The Portugals have owned this place over a hundred years. The climate of it is very unwholesome, and an abundance of men died here in making the early settlement. But when those Jews who would not accept baptism were expelled from Portugal in the year of 1493, thousands of them were exiled to this São Tomé and forced to marry with black women fetched from Angola, producing, in the process and fullness of time, a brood of mulattos that is the present population of the island. Half-Jew and half-blackamoor in ancestry, they yet are Christians now and boast of being true Portugals; but their constitution is by nature much fitter to bear with the malignity of that air than that of Europeans. There are a number of Portugals here, too, making a race so mixed as to be beyond any easy understanding.
I took the Dona Leonor into the harbor of the town, which lies betwixt two rivers in a low flat ground. It is a town of some four hundred houses, most of them two stories high, and all of them flat-roofed, built of a sort of hard ponderous white timber. A rampart of stone protects it on the sea-side, and on a high point above it rises the well-fortified castle of the place, which I remembered well, since its guns did fire most heavily upon us when the ships of Abraham Cocke passed by here in Anno 1589.
We had come in an unkind season; but all seasons are unkind here. There are two rainy and two dry seasons at São Tomé, the rains beginning at each equinox, when the sun, standing straight overhead, draws so much water from the sea that when it drops down again as rain it is like Noah’s deluge. The vapors rising from the black marshes under the violent heat create thick stinking fogs that make the air malignant, and compel the natives to lie at home at such times. But the deep clouds do at least shield the place from the worst furies of the sun, which in the dry seasons is intolerable, as it was when we arrived: the soil we found so burning hot that it was scarce possible to walk upon it without cork-soles to the shoes.
This is a most fertile place. The soil is generally fat, mixed with yellow and white earth, which by the dew of the night and the extreme rain of the wet seasons is rendered very proper to produce many sorts of plants and fruits, and, in swampy grounds, prodigious lofty trees in a short time. They plant ginger here, and manioc that grows as big as a man’s leg, and four sorts of potatoes, and much else. A principal crop is sugar: there are in this island above seventy houses or presses for making of sugar, and every press has many cottages about it as though it were a village, and there may at each be some three hundred persons that are appointed for that kind of work. All together these places make about fifteen hundred tons of brown sugar. The canes grow exceeding tall, but for all that do not give so much juice as they would in Brazil, perhaps because there is too much rain for proper ripening. Another thing they grow is cotton, and also wheat and grapes and such.
But the mainmost crop of São Tomé, that they harvest with great zeal, is sprung from the seed of Adam.
This is a place where they deal in the souls of men and women and children, which is a most frightful trade, and keenly cruel. Slavery is an old thing in Africa, far antedating the coming of the whites, and as it is practiced among the Africans it is no more reprehensible, I trow, than many another habit of the world. But the Portugals have refined it, here at São Tomé, into something most monstrous.
Slaves are a simple commodity to the folk of Angola and the Kongo and Loango. They are taken in wars between tribes, or are sold by their own tribesfolk to settle debts or to guarantee loans or in payment of blood money, or are placed in servitude as a punishment for theft, murder, or adultery. Once in slavery, the slave has no rank in the land, but is a mere piece of property, transmitted by inheritance or disposed of as his owner wishes. Yet other than in lack of freedom the condition of the slaves is hardly different from that of the free men. They must by law be treated properly, fed and housed, cared for in all ways. They are permitted to marry, even to marry those of free rank, and if they are diligent they can save enough to purchase their freedom, though only a few are known to do so.
All this have I seen with mine own eyes. I would not be a slave to anyone, at any time; yet will I attest that these slaves who are slaves in Africa to other black folk do not have a severely harsh life, and are more like the serfs and peasants of our older times in Europe. But how different a matter the Portugals have made of this custom of slaving!
I think they do not understand that the slaves are human beings. They regard them as mere articles of commerce, like the stacked tusks of elephantos or so many bags of pepper: something to be brought swiftly to market and sold for the best price. Strong slaves are valued, weak or sickly ones are discarded like lame horses. The demand for this merchandise is immense, for there are great plantations to be worked in the New World, and the Indians of Brazil and the Indies are poor laborers, who die or run away rather than serve their masters. But the Negro folk are good workers, and are sent by thousands upon thousands over there. The slavers of São Tomé rove all the coast, and go far inland, rounding up their human chattels and herding them toward the island. Where there are established slave-markets, the Portugals buy, exchanging liquor and gunpowder and such things for men and women. But also do they take by force, going into the jungle and stealing harmless folk away from their lives. And I have told you already how, when the Jaqqas did raid the Kongo and cause famine there, the Portugals of São Tomé went down to the isles at the mouth of the Zaire and bought children away from their own starving parents, for a few grains of food. But that is not the worst of it. For then—naked, badly fed, chained together—these people once they are enslaved are conveyed in great discomfort to the island, and laded upon evil vessels, and sent off to America with no regard for their welfare or comfort.
While I waited for my audience with the governor of São Tomé, I had me a good observing of the workings of this slave trade, and it sickened me mightily. Each day new hordes of slaves did come in from the mainland, and were stood in a certain shed to be branded, as we do brand sheep with a hot iron. I saw a branding one day, with slaves standing all in a row one by another, and singing a song of their nation, something like mundele que sumbela he kari ha belelelle, for all the world as if they were about to enjoy some happy festival. And one by one they were taken off by Portugals who put the hot metal to their flesh, stamping them on the buttock or the thigh, the men and women both. Most did not even cry out at this, though some fell from the pain. I watched this many minutes in horror, hearing the sizzle of the iron against flesh and smelling the smell of the burning, and finally I asked a Portugal, “Why do they show no fear? Why do they not cringe away from the iron? Are they so childish ignorant that they cannot know it will hurt?”
And he laughed and said, “Nay, they know it hurts. But we tell them that they that have not the mark will not be deemed persons of any account in Brazil, and so they are eager for the branding.”
Ah, the poor beguiled blackamoors!
And then they must wait for the next slave-ship that will depart. So they lie on the bare ground every night in the open air, without any covering, which makes them grow poor and faint. Some from the inland that are not used to the terrible climate of São Tomé fall ill, and they are allowed to die without medicine, which seems to me a very poor husbandry of one’s crop; but the Portugals say it is just as well that those die here, for if such inferior workers were shipped and sold and then they died, it would give the slave-sellers a bad reputation, and this culls the weaklings before they come to market. I suppose that there is some degree of sense in that, though I think there would be greater merit in preserving and strengthening the slaves, and curing and feeding them, than in allowing some by negligence to perish. That is, if one ignores all matter of human consideration and approaches this thing purely in business ways.
The time of waiting may be only a week or two, or maybe many months, if the seas are stormy. But then the ships come for them. The Portugals have constructed great dreadful slave-vessels, and it is pitiful to see how they crowd those poor wretches, six hundred and fifty or seven hund
red in a ship. The men were standing in the hold, fastened to one another with stakes, for fear they should at last rise up and kill the Portugals. The women were between the decks, and those that were with child in the great cabin, and the children in the steerage pressed together like herrings in a barrel, which in that hot climate occasions an intolerable heat and stench. The voyage is generally performed in thirty or thirty-five days, the trade-wind carrying them; but sometimes they are becalmed, and then it is longer, often much longer, and I think then the suffering must be horrible. Before any ship departs, the Portugals cause the slaves they load to be baptized, it being forbidden under pain of excommunication to carry any to Brazil that are not christened. This, too, I witnessed, the forcible making of a great many new Roman Catholics, who by whips and hunger would be taught to love the mother of God and all the saints. On the ship I saw, all the men were given the name of João, and all the women the name of Maria, and the priest did exhort them all every one to confide in the mercy of God, who never forsakes those who sincerely rely on him, adding, that God sends afflictions to punish us for our sins. Well, I cry amen, for I also believe that God does not forsake those who love Him, though I hold that He sends us afflictions not as punishments but as a discipline, to make us stronger. But I do wonder how much those blacks understood of all that. They were no longer singing mundele que sumbela and the rest of that cheerful sound, but now were putting up cries that made a dismal harmony indeed.
This trade does profit the Portugals extremely much. Yet I trust they will pay it all back with full interest thereon, at the final Judgment, when they must look into the faces of their Maker and perhaps all their saints besides. And yes, I know that we English have carried our share of slaves, even such great men as Drake and Hawkins partaking in the trade. But those slaves were all bought fairly, I trow, not stolen by us from their homes and families, and they were not treated near so cruel in shipment. I do not like slavery and if I had the running of the world I think I would not encourage it; but I recognize it to be a part of life, like illness and mortality, and I cannot truly say I oppose it, only that it should be done with some regard for the welfare of the enslaved, and not in the way of the Portugals.
There was a certain delay in seeing the governor of the island, in that he had gone to the mainland of Guinea on some matter of importance. So we were obliged to take up residence until his return. This was alarming to us, São Tomé being so unhealthful a place, almost as terrible as Masanganu, that had nearly been the slaying of me from fever. That same fever is common on the island, and I am told it usually carries off newcomers from Europe in less than eight days of sickness. The first symptoms are a cold shivering, attended with an intolerable heat or inflammation in the body for two hours, so as to throw the patient into a violent delirium, which at the fifth or seventh fit, or the fourteenth at most, makes an end of most persons seized with it. I feared this daily, but Cabral told me I would not take it, for I had had it before, as had all the men of my crew. This Cabral, who was a short and supple man with one leg a trifle longer than the other, had been in Africa many years and was wise in its way, and I did rely on him greatly for matters of such advice. “If one takes the Masanganu fever,” said he, “and one survives it, one is thereafter proof against it, if he live a temperate life. But only the fortunate few survive it. You are robust of constitution, Piloto, and I think the gods do favor you.”
“Aye, they must,” said I, “or they would not have given me the benefit of so much exile from my home, and other little gifts of that kind.”
“We are all far from our homes,” said Cabral. “But I think you have known some joy mixed in with your harms, in your wanderings abroad.”
“That I have, good friend. I will not lament.”
The island also suffers of smallpox, Cabral did warn me, and also a colic that is attributed by some to the excessive use of women, and by others to the morning dew; and there flourishes there a bloody flux of great deadliness. But the thing I most dreaded, in that suspended and discomfortable time of waiting, was one malady called bichos no cu, which is a sort of dysentery very common there. The nature of it is to melt or dissolve men’s fat inwardly, and to void it by stool, so that one dwindles and goes. The symptom is an extraordinary melancholy, attended with a violent headache, weariness, and sore eyes. As soon as these things manifest themselves, said Cabral—for, seeing that I was hungry for knowledge of the lands I entered, he did regale me with all manner of tales—they take the fourth part of a lemon peel, and thrust it up the patient’s fundament, in the nature of a suppository, which is very painful to him. If the disease is not inveterate, this certainly cures him; but if this remedy proves ineffectual, and the disease so malignant that there comes away a sort of gray matter, they infuse tobacco-leaves in salt and vinegar for two hours, and pound it in a mortar, and administer a clyster of it to the patient; but because the smart of it is violent, they have two men to hold him. “Even two,” said he, “may not be sufficient: I saw once a man break free of three, and rush to the water to cool himself, where he was straightaway devoured by a coccodrillo.”
“Which eased his pain of the fundament, at the least.”
“Aye,” said he. “But it is a drastic remedy, Piloto.”
Cabral having filled me with such harrowing news, I feared this disease much, but neither that nor any other malady befell me in São Tomé. No man of my crew fell ill, either, except one that took the venereal pox, but it was cured with mercury, not without giving him great pain.
One thing that I did acquire, though, while waiting in the island, was a female slave.
This happened greatly to my astonishment, for slave-owning is foreign to my nature. In truth I did as you know have three slaves in São Paulo de Loanda, but they had been bestowed upon me without my seeking, and I regarded them only as servants, not as property. I have never thought it fitting for an Englishman to own the life of a fellow human being. Yet did I make purchase of one in São Tomé. But it was for good and proper reason, I do believe, and I did not hesitate or scruple to do it.
It befell in this way. There was a sort of pen for slaves, called by the Portugals a corral, in the main plaza of the town hard by one of the churches. One morning I was going past this corral, which was well laden with slaves, when a voice from within it called out to me, “Senhor, em nome de Deus,” which means in Portuguese, “Sir, in the name of God!” I had not expected a prisoner of that slave-corral to cry out in Portuguese, nor to talk of God. Therefore I halted and did scan that close-packed mass of black naked flesh, until I saw who had spoken to me. She was a girl of no more than sixteen years, altogether bare with not even a scrap to hide her loins, which some of the women had. She was tall and well fashioned, with good clean limbs and high breasts that stood out straight forward, as the breasts of African girls do until they have had a child. Her skin was smooth and unblemished save for certain tribal scars that the Negroes do inflict upon themselves, and for the tattoo of slavery freshly applied, that blazed like a scarlet stigma upon the inside of her thigh just below the crotch. She was not so much black in color as a warm brown, with almost a tincture of red underlying it, quite unlike the hue of the people I had seen along the coast, and her eyes were bright and clear, with a distinct look of intelligence in them. Beckoning to me, she continued to talk in the Portuguese tongue, saying, “Jesu, Maria, the Holy Ghost, saints and apostles,” and the like, and came so close to the fencing of the corral that she could thrust her arms through. “Sir,” she said, “save me, for I am a Christian.”
At that a guard did appear within the corral, a foul squat one-eyed Portugal with a whip in one hand and a cutlass in the other, and he shouted at her and cracked the whip in the air, so that she turned and cringed before him. With a rough gesture he ordered her away from me, which wrung from her a look of such sorrow as did cleave me to the heart.
“Wait,” I said. “I would speak with her!”
“And who be you?”
??
?Emissary from His Grace Don Jeronymo d’Almeida, Governor of Angola,” said I with a flash of lightning in my eye to cow him. That sort is cowed easily enough. “I am inspecting these slaves, and I pray you give me no interference.”
He glowered sullenly at me, and in a low surly voice said, “What business does Angola have with our slaves?”
“I need not discuss such matters with you, friend. Get me this girl from out of your pen, so that I may talk properly with her, or it will go hard with you.”
“Will it, now?”
“By the Mass, I’ll have your other eye cut from you!” I roared, and had difficulty keeping myself from laughter at hearing myself swearing a Roman oath.
My sword was out and my face was red with fury, but I was still outside the corral and he and the girl within, and he could have chosen to leave me there, looking a fool. But it seemed that he had tested my resolve as far as he dared, for he signalled me around to the side of the corral where the gate was, and unlatched it, and sent the black girl through it to me, saying in no very gracious way, “You must not keep her outside for long.”
“Long enough to learn what I wish to know,” I said, and drew her a little aside, away from the gate. She was staring at me in wonder and awe, as though I were some deliverer come down from Heaven. And, looking upon her as she smiled so shyly, I found myself thinking it would be a pity to send her back into that cage of slaves from which I had plucked her. I think it was in that moment that the wild idea of buying her began to form itself in my mind.
To the girl I said, “How did you come to be in there?”
But she was not fluent enough in Portuguese to understand me readily. I realized then that she knew only a scattering of words, and had been rehearsing those most carefully, in the event that anyone drew close enough to the corral to pay heed to her. So I said my question again, more slowly, and doing a little dumb-show and miming with my hands to help convey the meaning. This time she comprehended, after some moments. She said a few words by way of reply, and I nodded and encouraged her, and she spoke again, more clearly, her confidence at the language increasing as she saw that I was inclined to be gentle and patient with her. And by slow and painful exchanges we did manage a fair degree of communication.