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.