressure of their hatred, that dull heavy hostile weight, as I had those first few days of our ocean crossing. And I gave them glare for glare, scowl for scowl. Am I your enemy? Porque? Because my country is your country’s enemy? Because my Queen is the Pope’s enemy? Because we will not sit and mumble at our devotions, and call upon the saints and other false gods? Because we loathe the Latin singsong, and have our own lawful book of prayer? Well, then, so be it, Portugals, I am your enemy! But only because you choose to be mine.

They jeered. They shouted things in their thick-mouthed lingo, not knowing that I understood the half of their foulness. They cursed the Queen as an excommunicated whore and the daughter of a whore and witch. They said the same of my mother and Tomer’s. I kept my peace, though it was hard. Jesu, it was hard! I would have cried things at them of the Pope and the stinking luxuries he wallows in, and the monks who fill themselves on altar wine and couple in the cloisters like devils, and such stuff, but worse. Yet I kept my peace.

I said only at last, in my best Portugee, as they marched me onto the dry black earth of their city, “The Devil will chew your souls, ye Papist swine,” and left them gasping in amazement that I knew their tongue.

The town, for the supposed capital of a supposed great empire in the making, was small and shabby. This part of Angola yieldeth no stone, and very little wood, and the buildings I saw were largely made of bulrushes and fronds of palm, covered with earth. There were of course certain structures much more grand, the governor’s palace and the houses of government, and the great-steepled red-walled church, and the high-palisaded fort.

Torner and I were prodded like sheep, or more roughly than that, through the midst of this place, down dusty mazes of scurfy streets. Everything was hot and dry, the rainy season having given way to the long time of no rain that is the only way to tell winter from summer in these latitudes, the winters being parched. As we proceeded, some Africans came out to stare, first a few, and then great crowds, like floating swarms of bulging white eyes in a cloud of blackness.

“Why do they look so fiercely at us?” I said to Torner. “Is it such a miracle, then, that two Englishmen should be paraded here?”

“It is your hair, Andy, your yellow hair!” he answered me.

Beyond doubt it was, and soon the boldest of the blacks crept forward to touch it lightly, as if to find out whether it was made from spun gold, I suppose. White skins were no longer strange show for these folk; but fair hair, I trow, must be a vast novelty, the Portugals all universally being a dark-thatched people. So they stared at me and I at them. What a splendid complex world, where some are pink in our fashion, and some are red and some yellow-skinned, and some are ebon! These Angolans were pure black, both the men and the women, some of them somewhat inclining to the color of the wild olive. Their hair was curled tight and black, though I saw in a few a slight red tint. Their lips were not as thick as those of such other blacks as I had seen in other lands, and their cheekbones were precious sharp. The stature of the men was of an indifferent bigness, very like that of the Portugals. The women looked strong, with deep and heavy breasts, which they exposed without shame.

What would become of me in this place was utter mystery to me. I knew not why the Portugals had troubled to ship me here nor what use they would find for me, and nothing was certain save that I would be a long time in seeing England again.

They thrust us forward to the fortress. The sun was fire in my eyes, blinding them, and then I fell blinking and muddled into a dungeon both damp and chill, carved out of the earth. Torner and I lay side by side in a great dusky mildewed chamber, with a barrier of sharp stakes between us. Our ankles were bound with light chains, so that we could not run without stumbling, but our hands were left free. The Portugal soldiers hovered around us, stinking of garlic and oil, poking their faces close upon ours, prodding us here and there to see if we had bones and ribs, and finding that we did, and prodding us again. Like superstitious heathen they made the sign of the cross often at us, and waved their beads and other toys about, and spoke to one another in a Portuguese so barbarous, so crusted with nonsense, that I could make little of it, except that they were instructing each other that we were to be kept without comfort.

And then they left us. “God bless Queen Elizabeth!” I called after them. “Dieu et mon Droit! England, England, England!” and more such things.

There we remained in darkness and misery for three or four days, receiving meals from time to time but otherwise ignored. Insects paid us visits, spiders with fur, and small chittering things, and lizards of the night. The stink of piss and shit was all we breathed. Barbosa had said, as we parted from him in the plaza of the town, that we would soon know our fates, but I wondered if these ill-gendered Portugals had simply forgotten us. Finally, though, came a clanking of gates and a rattling of distant locks, and Barbosa appeared, holding a guttering taper. Two of our jailers were with him, but they lay back some paces.

The good man was kind enough to bring for us a bowl of the wine of the country, which is made from palm-juice: for such courtesy may his saints give him peace, may his Madonna hold him in the bosom of her repose. The wine was milky and powerfully sweet, and had a tingle to it.

“Are you being fed?” Barbosa asked.

“Not often, and not well, but we are not being starved,” I said. “They give us a sort of porridge, mainly. Are we to be left in this hole forever?”

“There is a problem,” said Barbosa. “The old governor is dead, and all is confusion here, and warfare with the blacks is threatening. The King of Matamba and the King of Kongo and the King of Angola have made league against us, and the Jaqqas lurk on the other side, hungry for evil meat. There will be war. At such a time the officials here can give little thought to you.”

“Then let us go, if we are too much trouble!” Torner cried. “Set us free to make our own ways toward home!”

Barbosa shook his head sadly. “You would not live a week, my friend. This is no country for such adventures. You must stay in São Paulo.”

“Why are we kept?”

“They will find uses for you,” said Barbosa.

“What?” shouted Torner. “Never!” said I, in the same instant.

“Uses,” said Barbosa. “We are so few, and the blacks are so many. The administrators have decided to employ captive English here, of which you are the first.”

“It is folly,” I said. “We will never serve. And if they send enough of us to this place, we will rise and swarm upon your pitiful troops, and take this empire for Queen Bess.”

“I pray you, no such talk,” said the Portugal mildly, “or the hotbloods here will have your heads.”

“Does it matter?”

“It might, to you, when the moment comes.”

Torner said, “What counsel can you give us?”

“Patience, endurance, silence. Offer no defiance, and hope for better days. The death of the governor puts everything into paralysis here, for he was such a man as holds the center of all authority, and when he is gone there is only empty air, a vacuum through which whirlwinds swirl.”

This governor who had lately died, he told us, was one Paulo Dias de Novais. The garrison had elected its captain-major, Luiz Serrão, to his place. “Serrão in his time was a fine soldier. But he is old and weary,” said Barbosa, “and he is forced to fight a war little to his liking. I think he will make no disposition of you twain until his other problems are behind him. And that day may never arrive.”

“So we will rot here without limit?” I demanded.

“Jesus and Mary give you comfort,” the good Portugal said gently. “Better for you that you had never left England, but here you are, and I will remember you in my devotions, for I think it will be long before you see daylight again.”

In that, however, the kind Barbosa was mistaken.

Hardly a day later we were called out of our dungeon and summoned to the governor’s palace for an audience with this Serrão. He was old and heavy, and he sat in a slouching way, breathing thickly, for that he was fleshy and ill, with unhealthy grayish skin and beads of sweat bright all over him. For a long while he stared at us as if we were some strange beasts of foul stench, and I looked back at him with rage and detestation, for that this man was our single foe here, the one with power of life and death over us, and stood between us and home, and I knew he would not set us loose.

At last he said, “The letters tell me you are dangerous brigands, that sought to overwhelm the government of the Brazils. Is this so?”

“Brigands, yes,” I answered. “But all we sought was some of the gold of the Indies, out of the treasure-ships of the Rio de la Plata.” There seemed no purpose in holding to the pretense that we were innocent Virginia settlers, when we were plainly condemned here.

“You speak our language well, though your accent is poor.”

“It is the language that is poor. I speak it as well as it deserves.”

“Oh? Are you so full of fire, then? That you rail at the man who owns your life?”

“I rail at you because you own my life, sir.”

“I did not ask for you,” said Serrão. “To me you are a burden, a thorn in my side.”

“We did not ask for you, either.”

Serrão peered into my eyes. “Shall I feed you to the coccodrillos, and be rid of your nation? You are a buzzing in my ears. Saint Michael spare me from receiving more of you.”

“And Saint George spare us from dwelling long among you.”

“Be silent!”

At that sudden outroar from the sluggish and ailing Serrão, Torner looked toward me and said, “For Jesu sake, Andy, don’t enrage the old man!”

Serrão said, “The other English, he understands nothing of our speech?”

“Very little,” said I. “Afterwards will I convey the meanings to him.”

“Is he as full of wrath as you?”

“More,” I said. “His tongue trembles with disgust of all your kind, but he can say it only in English.”

Serrão nodded, as though hardly caring that we were such firebrand rogues, and fell silent again. He toyed with some carving at his belt, and picked at his nails with his dagger: a fat old soldier, who must once have been valiant and quick, though there was little sign of that now. Very likely he was sore vexed with Paulo Dias for dying at such a time. He looked up after a while and said, “What am I to do with you.”

“Put us aboard the next ship for Lisbon, and we will find our way from there to England.”

The old man laughed. “Yes, and give you a thousandweight of ivory to recompense you for your time in our hands, also. Are you good sailors, brigand?”

“Excellent good.”

“What skills do you have?”

“I am a pilot,” I said coolly, “and my companion is a gunner.”

These lies did I tell to make us seem more important, for had I said we were mere deckhands I feared the Portugals would value us little, and perhaps slit our throats to have no more trouble of caring for us. In this I think I was right. Serrão said in a mumble, “A pilot. Good. Very good. Our pinnace that plies between here and Masanganu is short-handed of crew, and we will let you serve aboard it.”

“That we will not do,” I replied.

“Are you defiant?”

“Indeed.”

He made a scowl, as though I had struck him with my fist in the rolls of fat at his belly, and had let some air out of him. I kept my eyes glittering cold. Yet strangely I found my loathing of him difficult to maintain: he was old, he was ailing, he was weary, he was mortal, and by an accident of fate he sat in judgment over me, which perhaps he liked no more than I did. I took this to be weakness and softheadedness in me, and attempted to banish such a way of thinking, and glowered down upon him as I might upon some sly and cozening Italian Cardinal who lay nightly with his own sister.

Serrão said, “Why do you refuse?”

“I am Queen Bess’ to command, but not yours, and surely not King Philip’s.”

“Talk not to me of King Philip. He is no king of mine, except by distant decree, of which I know nothing. I ask you to go on our pinnace, that has need of crew.”

“Crew it yourself, old man.”

He seemed to be holding himself in check. In a slow steady way he said, “What are my choices? I could slay you out of hand, and say you were determined heretics that preached falsely to the blacks. But no, I am not hot for that path. I could send you to your dungeon, and let you stink and moulder down there until your bones shine through your skin. Is that to your liking? But then I must feed you once in a time, and otherwise give care to you. Or else you could serve under our command.”

“That we will not, if we must rot for it, or feed your coccodrillos with our flesh.”

Serrão lapsed back against his chair and drummed with his fingertips on its arm, which was made of some scaly serpent-skin, and said, “You are stubborn and you are stupidly stubborn. So be it: back to your cell.”

The guards began to tumble us from the room.

Torner looked to me and said, “What is it?”

“We are offered berths on some ships of theirs. I have told him nay, we will not serve.”

“Brave fellow!”

Brave indeed, but perhaps not without folly. For as we hied ourselves back through the soul-frying sticky heat toward the depths and bowels of the fortress, I felt an alteration of my position coming over me. I thought to myself that I was being noble but nobly foolish in my patriotism. They could well leave us in the dungeon a year or five or forever. We might conceivably die down there of the damp, or of a spider’s bite, or of some inner flux, in two more weeks. How would that serve the Queen? How would that serve our own needs and dreams? Was it not better to obey these Portugals, and come up into the sunlight, and do their bidding until perhaps they pardoned us? I would find it hard to enter their service, but it might be either that or perish, and to perish out of stubborn patriotism may be a fine thing, but not half so fine as seeing England again.

To Torner I said, “I have changed my mind.”

“What?”

“In the dungeons we stand no chance. Aboard their pinnace we may find the beginning of the way home. What say you, Thomas?”

“Will you serve them?”

“Aye, I will. I think it is wiser.”

“Then so will I, Andy.”

I halted and said to the Portugals who were prodding and pushing me in the kidneys with their truncheons, “Wait, I would see the governor again.”

“Another day,” one guard replied.

“No!” I cried, thinking it might be months. “Go to him, tell him we reconsider, or it be on your head!”

The Portugals conferred; and then they relented, and took us back to Serrão, who looked that much older and more weary for the ten minutes that had gone by.

“I yield,” I said. “We will serve.”

“You are shrewd to do so. So be it.” And he waved us out.

Once more we were conducted to our dungeon, and now I explained to Torner all that had passed between Serrão and me in our earlier conversation. He shrugged when I said our choices had been to serve or to die miserably in our chains, and laughed at my promoting him to gunner and me to pilot; but he blanched when I named Masanganu as the place where we were to be shipped.

“You know it?” I asked.

“Barbosa told me of it once, when we were at sea,” said Torner. “It is a fort somewhere in the hot interior of this land, which guards against the wild tribes beyond. The Portugals all dread it, he said, and no man will go thither if he can prevent it, for it is a place where men die like chickens of fevers and plagues.” Torner looked to me and I saw more anger than fear in his eyes. “That fat old villain has found the easiest way to rid himself of us. Masanganu! A place where men die like chickens, Barbosa called it. Where men die like chickens.”

5

This pinnace of the governor’s was a modest vessel even as pinnaces go, with a spar awry on its foremast, and its mainsail baggy in the Arab fashion, so that it tended to bury the bow. I was glad we were not called upon to take it to ocean water, for I suspected such a craft would yaw unpredictably with a following sea or with slight changes of wind. But all we had to do was sail it somewhat up the River Kwanza, a distance of one hundred thirty miles.

This river has his mouth a short way below São Paulo de Loanda on the coast. The pinnace that waited there had a small crew indeed, barely enough men to cast free the anchor and set the sails: small wonder they were pressing Englishmen into their service. These Portugals were sadly overextended in Angola, but a few hundred of them to fill all the garrisons, and enemies congregating on every frontier. Aboard the pinnace the master and pilot were one man, a fleshy-faced Portugal named Henrique, and the others were but common yeomen who did as they were told, nothing more.

Nine days we were going up the river of Kwanza, in which time one Portugal yeoman died and another fell mortally ill. The country here is so hot that it pierceth their hearts. We moved slowly in terrible silence broken by terrible sounds: by day the wild screams of birds, by night the ghastly music of the leopards and lions and jackals and hyenas. “We have but one blessing,” said Henrique to me, for he was courteous and showed us no disdain, “that we are making our voyage in the dry season. For in the wet, black flying insects come at us thick as clouds, and we breathe them and eat them and blink them in our eyes.”

Coccodrillos lurked on muddy banks, smiling their coccodrillo smile that I remembered so well from Brazil. When we drew near them, they silently slid off into the dark water. In riverside lagoons water-birds by thousands waded about, feeding on hapless small creatures. There were black-and-white storks of sinister aspect, which to me seemed harbingers of death; and also another great bird with a bill strangely shaped like unto a great spoon. And along the shore was reedy green papyrus with tops like fans, far taller than a man. While beyond that the jungle lay, palms and vines and such intertwined into an impenetrable wall. Sometimes we saw the river-horse or hippopotamus, only its huge nose above the water, and its broad glistening back. And sometimes the coccodrillos were so thick on the banks that their heavy musk made us want to puke.

The strangest sight of all that we beheld was neither coccodrillo nor river-horse, though, but a man of human kind. This was perhaps halfway up the winding course of the river, just beyond a great lake called Soba Njimbe’s Lake. Here, on a flat place of land by the edge of the thick jungle, stood alone by himself a black of enormous height and huge depth of color, pure jet in hue, with a purplish undercast to him. He was altogether naked but for a girdle of beadwork that did not at all conceal his privy parts, which were frightful in size. He wore on one hip a kind of dagger and on the other a longer weapon, and leaned on a heavy target or shield of much size, and stared off into the distance, taking no more notice of our passing craft than if we were beetles on a drifting strand of straw.

There was about this one man a strangeness and a presence most commanding, and such a sense of silent menace, that made him a sort of Lucifer or Mephistopheles, and I knew at first instant he was nothing ordinary. Beside me one of the Portugals made a little grunting sound and he dropped to the planks and began such a crossing of himself, such a torrent of Ave Marias and Pater Nosters, that I saw I was not the only one to have such a feeling.

To Henrique I said, “What is that person?”

“Some prince of the Jaqqas,” replied the pilot. “We see them of times along this road, making pilgrimages that are outside our knowledge.”

“Jaqqas? The man-eaters?”

“The very same,” said Henrique. “Followers of the Lord of Darkness, devils out of the pit!”

One of the other Portugals had fetched an arquebus, and was aiming the thing now at the creature on the riverbank. Henrique hissed and pushed the snout of the weapon aside, saying, “Nay, fool, would you have us all in the stew-pot by nightfall?”

In another moment the river took a hard curve, and the Jaqqa was gone from our sight. But the image of him was burned into my mind and lingered long.

Henrique said, “They are a plague. They come and go like ghosts in the wilderness, or like locusts, rather, devouring everything in their path, destroying, showing no quarter. And yet we know not if they are our enemies or our friends, for sometimes they serve our purposes, and sometimes they fall upon our encampments like the hounds of Hell.” He shuddered. “These.Angolese people, and the Kongo folk, are but human beings with dusky skins and woolly hair, and we understand them, and when we look into their eyes we see souls looking back, and when we touch their flesh we feel the flesh of mankind upon them. But the Jaqqas—!”

He left the words unsaid.

Onward we went through the killing heat, which wrapped around us like a heavy cloth. On the sixth day we stopped at a village called Muchima, where the Portuguese had founded a presidio, or fort, in order that we might get medicines for our man who had fallen ill, the other having already died. Only three Portugals lived at this presidio, which indeed was more of a hut of boughs than any sort of fort. But all about them was a village of blacks, fifty or eighty souls, of a friendly sort, innocent and gentle, that lived mainly by fishing. We passed a night there.

For company that night all of the Portugals, even Henrique, took girls of the tribe as bed-partners, except for the one who was too ill for such sport, and one other who I think had taken an oath not to touch woman that season, in return for some favor granted him by his beloved Virgin Mary. Torner also was offered a woman, and most gladly accepted, and I, too, but I refused. My refusal was the occasion of some merriment among the Portugals, since I was so robust of body and rich of health that they could not understand it. “Are you a sworn monk?” Henrique asked me. “Or is it that you prefer the love of your own sex, in which case I think we must slay you and feed you to the coccodrillos, lest you corrupt our voyage.”

“Neither the one nor the other,” I made answer. “But I feel no urge toward woman in this foul heat.”

In truth that was no truth. My loins ached, and in my dreams I saw only breasts and thighs and buttocks and fleecy loins. But the fleece that covered those loins was the golden wool of my Anne Katherine. God wot I am no saint, and had taken no vows of fidelity neither, and yet I could not at that time put myself into the body of some stranger woman merely for the easing of my lusts, not when the palm of my hand could serve the same purpose with lesser sin. Especially when the stranger woman was of black skin and oiled with some rancid stuff, and had strange scars carven on her cheeks by way of decoration, and perhaps a bone thrust through her nose. To use such a woman would be almost like using cattle, that is, not a fitting partner for an Englishman. So I thought—God forgive me!—in my haughtiness, me only a year and some months gone out from Essex at that time.

Therefore I slept by myself that night, which I was greatly weary of doing, a year and some months being a long while to sleep by one’s self. In the morning when we resumed our journey Torner came to me, as we poled our way through a place of shallows and rocks, and said, “They gave me for my pleasure a girl of thirteen years. Her breasts were new, and stood out straight from her chest like this, and felt like globes of a firm spongy stuff. Among these folk it is a sin for a married woman to lie with other than her husband, even as it is with us, but their girls they pass freely around.”

“And had you delight, Thomas?”

His eyes gleamed like beacons. “Aye, Andy! Aye! Not that she was greatly skilled at it, and she had an odd way of wanting to receive me, crouching on her knees. But I turned her over and spread her fairly, and oh! Andy, it was so good a feeling, after this long a while.”

“Although she had no skill?”

“What matters is that? I was not marrying her,” said Torner, “only relieving my need. She lay there with her eyes open and her legs apart, and did little, so that I yearned for a good London wench that knows her arse from a table. But yet, Andy—but yet—!”

“What of her teeth, filed to points? Did that not unnerve you?” I asked.

“God’s death, but it would if she had gone crawling on my body with her face! I’d have shriveled to a thumb’s-length, with those devil-teeth gaping around my yard! But that is not the style of loving here, I think me. And merely the looking at the teeth caused me no distress, for after the first glimpse I kept my eyes elsewhere, and later I kept them closed.” Torner laughed and pummeled my arm. “And you? Too proud to tup a black wench?”

“Too much mindful of my Essex maid,” I said softly.

“Ah. Essex is far away, and will you remain chaste until you get there again?”

“How can I know that?”

“But for now you do, is that it?”

I nodded. “For now. I’ve kept chaste this long, at no small cost; maybe the habit of it is settling in on me.”

“Nay. I’ve heard you groan in desire many a night, Andy.”

Color came to my face. “Have you, now? Go to!”

“It’s truth! Why, in that dungeon last week you lay moaning and sobbing in your sleep, and then you snorted, and then you were still. Don’t you think I know those sounds, lad?”

“Perhaps you do.”

His hard blue eyes were close to my own, and his smile was a wicked one as he said, “D’ye think Anne Katherine lies chaste while you rove the seas?”

I struck him.

I hit him with the flat of my hand, against the cheekbone, a hard push rather than a blow, but hard enough to buckle his knees and send him reeling. Three or four Portugals came upon us, not wanting a brawl among us English, but Torner rose, shaking his head to let the bees loose from his ear, and grinning, and saying, “You slap with good force, lad.”

“You spoke out of turn.”

“Aye, and I’m sorry for it. It was a shameful thing I said.”

“She is no maid. I had her myself more than once, but I was the first, Thomas. I know that for certain, and I think I am yet the only one.”

“I pray that you be right. I wish you all joy of her love.”

“And the years will pass and I will not return,” I said, “and a time will come when she thinks me dead, and then she will go on to another man. But I think that time is not yet. I choose to think it, Thomas. She is but nineteen, or perhaps twenty by now, and I think she will give me another year.”

“You are betrothed?”

“Aye. I had a wife once that died of the pox, and now I fear I have lost a second before we were wed, and while we both still live. Are you married?”

“I am,” said Torner. “With three boys from her.”

“And does she stay faithful to you while you voyage?”

“I make no inquiries of that, good Andy. My trade keeps me apart from her long months at a time, and now may keep me from her forever. Am I to stay pure for such lengthy spans? And if I am not, should she? But I make no inquiries on that.” He laughed broadly. “How old do you be, Andy?”

“I was born in the month of Queen Bess’ accession.”

“So you are thirty, I think. A man of middle years, and yet you seem very young, in some ways.”

“Aye,” I said. “I had a late start, and I lost a few years through grief and confusion in my early manhood, when no wisdom entered my head. But fear not, Thomas: I am no fool. Filed-teeth wenches with breasts that stand straight out do not arouse me this week, that is all.” And we laughed and embraced, with pummeling of backs, and went on with our deckside chores.

But a heavy melancholy settled over me. I saw Anne Katherine shimmering in the air before me, and she was weeping and garbed in widow’s weeds. And I thought me, How strange, that I am here in this land of filed teeth and scarred cheeks and coccodrillos and Lucifer standing naked on a riverbank, and England so far away, lost to me belike forever. It is the price of empire, as Francis Willoughby long ago said, that some of our people be scattered like seed into strange ground: but why was it me that was so scattered? Torner might well be right, to console himself with whatever consolation lay at hand, for our lives that we knew in England were gone from us, and we were something other in this place, stripped of vows and identity, as naked to our pasts as that Jaqqa by the river is naked to the air.

And then I thought, Nay, I am Andrew Battell of Leigh in Essex, and I will remain Andrew Battell to the last, a man of Essex, and, God grant it, I will see Essex again, and Anne Katherine, and my family’s own house.

And now I think, knowing the things that that young man on the river-pinnace could not know, knowing all that I have done and had done to me in these twenty years and more gone by since then, Am I still Andrew Battell of Leigh in Essex, or am I transformed, am I magicked into a changeling? And I answer, Yea, I still am Andy Battell, but a larger and more strange Andy Battell than ever was planned for me when my father engendered me. And though I have done such deeds as an Englishman would hail as monstrosities, yet am I still God’s own man, and mine own, for aye. Do you comprehend that? I comprehend that. And, God willing, so will you, by the time I come to the end of my tale.

A bleak river-fog descended, making our voyage perilous, and in that heavy grayness my melancholy lifted. I found myself too much occupied with my duties to care that I was an exile and a prisoner, and in stray moments I even found myself wondering what it would have been like to lie with some blackamoor girl. We skirted the muddy shores. Out of the mists came fearful mooings and bellowings, of such creatures I knew not what, but that they were not the sheep and cattle of England. The mist raised a bit, and we saw that a second river was pouring into the Kwanza. This was the Lukala, flowing from the north-east, and just beyond this meeting of the waters lay the presidio of Masanganu.

Henrique trembled as he pointed toward the small stone fort. “This is a terrible place,” he said. “It is the unfirmest country under the sun. You shall see men in the morning very lusty, and within two hours dead. Others, that if they but wet their legs, presently they swell bigger than their middles; others break in the sides with a draught of water. I dread this place.”

“Are we to be here long?” I asked.

“Some weeks.”

“That could have been worse.”

He looked full upon me. “O, if you did know the intolerable heat of the country, you would think yourself better a thousand times dead, than to live here a week. Here you shall see poor soldiers lie in troops, gaping like camels for a puff of wind. Husband your strength, Englishman: you will need it.”

“Why then is there a fort in such a place?”

“To keep check on the blackamoors, that they do not invade us from without. If anyone is to descend on São Paulo de Loanda, they must needs come this way, or else along the river that lies to the north, the Mbengu, which is not so easy for transit. And there is another reason. There is beyond here a place called Kambambe, as far inward as Muchima lies behind us, and in Kambambe, they say, great mines of silver exist.”

“Indeed?”

Henrique guffawed. “See, the pirate is excited at once by talk of treasure! Know you, English, that we have not yet managed the discovery of the mines of Kambambe. But we know the silver is there. We think that it is the outermost of the mines of King Solomon, in fact.”

“Aye?”

“Aye. Some there be that will say that Solomon’s gold, which he had for the Temple of Jerusalem, was brought by sea out of these countries. And as we make our way to the heart of this land, O English, we will have ourselves Ophir and its treasures, to match the treasures of Peru and Mexico that the Spaniards have had.”

I listened attentively to all Henrique’s talk of the mines of King Solomon, and made note to bring such news to the ear of Queen Elizabeth if ever I returned home. I would have liked to place upon her hearth another Peru, another Mexico.

Poor Henrique saw no golden treasure. Under the ghastly weight of the hotness of Masanganu, which hung upon us like a falling sky, he took a flux and lay shivering with ague in the little house where the Portugals keep their sick there, and every week the surgeon came to him and did a letting of blood, but it gave him no surcease. I visited him and saw him growing into a skeleton day by day, the flesh burning away in his sweat. He had begun by being a plump and hearty man, and now he was a death’s-head and bones, an awful sight, death in life. At the end of two months there was nothing left of him, and he succumbed.

Then an officer at the Masanganu garrison whose name was Vicente de Menezes came to me and said, “You are described in the journals as a pilot, English.”

I was taken aback an instant; and then I recalled the lie I had lied to Luiz Serrão.

“Aye,” I said.

“Well, then,” said this Vicente de Menezes, who was gaunt and green-complexioned and seemed to have the hand of death on him as well, “the pinnace must now be returned to São Paulo de Loanda, with despatches and certain goods, and Henrique is dead. You are commanded to carry her down the river in his place.”

I did not debate the point. No pilot was I, but I had some smattering of the art, and none of the Portugals about here looked to be even faintly skilled. And I think at that point I might have done many things to get myself alive out of Masanganu’s furnace heat, even unto kissing the image of the Madonna, or mumbling Romish jargon—aye, even that, I think. Merely to take command of a Portugee pinnace was a small thing in the saving of my life. So I moved another inch toward my transformation: it might now be construed that I had become an officer in the service of King Philip. God’s blood, the twists and turns life inflicts on us!

And the twists and turns of the river: those at least I remembered, for I am gifted that way. What enters my mind sticks there with a fearful grip. We loaded our cargo, and took our leave, with a crew half the size of the one that had set out upriver, for Henrique and two of his men were in their graves now, and one other was too ill to depart. Those under my command showed no disdain toward me for my Englishness. Why should they, who only wanted to flee this hellish place? They would take orders from the Antichrist if he stood on the quarterdeck.

So we embarked. When we came to Muchima, a day and a half downstream, we saw smoke rising above the palm-trees long before the village appeared, and then came the village. A destroying angel had visited it; or a pack of demons, more likely. A hurricane of murderers had swept through here. The place was sacked and wholly ruined, with corpses everywhere, and steaming mounds of torn-out entrails, and other charnel horrors. It was a hideous sight. The palm-trees that give the wine had been cut down at the root, and the plantations had been dug and rendered waste, and all the fish-nets torn, and the bodies of the people were most hellishly mutilated and sliced apart. So much blood soaked the black earth that it was as crimson underfoot as though we walked on gaudy carpets, or the robes of Cardinals. The Portuguese presidio, too, was sacked and one of the Portugals lay dead and weltering in it, and the other two were gone.

“The Jaqqas, it was,” said one of my men.

Thus I came to understand that the lone black prince we had seen standing on the bank was a forerunner, perhaps a Jaqqa scout and perhaps a notifier of impending doom. The devilish scourge had come to this town and taken all life, even the cattle and dogs. We sought for the bodies of the missing two Portugals, but did not find them. “They are eaten,” a yeoman said, and the others all nodded their agreement.

Torner amazed me by showing tears. For the Portugals? Nay, for the girl he had had, the file-toothed wench on whose unenthusiastic body he had vented his cravings. From one smoking hut to another he wandered, looking for her remains among the frightful carnage. I came to him and took him by the arm and said gently, “What, are you so concerned for her?”

“She was warm and soft in my arms. I would at least give her a proper burying.”

A Portugal came up to us to inquire when we would be going on. I explained quickly that first we sought this certain girl’s body, and he shook his head.

“Nay,” he said. “The Jaqqas kill everyone, but not the boys and girls of thirteen or fourteen years. Those they take captive, and raise as their own. All the rest they slay, and many they eat, but not those.”

This I repeated to Torner. We returned to the pinnace. Such total destruction stunned and froze me. What, was such evil upon the earth in our Christian day? These happy folk snuffed out, and for what? For what? Their very palm-trees cut down, that gave sweet wine? I thought on it, and it was like staring into a wizard’s glass, and seeing such a realm of deviltry and monstrosity that I was thrown into sore fright, as if Pandemonium had broken through upon the earth and would conquer it all, one spot at a time. I felt a sickness of the soul. And in time another kind of sickness; for the next day the first throbbings of fever announced themselves in me, and as we hurried downriver, my head pounded and my skin ran with sweat and my bowels gave way, and I saw things all in pairs, so that I was hard put to steer my craft safely free of the banks of coccodrillos, and by the time I came upon São Paulo de Loanda I was filthy sick. I thought my last hour was galloping toward me.

6

Phantoms visited me in my fevered sleep.

First came a horde of lanky Jaqqas, led by one who was a veritable Jack-o’-legs, nine feet tall and black as night. I lay tossing and moaning on some foul straw pallet and out of the darkness of the jungle appeared these diaboli, with their eyes blazing like circlets of white flame. About me they marched, round and round and round. One of them played on a flute fashioned of bone, and one wore over his head and shoulders a coccodrillo mask, all snout and teeth and smile, and one beat on a drum that was made of human skin, still showing birthmarks and other such blemishes. And they sang to me in their Jaqqa tongue, but I understood their song, which was a song of death, a song of fury.

And so forth, long skeins of doggerel imbued with a hellish vigor and enthusiasm.

Before my dreaming eyes these black fiends fell upon the village, and I knew it to be the village of Muchima, where I saw them arrange in a secret circle and burst inwardly on the hapless fisher-folk, and strike them with their spears, and slit their gullets with knives of bone or polished wood, until the dead lay in heaps. Whether I closed my eyes or kept them open I saw the same sight, a slaughter most dread, followed by a feast much like the one I had viewed in Brazil, of human meat. There was one difference, that instead of devouring their victims one by one, these Jaqqas took an immense cauldron the size of a barque or caravel, and filled it with water that at once bubbled and sparkled, and thrust the villagers into it by the dozen, so that they floated and drifted while they boiled, and the meat came loose from the bones. And when it was cooked the greatest of the Jaqqas, the giant one with a body like a god’s and a dangling long member like a black serpent, took to me a thigh and an arm and said, “Here, English. Take and eat! Take and eat! In this flesh will you be healed!” And I had no choice but to eat, but lo! the meat was tender and graceful, and power poured into my ailing body, until I rose from my bed and danced among the Jaqqas through the smoking ruins of the harmless village.

Such was my phantasm. There was no truth in it but only that of a disordered mind. But there was prophecy in it, I would discover. There was vision and oracle. A day would come when I would witness at close range the Jaqqas at their play, and though what took place was very little like that of my fever-dream, yet there were certain monstrous similarities indeed.

The Jaqqas sang and danced and feasted and were gone. And I lay sweating and vomiting, thinking, I must not yet be dead, because I feel pain in every joint, and death is said to bring relief from such dismay.

After the Jaqqas, there came into my room Her Protestant Majesty Queen Elizabeth.

She was garbed all in resplendent white, with sparkling gems set into her robe, and a trim of white ermine that had been brought her from the dukedoms of Muscovy. The crown was on her head, with spikes of gold that rose as high as long fingers, and atop each spike was a little ruby or emerald carved most cunningly in the shape of a man’s head, just like the pickled heads of the traitors that stand on pikes along London Bridge. She carried the scepter and the orb as well, but these she put down, and she leaned over my bed so that her lustrous red hair dangled in my face and I felt her cool sweet breath and saw the luminous wonder of her smile.

“Poor Andy,” she murmured. “How you suffer for me!”

And took my hand in hers, and stroked it to draw the heat from my flesh, and said softly, “I remember how it was, when I had the pox and was like to die of it, and everything was alpha and omega for me all at once. It’s like that for you, is it not? But I recovered and you will recover of it, too, and grow strong, and when you return to me I will name you Duke, eh, Andy? The Duke of Angola. The Earl of Masanganu. And give you land and castles and ten thousand pound a year, for you are my only son, in whom I am well pleased.”

And much more drivel of the same sort, telling me tales of the court, the doings of the Earl of Leicester and Lord Burghley and Sir Walter Ralegh and all that crew, and then she spoke of her dread sister Spanish Mary, Mary Tudor, who died in the year of my birth, and who would have had us all Papists if she had lived. The Queen whispered to me of Bloody Mary’s chilly couplings with her husband, the very same Philip who has become King of Spain and Portugal, and told me such mocking gross things as I blush to reveal in this telling, for that they came not out of any true gossip but only out of the stews of my own mind, however fevered. She told me also similar tales of the Pope and his catamites, and then she said, “And if you die on this bed, Andy, take not the unction from the Portugal priest, but go with my own dispensation, that frees you of all blame, for I am God’s vicar in England,” and such stuff. And wiped my forehead with a damp cloth, and gave me sweet thick syrup to drink, and rested my head against her breasts, which were wondrous soft, contrary to the vile stories that are told of her. But I was fevered. For as the Queen cradled and caressed me she was transformed in my melting brain to my sweet Anne Katherine, whose breasts I knew well, and soft indeed they were. In the deep valley between them I had my repose, and she ran her fingers over my matted and tangled hair and sang of love and peace.

“Good Anne Katherine,” I said. “Take me to you!” Her body was bare, all pink and gold, and from it came the fragrance of grass in springtime and violets in bloom, or lilacs, and she opened her arms to me and gathered me to her. And my body rose to her, my manhood stiffened and I felt the warm wet place between her thighs where I was to go, and as I entered her something happened that was passing strange, for she darkened and grew smaller and became my other wife Rose Ullward, that had died of the pox. The change took only a moment from the fair woman to the dark, the tall to the small, and I cupped her breasts, which were wondrous round and full for so tiny a woman, and put my face into the hollow beside her cheek along her shoulder, and ran my lips along her skin, but the skin seemed cold to me. And well it might be, for the Rose I embraced was the Rose who lies to this day in the churchyard at Plymouth, all bone and staring eyeless sockets, which gave me great horror.

I screamed long and severely from that vision. And there came someone to comfort me, who patted my brow and spooned a medicine between my lips. I dared not open my eyes, fearing another skeleton, but a familiar voice said, “Have no dread, Andy, you are mending well.” It was my father. I looked to him and there he was as in life, dressed finely with tight dark hose and fine velvet breeches and a brown leather jerkin, and a doublet all chased with patterns of gold, and the cloak of a great gentleman, and leather purse at his waist, saying, “You were ever my pet, my favorite, the child of my late years, and I will guard you now, I will defend you against all harm, for I am your father and your mother both, and your pilot as well in this sea of storms.” I clasped his hand and he turned to smoke and was gone, which seemed to me to say, There is no true pilot except for yourself, and you must sail your own course in this world, where no other soul can truly aid you. But perhaps I am wrong to take such phantasms so earnestly.

I know not how long I tossed in these dreams. It may have been days or weeks or months.

There were many more. My mind was wholly cut loose from its moorings and I could not distinguish between dream and wake, day and night. Sir Francis Drake came to me and vowed to teach me all his craft of the sea, I know, and then there was a priest who offered me Romish comfort, with wafers and wine, which I think I may have accepted, and I do recall Thomas Tomer’s young Muchima bedmate, with her firm breasts, jutting in that manner of newly sprouted ones, and her little teeth filed to sharp wedges. She ran her mouth over me, kissing me and nibbling me, the way a barber might cup for the ague, raising little welts here and there, which I did not find objectionable. I found nothing at all objectionable, after a time, in anything. Let the Jaqqas dance in the room, let my Anne Katherine become my Rose become a skeleton, let Papist incense burn, it was all the same to me, for I was dying and the things of this world were all one, they had no heavy significance: baubles of air. I had sup with Bloody Queen Mary one hour and her father Great Henry the next. I had good Jesus and all His disciples, and Peter and James and Thomas did a juggling-show for me that made me laugh and clap. I danced with coccodrillos in a fine galliard. I dined at the court of the High Khan of Cathay and with the Grand Duke of Muscovy, and I walked down the long marble gallery of the lords of Byzantium, and I drank the golden wine of Prester John. I coupled with dolphins and serpents and the daughter of Pharaoh. I wandered into ages yet to come and into time gone by. I floated from one miracle to another, in a daze, in a rapture, and I had no wish for it ever to end.

But end it did. The world became more real about me day by day, until I emerged into the true truth of my surroundings. And then I would rather have returned to my dreams and my fevers.

I saw myself in a room with earthen floor and an earthen roof, an underground chamber, pierced at top by a circular skyhole that admitted a wan beam of light. My furniture was only a miserable pile of straw and a bucket of slops beside it, and there was a palisade of stout poles barring my door, with a chain across it, so that I was not sure whether I was in a hospital or a dungeon, or some of both. Which latter I soon discovered to be the case.

I was weak as a puppy. I could not rise. I touched my face with a quivering hand and felt my cheek all stony and hollow, like a skull’s, and rough uncouth beard sprouting everywhere. My eyes were blear, but I could see well enough my naked body before me, fleshless, the hip-bones rising to view like scimitars, my skin loose and slack and yellowish, my manhood shriveled and shrunken like that of a man of ninety years, limp and sad against my thigh. So I was not dead, but I was far from being alive.

The gate was let back and a woman entered my cell. I could see her but dimly, but she was slender and seemingly young, with a bodice and robe of some dark velvety stuff, and a kind of surplice over her shoulders woven like a net out of fine fibers, and a veil on her face. I took her to be a nun, though I was puzzled to see gold chains around her neck, and that she had a cap of black velvet trimmed with jewels. This did not seem nun’s garb to me.

“Are you awake, then?” she asked in Portuguese.

“Aye.”

“And in your right mind?”

“I cannot be so sure of that. What place is this?”

“The hospice of Santa Maria Madalena, in São Paulo de Loanda, where you have lain ill these months past.”

“Months? What month is this?”

“It is the month of the Feast of São Antonio.”

“By God, I know not your saints! What month of the calendar?”

“June.”

That smote me hard. First, that I had dozed away half a year here, out of my mind; and second, that now two years had slipped by since my leaving England. My life was fleeing and I was becalmed, helpless, lost.

The woman had brought me food. It was a bowl of some mashed stuff, floating in a light sauce. She crouched beside me and offered me some with a wooden spoon, saying, “You must regain your flesh. You have eaten very little. Will you try it?”

“What is it?”

“It is a thing called manioc, that we take from the ground and roast, a whole root, and grind into flour. It will make you strong again.”

I remembered this manioc from Brazil: a plant of the Indians, that I suppose the Portugals had brought with them to Angola. I had eaten it often, with no great fondness, but now I took it, and the broth in which it lay. The first spoonful filled me with such appetite that I signalled at once for another, but that was rashness: by the time the second one hit bottom, my stomach was sorely griped from the first. I waved the bowl away. She waited patiently. The spasm passed and I was hungry again, and took more, less greedily, a kitten-sip of the stuff. Then a little more. Then a pause, and then yet more. And I felt the griping begin again, and smiled my thanks, and said politely, “Obrigado, sister,” which to the Portugals is thanks.

“I am Dona Teresa da Costa.”

“Is it you that has cared for me all these months?”

“I and some others. They would have let you die, at first, but that seemed too harsh, and we came to give you medicines, and a little soup when you would take it.”

“I am most grateful,” I told her again. “What is your order, sister?”

She laughed a little tinkling laugh. “Ah, nay, I am no nun! No nun at all!”

“And yet you serve in the hospice?”

“It was for my pleasure,” she said. “You looked right splendid when they took you from the pinnace all unconscious, with your golden hair adangle, and your fair English skin, and all. I had never seen such hair and such skin, and I would not have had you die. Can you eat more?”

“I think not.”

“Something to drink?”

“Some water, only.”

“I will fetch it.”

She was gone a long time. Before she returned I felt the fever climbing in me again, and knew that I was far from healed, perhaps still in risk of my life. I began to shake, and as she came to me I turned on my side and delivered myself of all that she had fed me, in such racking pukes that I thought my guts would spew out my mouth and snarl by my side. Then, as quickly as that had happened, I was calm again, sweaty, trembling, but the heat was gone from my forehead. I begged her mercy for having inflicted such foulness on her, but she only laughed, and said, “There has been worse, much worse, in your illness.”

As she wiped the spew from my face I looked closely at her. She was no more than eighteen, I saw, and of surpassing beauty. Her eyes were set far apart and narrow in that wondrous Portugal way the women sometimes have, and her skin was deep-hued, an olive tone, and her hair, jet black, was thick and lustrous, tumbling in heavy loops and coils. Her lips were full, her cheeks were high and sharp, her carriage was regal.

“I will try more manioc,” I said, and this time I kept it down.

She bade me sleep, but I told her I had slept for months, and wished now to learn something of what had gone on in the world outside my cell. There was another Englishman in São Paulo de Loanda, I said: where was he, could he not be sent to visit me, or was he under imprisonment?

“I know not,” she said.

“His name is Thomas Torner, and he was with me on the pinnace when we came from Masanganu.”

“Yes, that I know. It was he who carried you on shore when you fell ill. But he is not in São Paulo de Loanda now.”

“Gone back to Masanganu?”

“I think he is fled,” she said. “Or perhaps perished. I know nothing of this Englishman.”

Which saddened me and sorrowed me greatly. What escape could he possibly have managed? I asked her to make inquiries, and she did, to no effect. Later I learned that Torner had disappeared not long after our return from Masanganu, slipping away in a manner most mysterious. But a party of Arab slave-traders had been along the coast just then, selling captive Moors from the desert lands to the far north, and it was suspected by the Portugals that Torner had somehow insinuated himself among them, bribing them or begging such mercy as the sons of the Prophet are willing to offer. What became of him beyond that I know not, whether he was sold in slavery himself, or made his way through the kindness of the Arabs to some civilized land, but I have had assurance that he did in time reach England safely.

With Torner gone I felt monstrously alone in this strange dark land. He had been a boon companion, a man of my own kind with whom I felt comfortable, and a wise head against which to toss ideas; and now I was by myself among a wild stew of Portugals and Jaqqas and Kongos and all the dozen other kind of blackamoors, with no one to guide me but my own wit. That was a heavy burden, though I think I bore it well enough as things befell.

My talking with Dona Teresa left me weary and she went from me, which was to my regret, because her presence gave me vigor. She seemed then to me a saint of charity and kindness. I slept and woke and slept and woke, and others brought me food, and then on the third day she returned. I was stronger, strong enough to reach a hand toward her as she entered, and to try to sit up a bit.

When I had eaten I said, “I think I will soon be able to leave this bed, and walk a little. And then I want to go out into the sunlight and quit this hole.”

“Ah, you may not.”

“In truth? Why not?”

“Because you are imprisoned.”

“Nay,” I said. “I dealt on that matter with Governor Serrão. He invited me into Portuguese service, and I agreed, and I served as pilot on the governor’s pinnace when I brought it down from Masanganu. Why imprison me now?”

“No one knows. The decree was set down, and you are not to be freed. Outside this room a guard stands at all time, to restrain you from leaving.”

I had to laugh at that, me too weak to put my legs to the floor.

Then I leaned toward her and said, “Dona Teresa, are you my friend?”

“That I am,” she said. And in that moment I for the first time doubted her, because I saw a glint in her eye, a strangeness, a kind of Satanic mischief, even, and I wondered how much a saint she might truly be. Where came those thoughts I hardly know: I think it was her great beauty that frightened me, and a certain foreignness, the full extent of which I did not then understand, that made me wary of trusting a Portugal no matter how kindly. But even as I was having these misgivings of her she said warmly enough, “What service can I do?”

“Go to Governor Serrão,” I urged, “and remind him that he and I came to a treaty, and that I said I would serve faithfully and—”

“Governor Serrão is dead.”

“Ah, then! When?”

“Many months past. There was a war against King Ngola and his allies, which went badly for us, and soon afterward Serrão fell ill and died. The troops elected the captain-major once more, Luiz Ferreira Pereira, to take his place. It is Governor Pereira who ordered you imprisoned.”

“Why?”

She shook her head. “That is not known. Perhaps he simply did not want to think about you, since he had so much else on his mind. There was an order posted, that the Englishman is to be kept apart, as prisoner. Which made no difference to you, since you raved and dreamed, and everyone thought you would die anyway, though you did not. When you have your strength again you will be transferred to the prison at the presidio.”

“Nay, nay, nay! Will you go to this Governor Pereira for me, and tell him how Serrão dealt with me, and that I am more useful to him in his service than in his jail?”

“But Pereira is gone to São Salvador.”

I was blank at that name. “Where?”

“It is in the land of Kongo. He left three months ago, and I think he will not return. They said he had urgent business to do there, but I think he is only in fear of the Jaqqas, who are said to be gathering strength to invade this territory.”

“So there’s no governor here at all?”

“None.”

“Who rules?”

“No one. All is without center or motion here. They say a new governor is on his way from Portugal, but we are not sure. We wait. We live. Time goes by.”

Once more I felt helplessness overcome me. These Portugals! The fat old governor dead, the new one fled, the next one not yet come, and what of me, what of me? Was I to rot forever, while they went about their ninnyhammer foolery? Well, and well, there was no use fretting myself over that now. So long as I had not the strength to walk as far as my own pisspot three feet away, it mattered little whether I was in the hospice or in the dungeon. And perhaps by the time I was strong enough to rise, the new governor would be here.

My strength did indeed come quickly back to me, in the weeks that followed. I was served occasionally by Dona Teresa, but more often by black nuns of the hospice, and always it disappointed me when one of them came into the cell and not she.

But she was there often enough, and slowly I learned things from her about herself. She was in fact just eighteen: I was right in that. And she was no Portugal, or rather, only by parts. I found that out by asking her how long it had been since she had come out from the mother country, and whether she had been born in Lisbon, which made her laugh. “Ah, nay, Andres”—so she called me, Andres—”there are no women of Portugal in this place.”

“What are you, then, a witch-child? A changeling blackamoor?”

I was closer to the truth than I knew. She told me that she had been born in the Kongo, in that same city of São Salvador where Governor Pereira had now sequestered himself. The Portugals had arrived in that neighboring kingdom to the north nearly a hundred years before, had settled there and had extended themselves into the blood and veins of that land in a peaceful invasion, filling the Kongo folk with Portuguese ideas and ways, and filling the Kongo women with something else, which you can imagine. Taking the black women for their wives, they brought forth a race of mixed blood, and then later Portugals married into those, and so on and so on until a strange interbreeding became the rule, producing such wonders as Dona Teresa. To my eye she looked a pure Portugal. But some of the blood in her veins was Kongo blood.

Knowing that of her, I understood my early moment of fear. She had done nothing but serve me, dutifully and without cavil, in my illness. Yet I misdoubted her for being a Portugal, and now I misdoubted her worse, since I had no idea where her real loyalties might lie, except to herself, and to the mixed blood that coursed within her. The jungle had its savage imprint upon her somewhere.

She had not been in Angola long—I think she had arrived only some months before my coming. What she chose not to tell me was that she was the mistress of a certain great fidalgo or grandee of the Portugals in the Kongo, one Don João de Mendoça, and upon the death of Governor Serrão this Mendoça had removed himself to Angola, thinking to make himself powerful there.

When she had told me these things of herself, I asked her also to tell me of events in the Angolan land during my time of delirium.

That was much, and none of it good. Shortly before Christmas Governor Serrão had completed his preparations for the war he had so little stomach to fight, and moved against the enemy. His army came to just one hundred twenty and eight Portuguese musketeers—with three horses—and some fifteen thousand native allies, armed with bows. That sounded to me like a mighty force indeed, but Dona Teresa shook her head, saying, “The black folk here are gentle, and frighten easily. And when they are faced with the armies of King Ngola their loyalty to Portugal quickly melts.”

This King Ngola was the ruler of the place, for whom the Portugals gave the land its name. Serrão took his army across the River Lukala and advanced east to a place far inland, where Ngola was waiting for him with a huge force of his own and the troops of the King of Matamba and a detachment sent by the King of Kongo and also, said Dona Teresa, certain forces of the Jaqqas known as the Jaqqa Chinda.

“Do the Jaqqas then make alliances with other peoples?” I asked.

“When it suits them,” she replied. “Just as the wind makes alliances with seamen, when it fills their sails and sends them where they wish, and other times comes upon them in gales and snaps their masts. We never know, until we find out.”

Fat old Governor Serrão was so shitstricken by fright that he desired to retreat before this preponderous enemy army, but his officers impelled him to attack. One of those who urged the battle on him was the same Captain-Major Pereira now in hiding in the neighboring land. On the last Monday of the year the Portugals met their foe and were most terribly defeated, and fell back many leagues toward Masanganu. In this withdrawal, it is said, Governor Serrão fought valiantly against his pursuers and ably protected the rear guard of the Portugals. For some time the army lay besieged at Masanganu, until reinforcements came up from São Paulo de Loanda and relieved them. Soon after this disastrous campaign Serrão took to his bed and yielded up the ghost, and was succeeded by Pereira.

“And now?” I asked. “With Pereira fled, will the city be invaded?”

“We wait,” she said. “We pray. We watch for omens.”

I thought secretly it would be no great disaster for me if King Ngola or the Jaqqa Chinda or any other of these heathens came in here and put São Paulo de Loanda to destruction. With luck I would show them I was no enemy to them, and my yellow hair might be the flag of my freedom. And if the ocean ran red with Portugals’ blood, what was that to me? I held no love for them; I had not yearned to be here; what had I had from them, in these two years, but chains and dungeons and mush to eat, when I would fain have been in England?

Yet I kept these thoughts to myself.

There was no invasion that month, or the months thereafter. My strength grew under the care of Dona Teresa and the black nuns of the hospice. I took my first few tottering steps; I held down solid food, and even some wine; I washed and dressed myself; I left my cell, under guard, and walked weakly in a courtyard of the hospice. Once I came to a place where a mirror was, and I saw my face and knew how close I had come to death: for I was haggard and weathered, with deep seams in my cheeks and a raccoon’s rings around my eyes, and my color was bilious and my look was rheumy—and this after months and months of recovery! I have always known that my Protector watcheth over me, for in our harsh world it is a triumph simply to live beyond childhood, but I think I must have more lives than most cats, and that I surrendered one or maybe two with that plaguey ailment that I got in fever-cursed Masanganu.

Now the return of my health brought me little joy, though. For as soon as I was seen to be walking and putting meat to my bones, a fine-feathered captain of the Portugals came to me and said, “You are transferred to the prison. Make yourself ready and come with me.”

I protested, but in vain. I demanded to speak to the governor, but of course there was no governor. I urged that I was already enrolled in the service of the colony, as a pilot on the governor’s pinnace. Was that madness, to beg to toil for the Portugals, and be shipped, if I won my suit, back to Masanganu, that had all but slain me? I think not. For it is hateful to moulder in a dungeon, and pride must be put aside when freedom, or a semblance of freedom, can be had.

This captain, who was a decent man as Portugals go, felt sympathy for me. But Governor Pereira had ordered that I be imprisoned, and a prisoner I must be, since there was no governor here to countermand Pereira’s foolish order, and no one else dared take it upon himself to find another disposition for me.

So I was hauled roughly back to the presidio on the heights of São Miguel overlooking the town. And when I angrily pulled my arm free from one of the Portugals who was conveying me thither, another struck me from behind with his cudgel such a blow in the kidneys and I fell gasping and vomiting, and thought I would give up my spirit there in the dust.

They returned me to the same beshitten subterraneous dungeon where Torner and I had been penned on our first arrival in São Paulo de Loanda. And the gate closed. And there I sat in the dimness and the stench. And there I was forgotten once more. My jailers brought me food twice a day, and water, and once a week they asked if I wanted to have a priest hear my confession, which I declined. Of other human contact I had none, for more weeks than I care to sum.

I thought I would go mad.

I wondered if it were better to have died.

It was one of my deepest testings. I had no Torner to amuse me with rough seaman’s talk and gossip of home; Dona Teresa did not visit me; the kind Barbosa, who had brought me wine on my first stay in this stinking keep, was no longer in Angola, or else had given up concern for me. I petitioned my jailers constantly for an audience with some authority of the colony, and they answered me with jeers, or spittle, or sometimes with their fists, which split my cheek and cracked a rib another time.

“Will you have a priest?” they asked again and again.

“Nay,” I said, “he will not free me, will he?”

7

In these dark months of bitter solitude I found only one entertainment, which was to hold conversation with imagined companions out of my lost happy life.

Anne Katherine I often addressed, saying, “This gold of the Indies I bring to you, to hang between your breasts and dangle from your ears and shine on your wrists.”

To which she replied, “And will you go to sea again, Andrew, now that you have won this treasure?”

“Nay, never. All that hauling of ropes and lines, all that furling and unfurling, the tarring and mending, the sun and the black thirst swelling my tongue—nay, nay!”

“But it was your great adventure, love.”

“Indeed so, and I would not have missed it. But the harbor is reached, and now it is time to sow and reap, and dine on cheese and wine, and see increase, and give thanks and sleep in a good soft bed, and one day to die in bed, too, full of years. Come here to me, sweet.”

And her breasts in my hands, and her lips on my lips, and our tongue-tips touching and our breaths mingling, and our bellies meeting—yea! Our seed rushing one to the other, and her sighs soft in my ear—

I spoke with my father. “Tell me the secrets of your craft,” I begged him, “so that I can be of use to these Portugals, and lever myself into freedom.”

“And would you aid them, then?”

“It is not so bad a thing. Do I serve God better working at a trade at sea, or lying in my own piddle in this black hole? Tell me of piloting, I pray.”

“You must first learn the tools,” he said. “Your task it is to know the water, the capes and shoals, but also your position in the universe, and for that you must have tools. Here: this is your cross-staff. See, hold the end to the eye, and move the cross-piece thus, until it corresponds exactly to the distance from the horizon of the star you observe, and that will tell you your altitude from the horizon. Do you see? At dawn and at dusk this is your guide. And this, here: this is your astrolabe, that you hang from this ring, and move the disk so. And here: study this book, the treatise of the Jew Pedro Nunes, on the uses of the compass, and such fine matters.”

“There is so much to know, father!”

“Aye. Twelve years, to make a proper pilot. Caping from one landfall to the next, taking the soundings of lead and line, telling the hours, making your memory into a rutter for all the world, mastering the currents and tides, keeping your charts safe and adding to them for those who follow after you—so much, so much! And you will be a pilot for the Portugals?”

“Nuno da Silva piloted for Drake, father. And Simon Fernandes, the Portugal, was it not he on Walter Ralegh’s Falcon in 78 in that doomed venture of Sir Humphrey Gilbert?”

“Aye, boy.”

“Why, then, an Englishman can pilot for the Portugals, or for the Dutchmen, or for the Egyptians, if need be. What matters is serving God through properly doing your task. D’ye see that, father? D’ye see that?”

And Rose Ullward I summoned out of the shades, my dark little first wife, whose father had the tavern in Plymouth. She peered at me, squinting in the darkness, and said, “You be Andrew that was my man, be you not?”

“That I be.”

“I knew you so little. Our time was so short. Be I remembered well by you?”

“In faith, not very. But I loved you, that I know.”

“Now you love another.”

“Because you were taken from me by death. God’s breath and eyes, woman, will you be jealous from the grave?”

“I am not jealous. I was betrayed by fortune. When you return from captivity, will you return to her or to me, then?”

“How can I return to you?” I asked.

“We will meet on the farther shore. You and I, and the good Jesus, and Great Harry the old King, and everyone else who ever lived and bled. Will we not? You said you loved me, Andrew.”

“And that I did. And you are the only wife I ever had. But when you went from me, I found another.”

“Aye. The way of the world. I wish you joy of her. But think of me, from time to time?”

“That I pledge,” I said, and sent her back into the realm of shades, for this imagined conversation was leading me into turbulent waters.

After her I summoned my brother? Henry and Thomas and John, and even Edward, who drowned before I was born, and talked long and earnestly with them about their lives and hopes and their skills, their fears, their purposes. I had Sir Francis Drake to lunch and John Hawkins and Sir Walter Ralegh, who was overbearing and shrewd and frighted me some. I spent a few hours discussing matters of state with Her Majesty. I had King Philip to my cell, that dour and bleak old monk of a king, and quizzed him on his creed and made him admit the Papist way was false and a mockery to the Gospels. I roved farther afield, and had the Great Khan and Prester John and the Sultan of the Turks. I got me poets, Kit Marlowe and Tom Kyd and others of the sort, and bade them read me plays, which I made up out of my own head, the play of Queen Mary and the tragedy of Samson and the play of the King of Mexico and the Spaniard conqueror. Oh, and they were such plays as would not have disgraced the Globe in London, I trow, but I can tell you not a line of them today.

In such fanciful ways my months ebbed by. Also did I pace my dungeon and count its paces, and get such other exercise as I could, and breathed as deep as I was able to make myself, despite the stench of the place, to keep my lungs in trim. And I think after my early despair I came to a kind of tranquility, like a friar in the desert: no longer bewailing the discomforts and disappointment of my life, but only taking one day at a time, as God’s decree upon me. I am in my way a fair philosopher, I suppose: I seek not to rail against the unalterable, nor to spend my energies moving the immovable.

One day at last I had a visitor other than my jailers. Dona Teresa it was, like a ray of golden sunlight lancing through the thick mud walls of my prison.

Her dark beauty glimmered and glistened in the shadows. Her eyes had a wondrous gleam and her lips, so full and broad, were shining, moist, heavy with the promise of delights. And I had mistaken this woman for a nun, once, in my sickness!

“I thought you had abandoned me,” I said.

“Poor Andres. I could not get leave to visit you, until a certain friend returned to the city from duty in the north, and by his authority granted me access. Do you suffer?”

“Nay, it is a glorious palace, and the feasts are beyond compare. It is only that I miss the hunt sometimes, and other little pleasures not available to me here, the morris-dancing and the games of bowls on the village green.”

“These words are mysteries to me.”

“What season is it?”

“The rains are upon us.”

“But not the armies of King Ngola?”

“Nay, there is peace. A new governor is coming to us, Don Francisco d’Almeida.”

My heart quickened. “Will you petition him for my freedom?”

“That I will,” she said. “And I will speak with another great man of the colony, Don João de Mendoça, who is known to me. I will bring you out of this place, Andres.”

“I pray it be soon.”

“What will you give me, if I have you set free?”

I could not fathom that. “Give you? What have I to give? You see me in rags, and less than rags. Where is my hidden store of gold, Dona Teresa? Do you know a secret that is secret even from me?”

“I know where your gold is,” she said.

“Then tell me.”

She came to my side and put her hands to my hair, coarse and tangled and foul, but still yellow, still the fair English hair so scarce in these lands.

“This is gold,” she said. She touched my beard. “And here is more of it. Holy Maria, but you are filthy!”

“There is little bathing here, Dona Teresa.”

“I will remedy that,” she said, and stroked my hair again. And looked long and strange at me.

I had not seen such forwardness from her in my hospital days. For certainly there was flowing between us now such currents as I know pass between man and woman, and my long solitude had not deceived me in that: a woman does not toy with a man’s hair, and fondle his beard, to no purpose. In the hospital I lay withered and naked before her, fouled by my own body’s foulnesses, and she seemed no more than a helpful woman of the city, doing a service to a hapless ailing man. But this was something quite other, now, this sly flirting, this playing at the game of coquetry and subtle desire.

As she stood close beside me she reached into her garments and took forth some small object, that she rubbed most lovingly against each of her breasts in turn, and then pressed to her belly and downward to the joining of her legs. After which she took this thing and put it in my hand, and folded my fingers over it, and, smiling secretly, stared most hotly into my eyes.

“Keep this by you,” she said, “and all will be well.”

I opened my hand and looked upon it. It was a wooden carving, cunningly done of some very black wood, that showed a woman with a swollen middle as though with child, and heavy breasts, and a deep slit carved in the place of her sex, and there was hair fastened to the head: five or six strands of dark coarse hair much like Dona Teresa’s own. When I touched this little idol with my thumb it felt warm to me, with the warmth of her own body impressed into it; and it troubled me, for it smelled of witchcraft.

“What is this thing?” I asked.

“A talisman,” said she, “to protect you from harm while you are in this place, and ever after.”

“A devilish little amulet, you mean?”

“An amulet,” said she, “but not devilish.”

“I think any amulet is the Devil’s manufacture.”

“A crucifix, too? Is that not an amulet?”

“Aye,” said I. “I do abhor all that sort of stuff, even the ones claimed by the Papists to be Christian.”

“Well, and abhor not this one,” Dona Teresa said. “For it will guard you, Andres.” She folded my fingers over it again, and, whispering close, said, “Take it. Keep it close by you. Do this for me, will you, in return for the services I have done you, and will in the future do you. Will you, Andres?”

“I will,” said I reluctantly. “But only because it is your gift, and I think fondly of it, that it came from you. For I tell you, I do abhor any amulet of the Devil.”

“I say again, it is not of the Devil.”

“It is no Christian thing, though.”

“Nay, that it is not.” She put her fingers to her lips. “We are Christian here, but we know some of the old ways, too, those that are of merit. This is one. Keep it by you, Andres, close against your body, and all will go well for you.” Then did she put her hand over mine, that held the talisman, and she said, “One thing more, though. Keep it from the sight of the Portugals, for they do not understand these matters. And if they should find it, I pray you do not say you had it of me. For I am thought of by them as full Portuguese in my ways, and I would not have them knowing I do follow a few of the old teachings. Eh, Andres? Will you pledge me that, Andres?”

She frightened me. I felt it was a Devil-trap she was leading me into. Perhaps it was because I had lately written in my mind that play of Samson who was snared by the Dalila who destroyed him, that woman of another tribe, in enemy employ. And here she was, yet, toying with my very hair, as Dalila had with Samson’s. Aye, I feared Dona Teresa. I feared her for her beauty, which was overwhelming, beyond that of any woman I had known, and I feared her also because she was part Portugal and part African, which is to say, Papist on one side and demon-worshipper on the other, but not an atom in her that was English. At that time of my callowness I looked upon women who were not English as something terrifyingly other, for all that I had chosen a French one to lie with first, as a boy. To me Dona Teresa was a bubbling pot of mysteries and magics, a stew-cauldron of unknown perils. And then, too, I suspected that she might be spying for her Portugal masters, which made me naturally cautious of revealing my heart to her.

And so I was wary with her and did not reach to embrace her, which I think she was inviting me next to do. But I did accept the little idol from her.

She felt my coolness and retreated after a bit, and said, hiding her annoyance well though not completely. “It was not easy for me to gain permission to visit you.”

“Will you come again?”

“Do you want it?”

“Why have you come?”

“When you were ill, I nursed you. I feel an ownership of part of your life, from that. Now you suffer again, in a different way, and my soul goes out to you.”

“You are most kind, Dona Teresa.”

“They say I can come every second day. I will do so.”

She looked to me as if waiting for me to refuse that. But I did not. Uncertain of her though I might be, I was not so foolish as to spurn the first companionship I had had in many months. Thus I told her I welcomed her return, and indeed it was no lie. I spent the day that followed counting away the hours. She had broken entirely the rhythm of my solitude, and I could not employ the little diversions now, the conversations and fantasies, that had whiled the time. Despite myself Dona Teresa had unsettled my philosophical equilibrium and reawakened me to life.

When she returned she brought two things with her, that she carried one at a time into the cell. The first was a flask of wine: not the sweet palm-wine of the blackamoors, that Barbosa once had given me, but true claret of Portugal, whose taste I had all but forgotten.

“This was not easy, either,” she said. “It is rare stuff.”

“You do me great kindness. Come, let us draw the cork!”

“Not so fast, not nearly so fast.” She put the wine aside and went beyond the palisade, and came back a moment later bearing a broad basin and a great rough yellow sponge. “Put off your clothing,” she said to me.

“Dona Teresa—”

“Do you think your odor is fragrant?”

“Nay, they issue no perfume to captives here. But this shames me, to put off my clothes before you this way.”

“In the hospice you lay with no clothes at all, and you had no shame of it then.”

“I was far from my right mind.”

“But the shape of your body comes not as news to me. And if we are to sip wine together, you must be more clean. Come, sir, do as I say!” She snapped her fingers at me as though she were a queen.

On that day she had chosen to wear a light bodice, cut very low, that all but revealed her breasts. They gleamed out from their captivity like fine polished carvings of precious wood, round and smooth and dusky-bright, reminding me of the breasts of her little idol. I felt myself swept along on a tide too powerful to resist.

But yet I was determined. Still did I intend to remain faithful to my Anne Katherine, whatever temptations this Dalila dangled at me: and if the words sound overly innocent to you, as they do to me, yet I will not deny them, for that was my intention, poorly conceived but deeply felt. I knew I might remain the rest of my life in Africa, and then my fidelity would be a fool’s medal, but thus far, thus far at least, I meant to cling to it, having held it so long already.

So I intended, at any rate.

Yet to clean my body was not a bad idea. I have always felt a fondness for bathing. I suppose if I were a grandee of the court, I would be content with powders and unguents and perfumes, and never once put my skin into water; for that is how they do it, so I hear. But simpler folk of the outlying towns have cleaner ways, and especially those that go to sea, for one often stands naked in a driving rain and the touch of water against the skin is neither unfamiliar nor painful, but rather becomes to be enjoyed. Here in my dungeon I was much bothered by the crawliness of the filth that was accumulating upon my sweltering body. So for all my uneasiness with Dona Teresa I did drop my clothes, and made as though to take the washbasin from her.

“I will do it,” she said.

There was no refusing. She wet her sponge—a harsh thing, not long from the sea, that scratched like briars—and scrubbed it down my back, and then my shoulders, and she spun me around and sponged my chest, not gently, so that my skin began to tingle and a rosy hue came into it. “How foul they have let you be!” she said. “Look, the water runs in dark streams from your hide!” I thought she had done with me when my upper body was cleansed, but no, she was most devilish thorough, and took her sponge over my belly, more kindly this time, and down my thighs, and along my legs both front and back.

In doing this service, which she performed as calmly as though she were swabbing a statue, she traveled most intimately close to my private parts, though she took care not actually to touch them. Yet she might just as well have caressed my privities fondly with her hands, for the effect was the same on me, that had not lain with a woman in two years and some. Her eyesight alone, casting its beam on my flesh as she knelt to rub my haunches, would have been enough to inflame me with lust. I strived to keep my body in check. I felt the sap rising in my loins, I felt my member quickening with life, and it was most shameful to me to know that it was getting stiff. I did not dare look down. But I could tell without looking that my mast was up, and royally so. And my heart thundered, and my throat went dry, and I recited the catechisms and other such dreary things to keep myself from throwing myself upon her, for how could I let myself do that?

How, indeed? When I meant to be faithful to a fair young woman in England, how give myself to a dark wench out of the jungle of Africa?

You smile. You say, Go to, only a monk would have retained his fidelity, or a eunuch, under such provocation. A man and a woman alone in a locked cell, and the man naked and the woman nearly bare-breasted, and so long a chastity for him, and the temptation so overpowering—surely the man would yield, and quickly and gladly, in that circumstance. I smile, too, at the recollection. But I was there, not you, and I swear by the bloody palms of Jesus that I kept myself chaste that day.

But not, I needs must add, in any way that was creditable to me. For as this bathing of me continued, my mind went hazy as with sunstroke and my vision clouded and my perceptions became narrowed down solely to that aching rod sprouting from my loins. And I sucked breath deep into my lungs and knew I could no longer withstand the gift of what seemingly was so freely being offered. I was on the verge of reaching for her, to take her to my pallet and push up her robe and slide myself deep into her harbor, with all thoughts of England and Anne Katherine and chastity blasted from my mind. Then suddenly she rose and stepped back and said, coolly, with a brusqueness, “There. Now at last you are properly clean. Clothe yourself, and let us enjoy our wine.”

It was like a mug of cold vinegar hurled in my eyes. I stood there stunned, my soul all full of desire and she already halfway across the cell and tugging on the cork of the claret. It was all I could do, I trow, to keep myself from stumbling toward her and throwing myself upon her, for I was not much different at that moment from a catapult that has been fully wound up: that is, once the mechanism is set in motion, how can the catapult help but discharge its load? The only thing that held me back and let me master myself once again was the awareness that I might have misread her entirely. Perhaps there was no flirtatiousness in her manner and no provocation intended by the freedom she had taken with my body. Perhaps she had no shred of desire for me at all, but saw me merely as a foul-smelling prisoner who needed cleansing. And perhaps it was all a test, to see if I could be trusted, and six guards lay in wait outside the cell to fall upon me at her first outcry of rape.

That was a cooling thought indeed. Fear overcame yearning. For I was among Portugals that might cheat at any game, even this, and mayhap they looked only for a pretext to hang me. To assault a woman of their nation would be sufficient charge, and she could well be part of a plot to open me to such a charge. At once my member droped and I turned away, and found my shabby clothes.

Dona Teresa, pretending unawareness of all my states of changing mind—I know that she was pretending—smiled most graciously and offered me a goblet of wine.

We drank together like lord and lady. We kept piously far apart, and talked of trivial things. I was bewildered and utterly disarrayed by the games she had played on me; my jaws ached of tensing them, my eyes throbbed, there was a band of fire across my forehead. The wine eased me, but only somewhat. I think I grew drunken, a little, and I stared more at her bosom than at her face, which she noticed, but she gave me no further provocations, and I kept my distance. In time she said she must leave, and she collected the empty bottle and the goblets and tucked them in a straw bag, and came toward me and smiled and flashed me such a look of direct and blatant invitation as like to have melted my kneecaps. But before I could comprehend it and conclude what response I should make, she kissed me lightly on the cheek, a sister’s kiss, a butterfly grazing, and sweetly wished me well and took her leave.

That visit much muddled my mind. In the days that followed I relived it a thousand times in memory, wondering if it had been her intent to make me so asweat with desire, or if I had wrongly imagined her motives. That I had meant to remain chaste was sure; that her sponging had magicked all chastity out of me was equally sure; but had I been toyed with? Or was it only that I was overripe for loving and was coming to see my fidelity as mere romantic folly? I knew not my own mind. I was overmatched with this Dona Teresa, I suspected: she was too cunning a player of the game of man and woman, and I far too simple.

When she visited me next, a few days later, she came swathed in black garments trussed as secure as a nun’s, and neither kissed me nor gave me looks of the eyes, but was proper and chaste with me. On the next visit from that she was more playful, and wore flimsy clothes again; on the next, she stayed only a few minutes, and was coy and remote. I never seemed to see the same Teresa twice running. And on the next she came in garments so light she might as well have been naked, a rain-soaked shift through which I saw everything, her dusky breasts and dark nipples, and the socket of her navel, and the three-pointed mat of dark curls below. It was too much. I knew for sure, the moment she slipped off the cloak to show me the wonders of her body barely hidden by that faint fabric, that she was playing a devil’s game with me.

“I have brought more wine,” she said.

“Will you bathe me, then, as you did that other time you came with claret?”

She laughed prettily. “Are you uncleanly again?”

“Nay, I am clean enough. But the sponging made a good preamble to the wine.”

I was altogether in her spell. My eyes traveled her body as though it were the map of the highway to paradise.

Coolly she said, “I have not brought the basin with me, nor the sponge. And if you need no bath, why take the trouble to have it, sir?”

“Because it gave me pleasure.”

She pretended to chide me. “Sir, you are a prisoner! You are not entitled to pleasures!”

“The wine?”

“Oh, that. It is for your health alone.”

“Bathe me with that, then.”

“You forget your place,” she said, sounding stern, but her eyes were sparkling and her smile was bold.

I went toward her. I was the aggressor, no denying it: but she had so maneuvered and chivvied and manipulated me that I was altogether her toy, and if I seemed to be the forward one, it was only an illusion, for I was moving along a path that had been wholly preordained by her scheming. My hands went to her shoulders. I pulled her close against me. She stiffened and pretended to be shocked, but it was mere pretense. That much was apparent. “Sir,” she cried. “Sir, what is this?”

I made no answer. I brushed at her shift, trying to sweep it from her, but in my need and my anguish I was clumsy, with fingers of wood, and even while she squirmed and feigned resistance she managed to reach about and touch some catch, so that the thing opened and fell away like fog in the morning sun. At the sight of her breasts I came close to releasing her and backing off, for her nipples were brown and the wide circles that surrounded them were brown. It was the African in her blood revealing itself. The women of Portugal and Spain, I know, have darker skins than those of England, but the ones I had lain with in my days aboard the merchant vessels had the breasts and nipples of an Englishwoman, more or less, a deeper hue of pigment but not brown like this, and in the baring of her breasts Teresa displayed the strangeness within her soul.

Not that I saw anything dreadful about African women, though they were not then particularly to my taste; but it was the mixture that put me off, the mingling of the blood of two worlds. Dona Teresa was a creature beyond my knowledge of women. I felt ensnared by the Devil, a slave to dark forces.

But I was enslaved also by another force that hammered and beat within my own veins. And so I covered those alien nipples with my quivering hands and gripped the dark satiny globes and pressed my mouth to hers, while she pulled away my clothing. And we sank down together to the damp earthen floor and her thighs parted and she received me, for she was more than ready and there was no need for the prelude of stroking and opening that many women prefer.

And O! and O! and O! all thought went from my mind!

Her back was arched and her legs wrapped themselves about my body and her fingers dug into my back, and down below I felt the hot sweet moist hidden mouth of her consuming me like the hungry mouth of a starfish, and there came a rising tide within me that altogether swept me away, nor did I fight against that. Buried deep in that lovely nether mouth, in that warm comforting harbor, I yielded up my ghost in a cannonade of lunatic explosions that entirely unmanned me, and left me dead and gasping on the floor by her side.

She laughed, a light and tinkling laughter, and ran her hand through the golden fur of my chest.

“So eager, Englishman, so hurried! But I forgive you. It has been a very long time, has it not?”

“A thousand years.”

“The next time will not be so far away.”

“Nay. Hardly another three moments, I trow.”

She cradled me against her breasts. My fingers roved her skin. In the aftermath of lovemaking it had the look of finely burnished bronze, and her hair below was crisp and closely coiled, another secret sign of the Africa in her veins. In the touching of her I felt my manhood return almost at once to life.

I rolled free and embraced her again.

“This time more slowly, for your impatience will not be as great, eh, Englishman?”

“Aye,” I answered. And gave the devil her due.

8

So with those first thrustings of flesh into flesh, commenced what I must now recognize to be one of the greatest adventures of passion that I have known, possibly the most grand of all, that transformed and wholly altered my life. I did not suspect such a thing at the time. I had no sense of anything of significance having its beginning, but merely that I was a lonely sufferer far from home who had tumbled into the snares of the Fiend. Dona Teresa, having cozened and dangled me until I was little more than a cunny-thumbed fool, had pried my much-vaunted chastity from me and in so doing had demonstrated—probably not for the first time—the power of her wiles over a helpless man. If I had been a Papist, I think I would have feared for my immortal soul, and gone bleating to the confessional the moment she left my cell.

But I am no Papist, and though I am a God-fearing man I am not a Church-fearing man, if you take my meaning. I do not think souls can be lost by the thrusting of a few inches of firm flesh into some hot little slit, even if it be not the right and proper slit that one has sworn to use exclusively. Though I felt myself to have been pushed and prodded by her into doing something that was only partly of my desire, yet that in itself did not make her the Devil’s agent, did it? She had played with me, and had had something from me that doubtless she had sought for good reason, and had given something to me that met my need.

I felt no shame and no guilt neither, I must declare. For chastity is like an inflamed boil, which, once pricked, heals and subsides quickly, and does not recur, and when the inflammation is gone is lost to memory. I knew that I loved Anne Katherine no less for having coupled with this stranger-woman on the floor of an African dungeon. And I knew also that my hope of seeing England and Anne Katherine again was slight, so slight that it was little more than monkish madness to attempt to preserve myself chaste until my homecoming. Not even Ulysses had done that, dallying as he did with Circe and Nausicaa and I forget how many others on his long journey toward Ithaca.

(But of course his Penelope had remained chaste. Aye, but that’s another matter, is it not?)

After that first passionate hour Dona Teresa left me, and did not come to me again for two days. Which left me hungry for her company, and kept me busy in my mind replaying our sport. Each time I heard gates clanging, my sweat burst out and my loins came to life, but it was only some guard, bringing me gruel or porridge or other dreary mess. But in time she did come, and again, and again many times.

“How is it,” I asked, “that you can be so free now in this prison? You come and go as if you are the captain of guards.”

“Ah,” she answered, “that am I not, but the captain of guards is my friend. It was he granted me the right to come to you.”

Startling hot jealousy blazed in my flesh, for I thought I knew what she meant by “friend.”

“That dandy, you mean, with the fancy purple breeches?”

“That one, yes. You know him, then?”

“I met him once. It was he who took me from the hospice to the dungeon.”

“He is Fernão da Souza. He is young and ambitious, and he means to be a mighty man in Africa one day.”

“As do they all, these Portugals, eh? Your friend Mendoça, who you say will grant you my pardon, he also hopes to be great in this land.”

“Indeed. And Souza thinks by pleasing me to please Mendoça, who is more powerful. So he lets me use him, by coming here and visiting with you as often as I like. In return for which he uses me, by having me say good things of him to Mendoça” Mischief flickered like heat-lightning across her features. “D’ye see, Andres, how simple it is for me?”

“If one has such beauty as yours, anything is simple.”

“Beauty is not the secret. Cleverness is. I understand what I want, and therefore I seek it and get it.”

“And what is it you want from me, then?”

“Would I tell you outright, Andres, d’ye think?”

“Aye,” I said. “For you know me to be a bluff and open man, and deviousness is not the medicine to use on me. But I answer plainly and openly to a straight request.”

“So you do.”

“Then what part am I to play in the epic of your life, Dona Teresa?”

“Why, you will take me to Europe.”

“What?” I said, amazed.

“It is my great dream. I am an African woman, you know, who has seen only Kongo and Angola, and all the rest of the world is only a fable to me. Do I seem European to you, Andres?”

“Aye, very much.”

“I am not. Yet I study being European. I speak like a European and I wear Portuguese clothes and I carry myself in a Christian way. I hate this place. I am tired of heat and rain and drought and rivers full of beasts that devour. I drink fine wine and cover myself with powders and perfumes and imagine that I am a woman of the court, but all the while I know this is mere savagery, with Jaqqas in the jungle that would eat me if they could, and great elephantos smashing down the trees, and such. I want to hear music. I want to attend the plays. I would have my portrait painted, and enjoy flirting with dukes.”

“So, then, lady, I am to convey you to Lisbon? To Madrid?”

“Why not London?”

“Shall I spread my cloak and fly by it, with you clutching on? Ah, I cannot fly! And I have not even the cloak!”

“You will leave Africa one day, Andres.”

“It is my every prayer.”

“And you will take me. Yes? You will bring me before the Queen Elizabeth, and say, Here is a woman of the court of Kongo, who desires now to be your lady-in-waiting.”

I smiled and said, “You much mistake me, Teresa, if you think the Queen and I are playfellows. But this much I promise you: aid me to escape, and I will seek to bring you out with me when I flee this land.”

Ah, such lies we tell, when smooth thighs and hard-tipped breasts are close at hand!

Was it a lie? I think that at that moment it was God’s own truth, and I saw the two of us in the eye of my mind escaping Africa together, settling out in some sturdy little craft along the coast and upwards to the Canary Isles and the threshold of Europe. But how could I do such a thing? Escaping of my own would be taxing enough; taking a woman would more than treble my risks and difficulties. And then, even if I did—to march into England with a woman of this sort on my arm? Easier to carry in a brace of elephantos, or a little herd of fleet zevveras. Introduce her to the Queen? Aye, and introduce her to Anne Katherine, too, and then have the three of us married by the Archbishop of Canterbury, shall I? But those were all second and third thoughts of a later hour. Just then I took my promise half-seriously, in the way we take cheering fantasies. That I would escape Africa one day seemed altogether possible, for it was my great goal. That I would take Dona Teresa with me was at least worth allowing in hypothesis.

Meanwhile I was a prisoner, and she had found a way to visit with me, and we now were constant lovers, with a rich and powerful lodestone force pulling our bodies together in a vehement and most ecstatic way. It seemed more than natural, that ceaseless yearning of the flesh.

And indeed it was, for she said one day, “Do you still have by you the little talisman I gave you?”

“I do. I keep it on a cord, around my waist, sometimes, to remind me of you, and when I sleep it is against me, or beneath my head.”

“And you had such scorn for it, when I gave it!”

“Well, but it is from you, and so I have grown fond of it.”

“I did lie to you concerning it,” said she, with a wanton grin.

“In what way?”

“That it was an amulet of protection. It is not that.”

“What is it, then?”

She laughed playfully. “An amulet of love,” said she. “To bind you to me, to make you crave me. For I did crave you, but you never looked upon me with desire, so that I thought I must have recourse to some greater power. Was that not wicked of me?”

“Ah,” said I, amused and uneasy both at once: for this was witchcraft, and I feared witchcraft. Yet did I tell myself that it was not the amulet that inspired this lust, but simply her beauty; although I felt some doubt of that in the depth of my soul, and some fear, that in keeping it close I was exposing myself to deviltry.

She brought me wine. She brought me little cakes. She bathed me with her sponge when prison filth grew too deep on me. She opened her body to me joyously and freely, and we developed vast skills at the sport of love, so that prison was less of a torment to me than prison is generally thought to be. Yet was I still a prisoner.

“The new governor will be here in a few weeks’ time,” she told me. “Then shall I intercede with him, by means of Don João de Mendoça, and have you set free from this hole.”

“And shall I still see you, when I am free?”

“We shall have to go about it secretly. But we shall go about it, I pledge you that!”

“And if your fine Portugal friends discover us, what shall become of me? Back to the dungeon? Or worse?”

“They shall not discover us.”

“Aye, you are practiced in these crafts, I know. If you were a man, I think you would be governor of this place before you were thirty.”

“If I were a man,” she said. “But I shall be the governor’s governor instead, and have the rewards without the burdens. Is that not better? Considering that I am not a man, and am by that disqualified from holding office. Why is that, d’ye think, that women may not hold office?”

“In England they may,” I pointed out.

“In England, aye! But these Portugals think otherwise. They think a woman good for only two things, both of them done in bed, and the second one being childbearing.”

“The other is not done in bed, Dona Teresa.”

“Not by you and me in this bedless cell, perhaps. But customarily—”

“Nay, I mean cookery,” I said, “for is that not the other thing women do, when they are not with child?”

She laughed heartily at that, and gave me a broad nudge.

Then, more serious, she said, “What offices may women hold in England?”

“Forsooth, Dona Teresa, the very highest! Surely you know we have a Queen, and had another Queen before her!”

That did not awe her. “So I am aware,” she said. “Your Elizabeth, and your Mary that was half a Spaniard. But queening is only an accident of birth. If there is no son, then the daughter must have the throne, or the power will be lost to the royal family, is that not so? Even the Spaniards, to whom a woman is nothing, have had queens, I think.”

“Aye, Isabella of Castile, for one, and mayhap others.”

“But what other offices in England do women hold? Do they sit in your courts and go to your councils?”

I thought a moment. “Nay, it is impossible.”

“Impossible, or only unthinkable?”

“There are no women in our Parliament. We choose none for our Judiciary.”

“And as your priests? Any women?”

“Nay, not that, either.”

“But you have a Queen. She is supreme, and has heads stricken off as it pleases her, and looses the forces of war. Below her, nothing. Eh, Andres?”

“It is so. Save for the Queen, our women are subject to their fathers and husbands in all things.”

“So it is the same for all you Europeans. A clever woman must rule by ruling her rulers, unless she be a queen. Do you regard me as clever, Andres?”

“You are the most clever woman that ever I knew, though it may be that our Elizabeth is more than your match. But perhaps no one else.”

“Then I shall gain what I crave,” she said, “which is majesty and might, or at the very least some strength of place. Fie, a woman has more privilege among the blackamoors of Kongo than they grant her in Europe. The blacks have had queens, too. And their women may own property. Yours are property.”

“You speak of the Kongo folk as ‘they’ and ‘blackamoors.’ You speak of the Portugals as ‘these Portugals.’ Do you stand outside both peoples, then, and look upon them all as strangers?”

Her face grew downcast. “In some degree I do.”

“Outside both, a member of neither? Is that not painful to you, to have no true nation, Teresa?”

“That was not of my choosing.”

“Who were your parents?”

“My father was a Portugal in the court of Don Alvaro, the Manikongo, that is, the black king. He was an adviser on military matters, and served the Manikongo bravely when the Jaqqas invaded his kingdom and drove the king into sanctuary on the Hippopotamus Island. He was Don Rodrigo da Costa, a very great man. He is dead now, of a fever taken while in battle.”

“And your mother?”

“Dona Beatriz, whose father was Duarte Mendes, the viceroy at São Tomé. They say that she was beautiful, that she resembled me much, but was darker, having more African blood than I. I never knew her. She died when I was a babe.”

“That grieves me. I also lost my mother early.”

“The Jaqqas took her, and I suppose used her in their feasts.” For a moment her eyes showed pain, and anger. Then she looked to me and said, “If she had lived, she would have been a great woman. I will be great in her stead. I will find the place where power is in this land, and I will seize possession of it. Unless”— and she smiled wantonly—”unless you bring me forth from here when you escape, and take me to England. In England I would also be famous and great. Tell me of England, Andres.”

“What would you know?”

“Is it cold there?”

“Nay, not very. The land is green. The rain falls all the year long, and the grass is thick.”

“I hear of a thing called snow.”

“There is not much of that,” I said.

“Tell me what it is.”

“Snow is rain, that freezes in the winter and falls from the sky, and covers the countryside like a white blanket, but not often for very long.”

“Freezes? That word is unknown to me.”

I groped and fumbled for explanations. “On the highest mountains of Africa the air is cold, is it not?”

“Yes.”

“And are those mountains not covered at their crests by a whiteness?”

“So I have heard. But I have not seen it.”

“The whiteness is water, that has been turned hard by the coldness, and made into snow, and also into ice, which is snow pressed tight. But why talk so much of snow? England has little snow. It is a mild cool land with sweet air, and fine fleecy clouds, and sometimes the sky is gray with dampness and fog, but we have come to love even that.”

“You scorn the Pope there.”

“Aye, that we do!” I stared at her. “You know of the Pope? What is the Pope to you?”

“The Pope is the King of Christendom,” said Dona Teresa. “The Pope is the right hand of God, and King Philip and all his subjects are subject to him.”

“You are a Christian, then?”

“My father was Don Rodrigo da Costa, and I am no savage, Andres,” said she with much show of dignity. “Why do the English mock and defy the Pope?”

“Why, because it is madness to be governed by a religious authority that is seated a thousand miles beyond seas and mountains, and that judges questions of English law by the standards of Italy and Spain and sometimes France, but never by those of England. The Pope conspires to dethrone our Queen. The Pope would deliver us into the power of our enemies of Spain. The Pope has strived always to tell us what we might do, and sometimes he has succeeded; but at last Great Harry overthrew him—”

“Great Harry?”

“King Henry that was the eighth of his name, the father of Queen Elizabeth.”

“Overthrew the Pope? Nay, how was that possible? The Pope still reigns in Rome.”

“In Rome, aye. But we have broken free. And spared ourselves from greedy monks who bleed the people of their wealth, and spared ourselves from ignorant mummery and mumpsimus nonsense, that chanted at us in an ancient language and smothered us in the reek of incense and the crying out to idols.”

“Why, then, you are not Christians!”

“Christians we are,” I said, “but we are English, and that makes a difference in all things.”

“Aye,” she said. “English have yellow hair and hate the Pope. Those are the chiefest differences. You must tell me more of England another time. And of yourself: you must tell me of your boyhood, and of your schooling and how you came to go to sea, and if there be anyone you love in England, and how you fell prisoner into the hands of the Portugal, and many other such things. But we will talk of those things later.”

“Later, aye.”

“And now let us talk no more,” she said.

To which I concurred, for she moved against me and drew her satin-smooth skin across my chest, and once more she magicked me in that brazen way of hers, engulfing, devouring, that starfish mouth drawing me in. She had no shame: that was the essence of her. Dona Teresa lay at the center of her world and all other things pivoted about her, and that which she desired was that which she took, be it jewels or fine clothes or the bodies of men. Yet there was an ease and an openness about this which made it not at all unseemly: it was as if she were a man, merely following her star, as we do. Why is it that ambition in a man is a virtue, and in a woman is shrewish discordance? Why is it that lustiness in a man is a mark of strength, and in a woman a stigma of wickedness? Aye, there are fallen women aplenty, but never a fallen man, except only those who have had high positions and let themselves foolishly tumble from it.

I learned much about the world from Dona Teresa da Costa in our feverish couplings on the floor of that murky stinking prison cell. I learned that a woman could be much like a man in certain aspects of character without giving up anything of her womanhood, if she be clever enough. I learned that an entire sex has been left to waste in idleness and chatter, for that we suppress them to our own advantage. I learned that in the darkest heart of Africa could blossom grace and intelligence and vigor that would give honor to any kingdom.

All these things I might have learned, I wager, from close study of my own Queen. For surely Bess is a prince among princes, a woman with all man’s attributes and those of woman, too, and she gives the lie to those who say that the sex is simple and weak. But it has not been my privilege, nor shall it ever be, to strut like a Leicester or Ralegh in the halls of Her Majesty: but Dona Teresa has afforded me close instruction indeed, her eyes glistening near to mine, her tongue-tip tickling the tip of mine, her hardened paps burning like fiery coals against my breast, and, moreover, her dark and mercurial mind open to my inspection, so that I could see her intentions and projects as clearly as, I think, anyone ever did. I would not compare her to my fair pink-and-gold Anne Katherine, for they were as unlike as one planet is to another, as orange Mars to dazzling Venus; but yet I sometimes found myself putting Dona Teresa’s forwardness against Anne Katherine’s timidity and shy uncertain way, and Dona Teresa’s snorting fury of lust against Anne Katherine’s tender and sweet embrace, and in such comparisons I felt ashamed and guilty of making them, for the olive-hued woman of Africa emerged far the more brilliant in the matching. Which is why, I hazard, we should not stray from our own beds to those of strange women, lest we discover things we are better not knowing.

Under Dona Teresa’s ministrations my captivity was not, then, the most painful of captivities to endure. There were bruises and discomforts aplenty, for sometimes the jailers grew angry with me, or I with them, and they beat me for my insubordinations. Thus I came to lose a forward tooth. Dona Teresa observed that, and asked at once for the name of the man who had injured me, so that she could have him punished for it. “Nay,” I said, “I stumbled and struck my face by accident,” I said, for I feared that the guards might take vengeance on me if I informed, and might even slay me. Other than such little things, though, mine was a comfortable life, with a woman of great qualities to be my consort on many a day, and excellent wine sometimes to drink, and little treats from the finest banquets of the city. Yet for all that I was not born to dwell in an earthen cavern, and I yearned for the sunlight and for freedom.

How many months had it been? I had lost all count. A season of rain and a dry season, and rain again and drought—was that not the full cycle of the year twice over? Was there yet an England? Was Elizabeth still its Queen, or had the Spaniards come again with a new and less feckless Armada? Anne Katherine, what of her? How fared my brother Henry, and his patron Ralegh, and the great Sir Francis Drake, and did the Thames still run past London to the sea? Lost, lost, all lost to me. Dona Teresa’s supple thighs and bobbling breasts were comfort but not comfort enough, as I raged and paced and suffered in my dungeon, and counselled myself to a philosophic calm, and raged yet again.

At last she came to me and said, “The new governor is here, Don Francisco d’Almeida. He has come with four hundred and fifty foot-soldiers and fifty African horse, all picked men, and he is full of bold plans. He has a project for an expedition clear across Africa, and a chain of forts to protect the road from here to the sea that lies on the other coast.”

“Very bold indeed,” I said. “And have you spoken with him, and will he let me from this hole?”

“I have spoken somewhat with him.”

“And?”

“He is a vain and idle man.”

My spirit, which had briefly soared, plummeted like Lucifer, who tumbled all the day long from heaven. “That is, he will not set me free?”

“He is occupied with his projects. Chiefly he is in struggle with the Jesuit fathers here. They claim rights in his government, and refuse obedience to the civil powers.”

“It is ever thus with the Pope’s men. And it is ever thus with these dim-souled governors here. Am I to moulder down here forever, Teresa?”

“Peace, peace. Having failed to win the ear of Governor d’Almeida, I have turned to Don João de Mendoça.”

I had long ago lost faith in the powers of this Mendoça. It seemed plain that he himself was unable to gain headway in Angola, in that he had dwelled here at a time of no governor without being able to take command, and had been set aside to some degree by this silly new governor out of Portugal, Don Francisco. But now Dona Teresa had arranged an interview for me with Mendoça, just as I had come to think no action ever would be taken on my behalf. “He will see you tomorrow,” she said, “and he intends to enroll you into his service.”

“Can he do such a thing?”

“He can do as he pleases. Now that Governor d’Almeida is here, and stands revealed as a fool, it is Don João’s time to make his reach for power. Be of cheer.”

“So shall I be.”

She caught my wrist by her hand and drew me close, ear to her mouth. In a low voice she said, “One thing, only. Give no clue to him that anything has passed between you and me save geographical instruction, or it may go hard for both of us.”

“Geographical instruction?”

“Aye. I have come to you all these months to be taught the globe, and the oceans, and the countries of Europe. Nothing more. Nothing more.”

“Don João de Mendoça is a jealous man?”

“He is a man of pride.”

Which confirmed what I had already guessed, that she was this Mendoça’s mistress, that she was using with him that which lay between her thighs as one of the instruments of her ascent. Well, and well, I had not thought her to be a virgin, nor to lie alone on those many nights that she was not with me.

It did not matter. I was of cheer. With her hand on Mendoça’s privates she might yet be able to squeeze me out my freedom.

9

In the morning there came to me that fancy-breeched captain of the guards, Fernão da Souza, another whom I suspected that Teresa had conquered. As was his custom he was most nobly dressed, all lace and spotless gloves and scented boots, and satin sleeves and pearl-trimmed cuffs of great flare and breadth: a young man, tall for a Portugal, fair-complected, with just enough of a look of shrewdness and ambition in his eyes to take the curse off his foppishness. “You are summoned,” he told me, “to come before Don João de Mendoça, who out of the greatness of his heart has granted you the opportunity to make yourself of use. Clean yourself and put on these garments.”

No foul-smelling ragabones for Don João! I sponged myself and clad myself in decent simple clothes, and went forth from my cell and out, blinking and astonished, into the huge blaze of daylight. And into the plaza of the town, and beyond the church to one of a small group of houses done in the Portuguese style—that is, fashioned out of boards, and with a second story, instead of being a thing of light framework and mud and thatch. This was the palace of Don João de Mendoça, whom I found already at his midday meal when I was brought in.

Mendoça was a man of much presence and authority, who in any sort of society would rise to a position of distinction. What he was doing in this remote colony, instead of dwelling at Lisbon and dealing in high affairs of state, I surely could not imagine, though later I found out what should have been evident enough to me: with a Spaniard on the throne of Portugal, Don João saw little hope of advancement in his homeland, nor, as a younger son, had he inherited great lands and wealth. So like so many other men of spirit he had gone to the tropic lands of empire, where all things begin anew for those with zeal and ability.

He was a man past middle years, forty or somewhat beyond that, which left me wondering how he could cope with the demanding passions of his paramour Dona Teresa. In stature Mendoça was low, but yet his shoulders were of great breadth and his chest was deep, so that when sitting he seemed a person of power and majesty. It was the same with Sir Francis Drake, who was not tall, but dominated by easy force at a counciltable. Don João’s flesh was full but firm, his skin was swarthy in the Portuguese way, his eyes were large and very glistening. He was dressed finely, yet not in the overdone dandified way of Captain da Souza: his was more restrained a costume, in tones of black and gray, with black velvet slippers. The feast that was spread before him was a royal one, I thought, although served on simple pewter dishes rather than fine plate. In many bowls and tankards and platters were the foods of the country, fruits and vegetables that I did not recognize, and meats of several kinds, all in deep and thick sauces, and reeking of the spices that the Portugals so love, their garlics and saffrons and capsicums and the like. Two kinds of wine were on the table, and beakers of beer or ale also. Don João had a platter to his mouth and was sipping of a heavy golden sauce, and with great deliberation he finished his sip, and hacked him a piece of what I took to be mutton or veal, and speared it prettily with his knife and chewed at it most delicately. Then he took a vast deep draught of his pale wine, and wiped his lips, and looked up toward me, and I saw in him a man well satisfied with his meal.

“Dona Teresa tells me you speak passable Portuguese,” he said without other word of greeting.

“Aye, that I do.”

“Where did you come by that skill?”

“By stages, sir, since I was a boy in England and my brother taught me some.”

“Your accent is too broad, though you have the words and the sense quite aptly. You speak our words in the flat English way, without music. Speak you more in the throat and in the nose, do you take my meaning? Put some thunder in your vowels. Put some savory spice in them. I think it is your English food, that is so empty of taste, that causes you English to speak your words in such a flavorless way. How do you say your name?”

“Andrew Battell, sir.”

“Sit you down, Andrew Battell. Will you eat?”

“If it please you.”

“Eat. There’s enough here for a regiment.” He pushed vessels of meat and gruel toward me, and a goblet and some wine, and other things. I was perplexed by such plenty, having lived so long on foul prison fare leavened only by those tasties that Dona Teresa had smuggled to me. As I hesitated he stabbed a slab of meat and put it before me, and I took of it, for fear of offending against his hospitality. It was meat that looked to be mutton, at a glance of it, but to my tongue it was not in the least muttonous, more in the direction of veal, though not far in that direction, and it was covered with a sauce of hot pepper and onions that was like live coals in my mouth upon first touch, though I quickly grew familiar with it. Don João watched me with curiosity as I ate the strange meat and then a second piece.

“You like it, then.”

“Indeed I do. What sort of meat is this, sir?”

“A vast delicacy. You know not how fortunate you are.”

“And its name?”

“It is called in these lands ambize angulo, that is to say, a hog-fish, because it is as fat as a pork.”

“It has neither the savor nor taste of a fish.”

“Nay,” said Don João, “for it is no more a fish than you or I, though it lives in he rivers. It is the animal that in the New World the Indians call the manatee, that has two hands, and a tail like a shield. It never goes out from the fresh water, but feeds on the grass that grows on the banks, and has a mouth like the muzzle of an ox.”

“A creature passing strange.”

“Indeed. There are of these fishes some that weigh five hundred pounds apiece. The fishermen take them in their little boats, by marking the places where they feed, and then with their hooks and forks striking and wounding them. They draw them forth dead of the water, and in the kingdom of the Kongo all such creatures that are caught must be taken straightaway to the black king, for whosoever does not incurs the penalty of death. Here we suffer under no such restriction, and we eat it often. Will you have more?”

“In some while, perhaps. This richness of food surfeits me, after so lengthy a captivity.”

“I see. But it improves your Portuguese. Do you comprehend that this sauce has sharpened your inflection, and made you eloquent?”

“Not the sauce, I think, but only listening to your words,” I said.

“Are you a flatterer, then?”

“Nay, I mean no flattery. It is only that I have a good ear, and in following your way of speech, I improve my own.”

“Ah. Well said. You are clever, and learn things quickly.”

To this I made no reply.

Don João went on, “This meat is of the thigh of elephanto, and this is a porridge, that takes the place of bread in this land. And this is a bean they call nkasa, that they stew. The oil is the oil of the palm-tree, this being no land for olives. And the wines are the good wines of the Canaries. We have not enough salt here, but otherwise we dine well. Why are you a prisoner, Englishman?”

“For that I was captured.”

“Yes. Yes, I know that. In Brazil, was it?”

“Aye, sir.”

“But prisoners are useless weights. If we did not kill you, we should have put you to some function.”

“That has been done. Governor Serrão used me in a voyage to the presidio of Masanganu, some two years past. But when I returned I fell ill, and upon my recovery I was jailed, I know not why, and I have languished ever since in one of the dungeons beneath the citadel.”

“You are a pilot?”

“That I am.”

“And willing to serve?”

“It is not my prime choice, but I prefer it to captivity.”

“And your prime choice?”

“To return to my England. I have a betrothed in England, and my only dream is to go back to her and make her my wife, and spend the rest of my life on land.”

“Yet you were a pirate in Brazil.”

“A privateer, sir, seeking to win some gold with which to buy my land.”

“To steal some gold, you mean?”

“It would not have been the gold of Portugal, Don João, but rather that of Peru, already stolen once by the Spaniards, and not theirs by God’s main design.”

“Ah,” he said, and said no more a long while, but mopped his bowls and searched in them for more bits of meat. In time he said, “I like you, Battell.”

“Thank you, Don João.”

“I do. You have a rough English honesty about you that pleases me. You do not fawn, you do not lick. When I thought you might be flattering me you said, Nay, I am only copying your way of speech, where one of the captains here might have given me a lengthy song about my elegance of style. I will let you go home, I think.”

I had not expected that. It stunned me so that my tongue was nailed to the roof of my mouth and my jaws hung slack like those of a witless gaffer.

“If you will do some service here first, that is,” he continued.

“Name it, sir!”

“We are shorthanded of mariners here. There is trade to do along this coast, to the kingdom of the Kongo and beyond it northward into Loango, where they have riches that they will exchange for baubles—the teeth and the tails of elephantos, and the oil of palms, and the cloth also that they make of palms, and much more, which we can have for beads and looking-glasses and rough cloth. Of ordinary seamen there are enough, but scarce anyone to command them, and do the navigation, and keep our pinnaces off the reefs. I would have you do some piloting for us, a few voyages, six months’ worth of service, perhaps, or a year, and if you acquit yourself honorably we will put you aboard a ship for Europe, and God go with you.”

My face grew red and I stammered with joy, for this answered all my prayers.

“Don João!” I said. “Don João!”

“Will you serve, then?”

“Aye. And gladly, if I buy my liberty with it.”

“Done, then. Take ye another piece of the hog-fish.”

He shoved the platter at me, and in my delight I cut me a great huge dripping slice, and crammed it down all at once, so that I like to have choked on it but for the gulps of Don João’s precious wine of Lanzarote that I took with easy abandon. He watched me without objection. Already I felt myself halfway back in England, Africa dropping away from me like a sloughed skin, and the morsel of manatee meat in my mouth, strange flavor and fiery of spicing, seemed to me the last strangeness I would have to swallow. O! but I was wrong in that, and strangeness aplenty was waiting for me down the channel of time, and the meat of the gentle sluggish mud-grubbing manatee was hardly the worst of it. But just then I was bound for home, at least in the fancies of my mind, and I thought to myself that this Don João de Mendoça was unlike all other Portugals and Spaniards, a man of sympathy and compassion and true grandeur. I could almost have kissed his boot, but that I have never been the boot-kissing sort to anyone, and might find it hard to make such obeisance even to Her Majesty.

He said, “Dona Teresa speaks highly of you. I think her judgment is the proper one.”

“She is a perceptive woman.”

“Indeed. A rare woman indeed. I have known her many years, Battell. Her father died young and heroically, in the Kongo, and I have been her guardian.”

And something rather other than a guardian, I told myself, but did not say it. A rough English honesty I might truly have, but rough English honesty does not extend to rash looseness of tongue except among fools.

Yet I saw Teresa in my mind’s eye, naked in my cell and oiled with sweat, crouching above me and lowering herself to encompass my pestle within her mortar, and then setting up such a grinding as would turn marble to powder; and I knew that if that image were to leap from my mind to Mendoça’s I would find myself no sea-pilot at all, but a galley-slave or something worse. And I saw also Mendoça, naked and sleek and plump, with his knees between Teresa’s thighs and his hands clasping both her breasts, and that image kindled a fire of turmoil in my own breast that was so dismaying that I compelled myself hastily to think of manatees instead, and elephantos, and the shining fishes of the tropic seas. While my head so swam with these pictures, Don João continued to talk, prating of Dona Teresa’s virtues, her wisdom and command of the arts of music and poetry and her shrewdness, which he said was the equal of any man’s, and her beauty, telling me of her keen luminous eyes and supple limbs and cunning lips as though he were describing some woman of a far-off land. Well, and he had good reason to be delighted in her, and to praise his own good fortune by praising her this way to me. I understood his zeal only too clearly.

It was time now for an end to my audience with him. We had arrived at our compact: I would do some piloting, and then he would turn me loose. It seemed strange to me that the Portugals, who had found all these lands and the far side of Africa as well in the days of Prince Henry the Navigator, these Portugals who had gone off into the misty beyond and discovered even India, would be so reduced as to press an English pilot into their service, in the very seas where Bartholomeu Dias and Vasco da Gama and their other great mariners had won such repute. But evidently the Portugals had fallen upon low times, if they had to have the Spaniard Philip for their king, and why not, then, the English Andrew as their pilot, me who had had only the lightest of training for that task? I thanked Don João de Mendoça once more for his generosity of spirit and also for this meal of rare delicacies.

He clapped his hands and two slaves appeared to clear the table— blacks of some other region of Africa, with flat noses and lips like fillets of beef. One had the ill fortune to stumble and splash some drops of an oily yellow sauce on Don João’s garment, staining it, and with a single smooth unthinking motion Don João scooped up a pewter boat holding another sauce, a fiery hot one, and dashed it across the slave’s face and into his eyes, so that the poor brute cried out and covered his face with his hands and dropped to the floor, rolling over and over and sobbing. Don João spurned him with his foot, pushing him aside, and the slave, crawling on his knees, scuttled from the room, for all I know blinded, or at the least in mighty pain. So it is with these Portugals. Don João was in truth a man of sympathy and compassion and all of that, civilized and humane, maybe the best of all his kind, but even he, for a few spots on his sleeve, would deal out a terrible agony to a fellow creature. It was a useful lesson to me, not that I really needed it, in the complexity of human nature, that I should see Don João as a superior being of great merit, and that he should in reality be quite far from perfection. But perhaps that is a lesson in the simplicity of human nature, namely, my own, that I should have expected total goodness in a Portugal. The unhappy slave might at least be grateful that he did not serve a Spaniard; for then his master might have had him flayed, or worse, for those small flecks of grease.

10

And then did I take up the honorable and exalted trade of ocean-going pilot, the finest of all maritime professions, which my father had mastered in his twelve years of Trinity House, and which my late brother Thomas also had attained. It humbled me to be following in their path without having undergone their long and strenuous licentiate period, and it struck me as hugely ironical that I would do my piloting for Portugals instead of for the Queen.

But I had no fear of doing it badly and disgracing all the Battells of time past and time to come. Don João had said it himself, that I am clever and learn things quickly. I mean no immodesty, but it is true. And also I was then no novice at sea, having made a voyage from England to Brazil, and one from Brazil to Africa, along with many lesser ones in the seas of Europe, even as far as Muscovy, and I had not made those voyages with my eyes closed. Finally I had already had one taste of piloting, when I sailed Governor Serrão’s pinnace down the Kwanza from Masanganu to São Paulo de Loanda, and though that is not the same as going out into the Atlantic, still, it calls for some skill.

What is it, this craft of piloting, that I value so high?

It is nothing less than the heart of navigation: the art of guiding vessels from one place to another when land or navigational marks are in sight.

I do not mean to scorn the science of navigating in the open sea, which is the province of the ship’s master, unless master and pilot be combined in one individual. That is called grand navigation, and it is no trifling aspect of seamanship. A Magellan or a Columbus or, supremely, a Drake who points his bow into unknown seas is scarce to be mocked.

And yet, I must say, what is grand navigation once one is out in the great waters, except the doing of the same task day after day, that is, keeping the wind to one’s back and the deck above the waves, and seeing to it that you sail toward sunset if westering is your aim, and the other way if you would go the other way? Whereas the pilot—ah, the pilot must cope with a thousand thousand perils, and have every science at his command to prevent disaster, and his task is full of intricacies in every moment.

Mind you, the pilot does not have land constantly in sight. The prudent seaman does not often choose to keep close inshore—there are too many dangers and mysteries there—but rather prefers to take himself to deeper waters, beyond what we call the kenning, which is the distance at which the coast is visible from the masthead. But it is the pilot’s duty to sight capes and headlands often enough to be sure of his vessel’s position. Where the territory is well known, he has his rutter or portolano to tell him of the points he must watch for: his book of charts, compiled by generations of his predecessors, marking each promontory, each island, each snag or speck that is a landmark to him. And where he sails an unknown coast he must use his wits to learn the landmarks, and use his instruments when no landmarks are ready at hand for him.

So we feel our way, with compass and lead, with cross-staff and quadrant, with astrolabe and plumb-bob. We strive never to veer dangerously close ashore, nor to let ourselves be driven perilously far to sea. We must know the winds and the stars and the messages of the clouds.

There is more. A time comes in the voyage when landfall must be made; and then there are new pothers, for the pilot must deal in shoals and reefs, in tides, in sudden bores and currents. The moon rules the tides and the pilot must then live by the moon in her phases, or risk running his ship aground and running himself to the land of simpletons. So it was a sizable assignment that Don João was offering me, made doubly difficult in that I had never seen these African waters before—unskilled pilot bluffing his way in unfamiliar seas!—and triply difficult for having as my companions a crew of Portugals who had no reason to love or respect me or to share with me such knowledge of the route as they might themselves have.

The pinnace I was given was the Infanta Beatrix, a larger vessel than the one I had had on the river, perhaps seventy or eighty tons. Perhaps it was more of a caravel than a pinnace, in fact, for it had three masts, including one little one at the stern-castle, and her sails were lateens, that would let her run before the wind and also go near it, that is, sail with a side wind. But in addition there was some mongrel arrangement for square-rigging her on the fore-mast, if need be.

They let me go aboard her to make examination and grow familiar with her. For to a mariner a new ship is much like a new woman, that needs a little getting used to. All women have the same parts, in more or less the same places; but yet they differ in size and shape and in their workings, and even an expert saddleman takes a few moments to learn the way of her. With a ship even more so. The hull is below and the masts overhead, but there are many varieties of placement within that arrangement, and one must seek out and know ahead of time the details of sails and spars and spirits, shrouds and tacklings, braces and stays, ratlines and cables, and all of that. So I wandered about, discovering the Infanta Beatrix. She was tight and sturdy, a handy ship, promising ease of sailing. There was a cabin for me in the poop, though small, and for my guidance I had some instruments and also various books of tables, old and much water-stained but still useful: an ephemerides, an almanac, a table of tides, and a rutter-book. Not one of these gave the complete information of the coast, yet each held a part, and by employing them all and the protection of God besides I thought I would be able to find my way up the coast the first time. After that I should be able to manage it less hesitantly.

The crew was a smallish one. The master, who was my superior officer and had command of all and responsibility for the cargo, was one Pedro Faleiro, who seemed to me weak-willed and short-tempered, but not evil. Of others we had a carpenter and a caulker and a cooper, a gunner, a boatswain, a quartermaster, and a company of ordinary seamen, all roguish and lame-spirited, that struck me very different from English sailors in all respects. Yet they seemed to know one rope from another, which was all I would ask of them. I think I would not have cared to cross the ocean with such men, but a journey of fifty or one hundred leagues up the coast and back was a different matter.

Though I was English and not a Papist, they were outwardly friendly to me, and Faleiro and some others invited me to take the Mass with them on the eve of sailing. “Nay,” I said, “it is not my custom,” and their faces clouded, but only for an instant, and they let me be. So off they went to their Romish mysteries, their swallowing of wafers and guzzling of wine, that is, their eating of the body of Jesus and the drinking of His blood, as they themselves will admit to believing they are doing.

I would not have minded some word or two of God’s blessing myself before putting to sea. But there happen not to be any chapels of the Anglican rite in this part of Africa, and I saw no value to me in the Latin ceremony, which is not a conduit for the divine power but rather an impediment to it. Instead I went off apart by myself and looked toward the sky, and said within my soul, “Lord, I am Andrew Battell Thy servant, and I have fallen into a strange fate, which no doubt Thou had good reason for sending upon me. I will do Thy bidding in all things and I look to Thee to preserve me and to keep my body from peril and my soul from corruption. Amen.”

I remember that prayer well, because I had many other occasions afterward to use it, as my African years lengthened and the dangers that menaced me grew ever more horrific. And I think it is a useful prayer. I do believe that if one turns directly to the Lord and speaks openly and plainly to Him, that it is a thousand thousand times more effective than any telling of beads and lighting of candles and muttering of Pater Nosters and Ave Marias and kneelings and grovelings before some priest in fine brilliant robes and majestic pomp.

When I had done praying I returned to my dark cell in the presidio; for, though I was no longer under guard, they had not given me any prettier quarters. A place in the town would be ready for me when I returned from my voyage, they said. (There was no need to guard me now. They knew I would not flee. Where could I go? How? I could not swim to England.)

Soon after, Dona Teresa came to me. She wore a dark cloak and a veil across her lovely face.

“You see I keep my word,” she said.

“I am most grateful.”

“Don João spoke of you warmly, and with great praise. He says you are a man of skill and strength and shrewdness, and that in your blunt way you have a kind of diplomacy, and that you are altogether commendable.”

“Aye, that I am.”

“And you are possessed of great modesty, too.”

“Aye, Dona Teresa! I am famous for it, and rightly so.”

“You have other gifts, too, for which you could be famous also, but Don João knows nothing of those.”

“Nay,” I said. “I told him, as we sat over our wine and our hog-fish stew, how many times I had enjoyed your body, and how admirably I had tupped you, and what sounds of extreme pleasure I was able to bring from your lips. And he gave me congratulation, saying that he had sweated like a Dutchman over you without achieving your ecstasy, and he wondered if I had any secret of it that I could impart to him. So thereupon I said—”

“Andres!”

“—that it was simple, that one need only put one’s mouth close to your left ear—”

“Andres!”

“—and speak to you in English, saying certain inflammatory words such as ‘cheese’ and ‘butter’ and ‘tankard’, and upon hearing those words you went into such frenzy that it took all of a man’s vigor to ride you without being thrown, and—”

“I pray you, stop this!” she cried, holding in her laughter but letting some giggles escape.

“—and straightaway you would reach your summit of pleasure, from merely the sound of some English. So Don João thanked me and commanded me to instruct him in my language, which I have done, and when he seeks your body next you will, I think, hear him speak some of the fine old words of English at intimate moments, whispering to you, ‘cobweb’ and ‘cutlery’ and such like. And I advise you, Dona Teresa, to respond with much movement of your hips and thrusting of your middle and gasping and moaning deep in your throat, or else it will give me the lie, and I will lose standing and prestige with your Don João.”

“You are a very foolish man,” she said fondly.

“I am set free after long months of prisonhood, and I think it has softened my brain with excitement.”

“Will you speak to me in English?”

“An’ it please you, I would speak to you in Polack, or in the language of the Turk.”

“Speak in English.”

“I am thy faithful servant and highest admirer,” I said in English, with a bow and a grand flourish.

“Nay,” she said, “not yet, not yet! Whisper these things in my ear, as you said, when we are intimates!”

“Ah. Surely.”

She unwound the veil and laid bare her elegant face, which more and more seemed to me to have some hidden blackamoor beauty in its features—that fullness of the lips, that breadth and height of the cheekbones. And then with a similar gesture she doffed her cloak, pivoting and whirling while unshipping the small catch that clasped it at her throat, and I saw that beneath the cloak was nothing at all except the supple nakedness of Teresa, her breasts swaying and tolling like bell-clappers in bells, her thighs glowing darkly in the dark shine of my cell. And at that sight so suddenly revealed I felt an access of joy that all but had me shouting out an hurrah. She came to me and I stroked and rubbed her with my eager hands and felt her beginning to writhe beneath my touch, most especially when I put my fingers to that plump tight-haired mound at her belly’s base. She made hissing sounds and spoke to me in words I did not know, but which I think must have been of the Kongo tongue that was native to her mother’s grandmother, and as I went into her her eyes rolled as those of one transported. The keenness and wildness of her passions were almost frightening. We went at it with right regal fury, and I could not help but give play to my wit, which hearkened back to our foolery with words, and at one moment of delight I put my lips beside her ear and murmured such English words as “stonemason” and “turnip-greens” and “scavenger,” the first that came to my mind.

Which made her shriek with crazy laughter and pound my back with her hand in a fair savage way, and down below I felt her squeeze me tight, in that style of having a little fist concealed in there that some very passionate women have, and she cried, “Ah, Andres, how I do love you, Andres!”

And with the using of that word “love” a chill passed over me in all my overheatedness. For I thought of Anne Katherine. I had taken care not to do that for quite some long time, but now she came rushing into my guilty soul. I told myself that these are deep waters indeed that I sail, if Teresa and I have taken up with the light sports of word-play, that are the mark of lovers, and that has carried us onward to talk of loving. For mere coupling like rutty cats in a foreign land is one thing, which may be forgivable when lust overtakes one’s chastity, but love is quite another, and perilous.

Then I told myself what I should have thought at the first: that oftentimes people speak of love when their bodies are entwined, and it is a human thing, a failing of the moment. One always loves the person who is giving one’s body extreme pleasure—at least at the instant such pleasure is being administered—but that is not the same thing as the love that bonds man and woman across the decades. Or so I told myself.

And put the question from my mind, and had my pleasure in good hard hot pulsing spurts, and fell gasping over Dona Teresa. And we lay quiet a long while, until she rose and recloaked herself and went from my cell, wishing me a bon voyage.

11

The next day we sailed. I thought my piloting would be put to the test at the very first, in the finding of our way out of the harbor of São Paulo de Loanda, through all the shoals and shallows. But there was no need. The crewmen knew the road across the Bay of Goats, and did it without my instruction, following the buoys and marks and taking us past the tip of the isle of Loanda and into the open sea.

Yet I marked well what they did; for another time I might have to find the way of my own.

There was some challenge soon after, as we beat our way northward. Not far north of São Paulo de Loanda a river reaches the sea that has several names, the Mbengu or the Nzenza, which the Portugals choose to call the Mondego. Under whatever name it roils the waters with its outflow, and had to be gone around with care, which we did, and then it was straight sailing.

Shortly I discovered that my apprehensions of difficulty in my new trade were for nothing. It was a fair sea and we had no great journey to make, only fifty leagues to the mighty river of Kongo, that the Portugal call Zaire. That is their way of speaking a native word, nzari, which has the meaning simply of “the great river,” and a great river it is, one of the greatest, I trow, in all the world. To reach it we sailed with land-winds pushing us, creeping still all along the coast, and every day we cast anchor in some safe place either behind a point or in a good haven. There were a few small tasks of decision to make as we journeyed, but on the whole I think a child could have done the piloting, and it gave me no high opinion of the Portugals of Angola to think they had waited this voyage until they had a captive Englishman to read their charts for them. Oh, I did some gaping and some squinting, and I came out with my astrolabe and looked most solemn, and measured stars with my cross-staff very gravely, and from time to time fed my compass needle with my lodestone to renew its magnetism. And took some soundings, and did my timekeeping, and had things done with tacks and sheets and bowlines, and all of that. I wanted the Portugals to prize me highly.

The place of our going was an island in the mouth of the River Zaire, which in my orders from Don João de Mendoça was called the Ilha das Calabaças, that is, Calabash Island. When I looked to my charts, meaning to find the outermost of the isles of the estuary, that island was marked, Ilheo dos Cavallos Marinhos, which means Hippopotamus Island. I asked Pedro Faleiro about this, saying, “I will find any island I am asked to find, but you had better keep your names more orderly.”

Faleiro smiled. “They are the same place, Calabashes or Hippopotamuses. We have a town there, where we do our trading.”

I had heard that name before, Hippopotartius Island, but I had to roam some way into my memory before I found it. Dona Teresa had spoken of it, I recalled. Her father, she said, had fought bravely and died there at a time when the Jaqqas had erupted into the kingdom of the Kongo. I asked Faleiro if he could tell me anything of that, and he said, “It was long ago, before my coming here. But they still relate tales of it, to remind us of the fury of the devil Jaqqas.”

And a tale of horror and ferocity he unfolded, that made me think of the worst stories of history that I had heard, the diabolical Mongol hordes that had overrun Europe in ancient times, or the vengeful Turks, or the Huns of long ago, that had blackened whole provinces. But this seemed worse, for it took in not only the destruction of settled peoples, but the eating of human flesh, which I think those other monsters did not practice.

The Jaqqa cannibals, Faleiro told me, had come into the Kongo out of the forests along the south-west flank of the kingdom and had gone rampaging northward to the royal capital, São Salvador, which lies inland, well away from the great river. This befell, so far as Faleiro could reckon, in the year of 1568. I was a boy of ten in that year, dreaming in Leigh of going someday to sea. And in that very moment of my childhood by the placid banks of the Thames hundreds of thousands of fugitives had desperately been crossing the land of Kongo with the hope of escaping the murderous appetites of the Jaqqas.

Into São Salvador the Jaqqas came, said Faleiro, like a tide of fire. It was a great city then, far more resplendent than it had been ever after, and infinitely greater than São Paulo de Loanda. They set it ablaze, and murdered in terrible ways anyone they could catch, and piled up the dead and ate their fill of them until they were glutted and belching with the meat of mankind. Meanwhile the survivors set up a huge migration: the people of São Salvador, not only the Manikongo or king and all his court, but also some hundreds of Portugals that dwelled there, fled into the countryside, causing such confusions there as the Jaqqas might almost have worked themselves, and setting in movement vast hordes of innocent folk that went running through the forest until they came to the banks of the Kongo. There they found some islands on which they might take refuge, most particularly this Hippopotamus Island or Calabash Island that we were now approaching.

They came in there in such numbers and in such awful closeness that plague broke out among them, and famine, and thousands died every day and had to be thrown into the river. And yet the Jaqqas rampaged behind them, forcing more and more and more of the gentle Kongo folk into the zone of the river. Some were literally pushed into the river itself, by the crowding and the pressure of those that came behind them. Those became feasts for the coccodrillos.

Then happened something else that Faleiro spoke of with a kind of pride, which filled me all the more with horror. For the Portugals thereupon took advantage of all this fright and tragedy, by coming down in caravels from their slave-peddling island of São Tomé in the north— the same that I had seen when sailing with Abraham Cocke—and rowing in longboats out to the islands to make slaves out of the sufferers.

Faleiro thought his was a right shrewd deed. “They brought food, d’ye see? And the father sold his son, and the brother his brother, because they were starving, and a great profit we made of it. And carried the slaves off to São Tomé and thence to the New World, to their great benefit, for I think they would all have died if they had remained on the Hippopotamus Island.”

Hearing this, I thanked God I was made an Englishman and not a Portugal. For although we ourselves have trafficked in slaves to good profit, at least we buy our merchandise honorably from the dealers both Moorish and Negro in such commodities, and do not shamefully come to desperate starving folk and offer them bread in return for their children. And in thinking this I wondered for the first time, but not for the last, which were the greater devils: the Jaqqas who had worked all this destruction, but who were like wild forces of nature without souls or consciences, or the Portugals who seized advantage from it, and were supposedly Christians who had pledged themselves to the way of Jesus.

Among those who were caught up in that charnel madhouse at the river’s mouth was the mother of Dona Teresa da Costa, and Dona Teresa’s father also. And I believe Dona Teresa herself was born in that time of chaos, living in a world gone mad with the bonfires of the Jaqqas blazing on the horizon and so many people dying each day.

Well, and well, no horror lasts eternally except the one that the preachers promise to sinners, and I think those Portugal slavers will feel the heat of that at Judgment Day. But it was other Portugals who honorably ended the torment by the river. Don Alvaro the black king sent a message to his ally King Sebastiao of Portugal—they had a king of their own in those years, before the Spaniards swallowed Portugal—the King Sebastiao sent word to his men at São Tomé to cease stealing slaves and to begin the rescue of the unhappy sufferers. And so the Portugals at São Tomé put together an army of six hundred men and went down to Hippopotamus Island and gathered the remains of the Manikongo’s forces, and waged war against the Jaqqas.

It took two years of bloody campaigning, but in the end the Portugals drove the Jaqqas out and restored the Manikongo Don Alvaro to his throne at São Salvador, and built a wall for him around his city to secure it. And the Manikongo then vowed himself a vassal of Portugal, and paid a tribute for some years in njimbos, that is, the cowrie-shells that are the currency of the land, for he had neither gold nor silver to pay. But those Jaqqa wars were the end of the Kongo as a real kingdom, for afterward it was greatly weakened by famine and plague, and the strife of its chieftains and provincial lords, and the hellish enterprise of the slave-buyers. And the Portugals, seeing their puppet kingdom collapse in the Kongo, began to remove themselves toward their southern colony of Angola and make that their base for activities in western Africa.

It was in the driving back of the Jaqqas that Dona Teresa’s father Don Rodrigo showed his valor, until he took a fever and died. And it was in the defense of Hippopotamus Island that Dona Teresa’s mother was stolen and, in all likelihood, consumed by the cannibal warriors. So the place that lay before us was closely linked in my mind to her, that woman whose lips and breasts and thighs, so sultry and siren-like, were fresh in my memory. And now we made our course toward that island.

Entering the mouth of the Zaire was no child’s task, and there I earned my keep as a pilot. You should know that the Zaire is a river that swallows all rivers, a tremendous torrent that by comparison makes our Thames seem like a stream. I would match it against the great Nilus of Egypt and the giant many-mouthed river in America that they call the Amazonas, for size, and I could not say which one has pre-eminence. While moving northward toward it I was compelled to stand well out to sea, sometimes as much as fifteen miles, for that the waters offshore are very shallow and the surf is evilly fierce. Keeping steady watch through my glass, I saw a long wall of high red clay cliffs, and then came to that which I knew from my charts to expect, but which must have astounded the first Portuguese explorers into silent amazement: the frightful onrush of the river into the ocean.

It comes down out of the land with a dark hue, which is the mud that it carries from Africa’s heart. And it drives this color forty, fifty, even eighty miles into the ocean, so that the waves breaking near shore are a strange and surprising yellow-brown color, and the ocean itself is deep red, a muddy bloody hue. And all this is fresh water, though it lies in the ocean: we could drink it, if so we wished. This river torrent emerges from the land between two broad spits like the claws of a mighty crab, that make what seems to be a natural harbor, a dozen miles or greater across, inviting mariners to enter. Here the red clay cliffs give way, and there are level beaches of sparkling sand, and behind that a forest of ollicondi trees, that must be the most swollen colossal trees in all the world, and then the blue wall of distant mountains somewhere eastward of all that.

So inviting a harbor, yes. But O! the entering of it! The terrible entering of it!

For the river comes forth with a violent roar and crash and beats itself upon the bosom of the sea like an awful flail, and our small pinnace was a mere cockleshell against such might. With the aid of the sea breezes I made my way slowly and cautiously into the Zaire’s vast mouth, thinking I was putting myself into the maw of a dragon. And though it was fair going at first, the river narrowed and narrowed and narrowed yet more, until it was scarce a mile across, with walls seven or eight hundred feet on its banks. The narrower the river the more furious its flow, in that there was that much less space here for all that volume of water to pass, so it must pass the more vigorously. We ran against a seaward current of ten knots that boiled and seethed, with whirlpools looming suddenly with loathsome sucking noises right beneath our keel. Now the Portugal sailors looked to me. I saw terror in Pedro Faleiro’s face, and knew why I was there.

“Tell us, pilot! Which way? Where the channel?”

There are times when it is best not to think in any solemn slow way, but to act according to your sense of the moment. At such times, if fortune goes with you, you become an arm of the sea, an adjunct of the winds, and everything flows through you without meeting resistance, and you know without knowing what must be done. So it was with me. I had studied the rutter and I knew something of the best way into the estuary, but I looked at no charts now. I put myself in a commanding place and gave signals to the men working the ropes and lines and to the one at the helm who gripped the whipstaff, and tacked her and swung her and leaned her into the wind, and felt the currents running below me like the blood through my veins, and called for readings on the fathoms as my leadmen sounded them. And ten thousand mile of river thrust against me out of Africa’s unknown core and I would not let it say me nay, but beat my way on and on and on, until at last the worst of it was behind me and we were in the estuary, moving through quiet channels where we were shielded from the worst of the onrushing force by the river islands that lay just ahead.

Ah, I thought. That is what sailing is! I had never known its like before.

And as we glided into the mouth of the Zaire, making our track between swamps and mud-flats and other such shallows, looking toward the saw-edged grass that rose three times the height of a man, and toward the hordes of coccodrillos whose eyes gleamed like emeralds out of their long nightmare heads from the sandspits, and listening to the flame-colored parrot-birds standing in the palm-trees, and seeing a hippopotamus arise from the water, more like a vast round-nosed pig than like the river-horse that its name would have us see, and opening its gaping red mouth as though to belch us back to Brazil—as I saw all these things, I felt a hand come to rest lightly on my shoulder, and did not look around, for I knew I should not see the owner of the hand, and the hand tightened in a fond grip and my father the master mariner Thomas James Battell of Leigh in Essex said to me in a voice that only I could hear, “Well done, my son, well done indeed.” And my eyes became moist, out of pride that I was my father’s son and worthy of the name.

Before us lay Hippopotamus Island, or the Island of Calabashes, or call it what you will.

Having Faleiro’s story of warfare and destruction fresh in my mind, I was surprised at the peace of the place. I suppose I expected to find bloody bodies scattered in mounds at the shore, or vast scenes of devastation. But that was idle of me, for all those monstrous events were twenty years in the past, and matters had long since calmed here. There was a little harbor, and a native town, and a Portuguese settlement of no great size, and after the turbulence of the river I found this place most placid, most welcoming.

This was my entry to the kingdom of Kongo, which once was the greatest realm of all this part of Africa, perhaps surpassing even the fabulous land of Prester John in far Ethiopia, but now is much fallen from high estate, owing to the bloodthirstiness of the Jaqqas and the different evil practiced by the Portugals upon these people. It was a light and open land, golden yellow in the grassy places—for there had not been rain in a long while—with fine dust drifting easily. But as is true everywhere in Africa, behind the open plains and easy sunny places there always lies a jungle, and the jungle is ever dark, dark.

This first taste of Kongo was pleasing to me. I saw myself at the gateway to a land which, although black, was in its way civilized. In Angola I had seen little except São Paulo de Loanda, which is wholly a Portuguese settlement created by them from the ground upward, and such blacks as dwelled there had come from elsewhere to be pressed into the service of the white masters. And on my journey to Masanganu I had seen but a few small villages, from which I had learned little of the nature of the people. But now I was in a true black nation, which was a novelty to me.

The people of the Kongo call themselves the Bakongo and they speak a language called Kikongo, in which I became fluent as time went along. They live by farming and other settled arts, understand the crafts of metalworking and textiles, and are by way of being Christians, though I will testify that their Christianity is but a shallow overlay, a sort of coat of glossy sacred varnish that covers the deep and strange paganism beneath. The giving of that love-idol to me by Dona Teresa is a fair example of that. In their capital city of São Salvador, which I was not to visit for some good long while, they do wear Portuguese dress, much of it quite fine, and give themselves Portuguese names and put on many other such pretensions of civility. But here on this island it was not quite that way. The place was small, but most exceeding hot and moist, and nothing about it showed much mark of great advancement. The native town was fashioned of light structures of branches and earth covered with thatch, much as I had seen at São Paulo de Loanda, and the streets were a muddled maze, so that, small as the town was, a stranger would instantly become lost in it. The people did not wear any European finery, but only a simple piece of red or green palm-cloth wrapped like a kilt about them from waist to feet, leaving the breast bare. Some of this fabric was quite finely worked, with pleasing decoration, but nothing like that which I would see later in the cities; most of it was rough stuff, for these were mere common people.

The Portuguese town was very tiny and not pleasing to me. It had eight or ten Portugals living there, gloomy-looking men in the main, whose appearance was ill-kempt and bedraggled. They had with them some black concubines, practically naked, and there were bastard babes running about, and dirty, fly-bedeviled dogs of uncertain breed. “Fie,” I said to Faleiro, “are these men convicts, that they look so worn?”

“They are the garrison, and do guard this place against invaders.”

I laughed at that. “An invasion of mosquitos? An invasion of mice?”

“What if the Dutchmen were to come here, or you English, and try to pry the Kongo from our influence?”

“And would these sad old men drive them away, then?”

“They fly the flag. It is important to fly the flag. Other Europeans respect a flag. So long as they are here as representatives of our land, there will be no foreign invasion.”

“And if the Jaqqas come?”

“Ah,” said Faleiro, with a little shudder. “The Jaqqas are another matter.”

I understood the unhappiness here. These were forgotten men in a forgotten place. The Portugals now concentrated their energies in winning Angola, and had their other main base well up the coast at São Tomé to do their slave-trading; but the Kongo, once so great in their schemes, was hardly more than anything to them now, and there was no future for those who maintained the ghost of an empire here for Portugal. Yet it had to be done, and these were those who did it, and also those remaining at São Salvador. I readily comprehended now why so ambitious and capable a man as Don João de Mendoça, after having devoted himself to the Kongo for so long, had removed himself to Angola in the pursuit of his ambitions. But these poor souls could not do as he had done.

Well, and that was hard for them, but no concern of mine. No one had compelled them to go to Africa, as I had been compelled. They stared at me sourly, knowing from my yellow hair that I was something out of the ordinary, and when they heard that I was English some of them made the sign of the fig at me in scorn, since that England and their homeland were enemies now, but I gave it back to them, and the sign of the folded arm as well, and would have no mockery from them. Faleiro spoke with them and they let me be after that. I disliked their mangy town and went back to the native one, where the people did look upon me as if I had come down from a different world. But they were friendly, and in their timid dainty way begged to touch my hair and beard.

We performed our trading business quickly and in enormous profit. This island was a depot for the merchants of the hinder lands, who brought such treasures as the teeth of elephantos to trade with us. These teeth are of great size, being only the two forward ones, that are called tusks, and ivory is carved from them. Another sort of thing that the Portugals purchase here is the golden wheat of the kingdom, that is called masa mamputo by the natives. This is not true wheat at all, nor is it native to Africa, but it is the stuff called maize or Indian corn, that comes from the Americas and was introduced here by the Portugals. The last commodity we had at the Hippopotamus Island was the oil of the palm, that they produce out of the pulpy fruits of the slender and graceful palm-trees that grow everywhere about. This is extracted from the fruit as oil is extracted from olives, and is most excellent in cooking: I came to prefer my food cooked in it and now find the oils of Europe greasy and strange to my taste. Its color and consistency are that of butter, though it is more greenish; it has the same use of olive oil and butter; it may be burned; it may be used to anoint the body. We acquired great store of it here.

And what did we give in return for this abundance of tusks, and that golden wheat, and the oil? Why, long glass beads and round blue beads and trifling little seed beads, and looking-glasses of the most vile manufacture, and red coarse cloth, and Irish rugs, which were very rich commodities to the Bakongo folk. We received for one yard of cloth three elephanto teeth, that weighed one hundred twenty pounds. I was ashamed to do such dealings, but when I saw that the natives were joyed to have our scurvy merchandise I let my objections drop away from me, for who am I to say which is more valuable, an elephanto tusk or a yard of cloth?

So quickly we laded our pinnace and got ourselves back onto the bosom of the great river. Which swept us like a cork out to sea, and I caught hold of the wind and turned us south, and coasted us skillfully back to Angola. And stood like a king in triumph on the deck of the Infanta Beatriz, bare to the waist and sunburned dark, with my hair long behind me in the breeze that came out of the hot lowlands, as we made our way into harbor at São Paulo de Loanda. For it had been a successful voyage and I had done well, and had won my own respect in the business of piloting. And one’s own respect is the hardest of all to win, if one be an honest man.

Don João de Mendoça clapped me lustily on the back and praised me or my work and fed me on buffalo and other strange meats, and gave me his good wines, and said, “Well accomplished! And next week off you go again, even farther, to the land of Loango for a greater cargo.”

Indeed I was ready to go. And go and go again, as often as they did care to ship me, for a year or so. I would keep my bargain, and then they would keep me theirs, and send me off to England as a free man.

Aye! To bargain with a Portugal! Ere I saw England, how many voyages there would be, and what monstrosities of event, and what pains, what deaths, what torments! But I predicted nothing of that to myself then. I supped with Don João, and I spoke a trifle boastfully of my getting into the estuary of the Zaire, and then I went to my new little house in the city to plan for my next voyage. There did Dona Teresa come to me soon after, and there did we have a joyous reunion of our bodies and our spirits, and afterward, when I lay alone and drowsy, an amazing thought did enter my mind. For I realized that even though I had been taken captive and sent into slavery to these Portugals, and had endured much that was not to my liking, I had emerged into a happy life. I was a happy man, by God, and could not deny it! Only one thing was lacking to me, and that was my return to my native land; but even that seemed less urgent, now that I was out of dungeon and had won a place among the Portugals here and had a skill that I practiced well. That amazed me: to find myself happy. Yet it was the truth, at that moment. And in a week, the voyage to Loango; and in a year, perhaps, the voyage home to England. All journeyed well for me.

Aye! Would that it had been so!