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 milclass="underline" 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.”