Lord of Darkness

  I had heard that name before, Hippopotamus 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 Sebastião of Portugal—they had a king of their own in those years, before the Spaniards swallowed Portugal—the King Sebastião 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!
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  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 someth
ing 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?