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.