Some few days after my homecoming Don Jeronymo d’Almeida sent for me, to offer me a new task. To him I did go in an ill grace, knowing him to have treacherously conspired the deaths of those two my friends, and wanting to have no warmth between me and such a Judas. But yet I had to swallow back my qualms, for he was governor and I was at his mercy; I could upbraid him all I liked over Don João and Dona Teresa, and still at the end of it he would only have me flogged, or buried away in the dungeon and forgotten, and what would that have availed me, what would it have availed Don João, Dona Teresa?
Don Jeronymo greeted me brusquely and in his usual harsh and fierce way. He was intending now, he said, to launch his expedition into the troublesome province of Kisama, that had altogether thrown off Portuguese rule. That province has its beginning on the south bank of the River Kwanza, and runs southward from there in the direction of Benguela, where there is an important stopping-place for the refreshing of Portuguese ships headed around the Cape of Bona Speranza.
It was perilous in the extreme to allow that province to remain in rebellion, and so, as soon as the São Tomé men arrived, Don Jeronymo meant to lead a large force into that land. His plan was to go by ship up the Kwanza to the former presidio of Muchima and rebuild it, and then to march overland due south to a place called Ndemba, where rich salt mines were. At Ndemba he would found another presidio, and garrison it with one hundred men: this would become his base for the reconquest of Kisama Province.
My role in all this was simply to serve as ferry-pilot. I was to take troop-ships up and down the Kwanza, delivering his soldiers to Muchima and to the larger presidio farther up the river at Masanganu.
Well, I had no great craving to go anywhere near Masanganu, where I had contracted that terrible fever that had me raving and feeble for the better part of a year, and like to have cost me my life altogether. But I reminded me of Pinto Cabral’s words, that once one has survived such a fever, one does not take it again, if one has a sturdy frame. So a new voyage to Masanganu seemed to me more bothersome, on account of the awful heat, than in a real way dangerous to me. Yet I did hate the place and would gladly have been sent elsewhere, even to that salt-mine town of Ndemba. But that could not be reached by water and in Don Jeronymo’s mind I was reckoned to be a pilot, not a soldier.
I was put in thought once again, also, of Don João’s promise to let me go home to England after I had done him some months service as a seaman here. Already that promise was some two years old, or nearly, and I saw no sign of its fulfillment. For it had been cast in abeyance during the strife between Don João and the d’Almeidas, and surely it was suspended entirely by Don João’s death, or rather made entirely null and void: Don Jeronymo would hardly release a useful pilot in time of war. That gave me great bitterness. But I dared not bring the issue to Don Jeronymo, knowing his ferocity and the precariousness of my position. I had no choice now but to go on serving my Portuguese masters in all that they demanded of me, while awaiting God’s grace in a change of my fortune.
So once again I did voyage to Masanganu, with a flat-bellied frigate that seemed to me more like the ugly boats that the Dutch call scows. We loaded it up with Portugals who looked most gloomy and distraught, for they felt sure they were going to their deaths, if not from native spears and arrows then from the plagues and black fluxes of Masanganu; and up the river we went, past the sluggish evil coccodrillos snoring on this shore and that, past the thick green walls of vegetation that concealed God knew what terrible mysteries and horrors, past the places where the hippopotamuses yawned and the long-legged water-birds stalked about like things of ill omen.
Into the zone of heavy foul stinking wet heat we traveled, and indeed the men began to sicken. But that was no business of mine, and I delivered them dead or alive at Masanganu or at the restored fort at Muchima, and went back for more, and did it all again. The chief thing that I remember of this onerous and dreary shuttling is my first sight of one of the gigantic serpents of this land, the which I would not have credited had I not seen it with mine own eyes.
This monster I did behold at Masanganu, when we were unloading our cargo of soldiers. The blacks of the place gave a great shout of a sudden, and waved their arms and did a kind of dance in their fright, and then we saw it coming through the low bushes along a foot-path much used by us. It was, without any hyperbole, twenty-five feet in length, I assert, and it had a head as big as a calf, and when it moved from side to side in its coilings it disturbed the bushes as much as though twenty people were advancing through them. We drew back in alarm at the sight of it, fearing that it might gobble one of us with a sudden lunge, or smite at us with its immense yellow tail; but then some among us took their muskets and fired bullets into it, which halted its advance.
It was a monstrous long time in dying, too, beating both its great head and its nether end against the ground in a slow hammering way. I think it did not know it was mortally wounded, but thought only that it had been set upon by some kind of stinging flies, or angry bees, if it thought anything at all. But at last its life left it and the natives, jumping forward most boldly now, hacked from it its head, after which it convulsed anew and continued to move for some minutes.
The meat of these serpents is eaten with great enjoyment by the blackamoors, who claim it to be a delicacy. They offered a share to us, but found no takers. Afterward I saw the bones of it, amazing delicate and beautiful, littered out over what seemed to be half an acre of the town. One Portugal who had had experience with these beasts told us a tale of a somewhat smaller one, but still immense, that was encountered near São Paulo de Loanda in the early days of its founding. A soldier did cut this one in two pieces by a lusty stroke of its scimitar, he said, but even that did not kill it, and both pieces crawled away in the thick bushes. And soon afterward, two other people happening by, the half that bore the head did crawl out again and seize upon them, devouring them almost whole. I cannot attest that I saw such a marvel with mine own eyes, only that the tale was told to me; but I am inclined to believe in its verity, knowing what I have come to know about the strength and persistence of these animals. The same Portugal told me that the Jaqqas, when they took one of these serpents alive, would urge it to gulp down one of their prisoners, and then would eat snake and man themselves, together at a single feast. This, too, I never witnessed, though I witnessed plenty else among the man-eaters.
I did my Masanganu service, finding the place plaguey hot and discomforting, as always, though I suffered not at all from its fevers. This took me all through the late months of Anno 1593 and the early seasons of ‘94.
Meanwhile reports came to us that Don Jeronymo, supplemented by soldiers of São Tomé, had carried out a great sweep through Kisama and had reduced nearly all of the rebellious sobas to submission. The work was done and I was looking toward an end to my river-shuttling, and a return to São Paulo de Loanda and the arms of my sweet Matamba. It would be a joy again to breathe the sea-breezes of the coast, I did tell myself, for even a torrid place like São Paulo de Loanda seems but a jolly holiday-place when it be compared with such an outpost of Satan’s realm as Masanganu.
But then came messengers with deep disheartening news. Don Jeronymo, having completed his military work and founded his new presidio at Ndemba, had elected to go in quest of the silver mines of Kambambe in the east. Many a brave fool had been broken in the search for these mines, which for all I know are mere myth; and on his way toward them Don Jeronymo was smitten down by an ague, and had been taken back to São Paulo de Loanda gravely ill. Upon making this hasty retreat the governor had placed command of his soldiers in the hands of Balthasar d’Almeida and Pedro Alvares Rebello, two men whose judgment was not highly praised by their fellow Portugals; and those two, seeking, I suppose, to win quick fame through some independent exploit, had gone hallooing off into most bleak and inhospitable terrain in search of a certain wild native chief, Kafuche Kambara by name. That determined rebel was roving somewhere southward of Masanganu; and in the better hope of snaring him, they were summoning nearly all the garrison from that town, leaving only a small force there.