In the hasty assembly of soldiers no one healthy was spared from the service. And to my surprise and dismay I found myself compelled to take part in this rash expedition. There on the list was my name pricked out:
Andres Battell, Piloto.
Of the arts of foot-soldiery I had never known much. That is not a great English skill, we being an island race. When enemies have come to our shores we have fought valiantly but, I do admit, with little success, which is why the Romans of Caesar were able to subdue us, and the Angles and Saxons who came later, and the Normans of William. We are a brave folk—the bravest, I think, in all the world—but we have never given heed to mastering the drills and maneuvers of combat by land, that require us to march like a single animal with many heads that think alike, for that is not the English way. We are too much independent. And therefore, knowing this weakness or fault in ourselves, we have since King William’s time taken good care that no enemy shall ever reach our shores again, and none ever has, and I suspect that by God’s grace and the strength of our bold seamen we will be protected forever in England against further invasion.
In my own family they say there was a grandfather of my father who fought well in the wars between Lancaster and York, but other than that one we have been all of us men of the sea, as befits a family of the Essex shore. So it was a new and most unwelcome thing to me to find myself decked out in Portugee armor, with a gleaming polished casque to keep my head asweat and a great hulking breastplate and all those other foolish massive things, and then to have to go marching in one plodding step after another over an interminable wasteland. God’s bones, how repellent unto me! Yet had I no choice in the matter. I could not say, “My contract with you Portugals is to be a sea-pilot for you.” I had no rights whatsoever among these people. I lived by their sufferance alone. I was a prisoner of war, that could be clapped in dungeon by any commander at any time. So when I was told to march, why, I did march, and no grumble of it.
And O! the grievous dismal land we marched into! Here were no lush and leafy jungles, here were no steaming heavy vapors rising from ponds and swamps. This was a dry land in a dry season, a place where it was easy to believe that rain had fallen last in the time of King Arthur, and before that perhaps in Julius Caesar’s day. The soil was a parched orange thing, cracked like old plaster where the sun had riven it, and it was all but barren. Bleached skulls and bones of animals lay scattered on the ground as omens of mortality. On that seared plain terrible crookbacked thorny trees did sprout, and other low vegetation that might have been engendered in the troubled dreams of some disordered deity. It was an empty land, except here and there where the earth was less brutal and a few native settlements clung to a sort of life: dome-shaped huts of flimsy branches and leaves, arrayed in circles of seven or nine, occupied by sad-eyed scrawny blackamoors who fouled their own territory with scatterings of bones and seeds and broken calabashes and other rubble, and hung withered chunks of smoked meat in the leafless branches of the trees.
Only once was there during that dreary miserable march any moment of beauty or joy, and that was when we entered a zone of grassy pasture that was grazed by the animal called here the zevvera, which is wondrous to behold. This beast is like a horse, but that his mane and his tail and his body is distinguished by streaks of black and white that are most highly elegant, and look as if it were done by art. These zevveras are all wild and live in great herds, and will suffer a man to come within shot of them, and let them shoot three or four times at them before they will run away. When they do run, it is in huge number, and the sight is something that not the most doltish dullard would ever forget, for they dazzle the eye with the movement of their white and black stripes, that seem to have an inner motion of their own beyond the motion of the animal itself.
We startled these zevveras and brought down a few with our muskets, and the rest fled, so as to create that miraculous effect of a river of stripes moving away from us. No man has ever tamed one of these striped horses to ride upon him, and I think no one ever will. For they do have a fierce independence of spirit, that I admire greatly.
I had one other pleasure on this journey, most unexpected, which was the companionship of my gentle friend Lourenço Barbosa, the tax-collector. Certainly he was no military man. But when I arrived of Masanganu on that last voyage in the scow I found him already there, to make some sort of enumeration or survey of Portuguese settlement in the inland region; and when generals Alvares Rebello and d’Almeida sent forth their request for an assembly of troops to conquer Kafuche Kambara, Barbosa chose to go with them instead of to remain in Masanganu. I believe he simply wished to taste a little of the excitement and fury of war, after having spent all his days traveling about the borders of the realm making lists and registers and entries in his ledger.
I did not even know until the second day out of Masanganu that he was among us. But then I saw in the column just before mine a distinguished older man with an elegant purple plume to his hat, instead of a metal helmet, and though scarce believing it could be he, I hurried ahead and found him. And we did have a cheering reunion, each being greatly surprised to find the other in such an unlikely place.
We shared wine, which he had brought with him in a hamper, and we spoke of what had befallen us in the ten months or thereabouts since last we had met. Barbosa had been all over the inland, into such provinces as Malemba and Bondo and Bangala and Matamba, where scarce any Portugal ever went, and I marveled at his diligence in making surveys of such remote places. He told me many a tale of these lands: such as the great province of Cango, fourteen days journey from the town of Loango, which is full of mountains and rocky ground, and full of woods, and has great store of copper. The elephantos in this place do excel, and there are so many that the warehouses do overflow with the teeth of them being stored to go for market in Loango. And I heard from him of certain monster apes of the inland, the great one called the pongo and the smaller one named the engeco, which are much like wild hairy men, but cannot speak and have no more understanding than a beast.
When he told me this and much else, that astonished me beyond words, I related of my voyage to São Tomé, and that I had acquired a slave-girl from Matamba who was a Christian and had become my bedfellow, and such. Then Barbosa asked me what news I had from São Paulo de Loanda, for that he had not been in the capital of the colony in many months. In particular he craved to know whether Don João de Mendoça had returned from Portugal, and if so what had befallen between him and Don Jeronymo d’Almeida.
At this I grew most downcast, for I had not yet come round to telling him of this matter owing to the painfulness of it to me. Gravely I said, “Nay, I think Don João will never return, for Don Jeronymo has plotted to do him to death.”
“What is it you say?”
“So I heard it from one of my sailors,” I declared, and repeated what had been said to me by Mendes Oliveira, that two rascals had been hired to throw Don João and Dona Teresa overboard in the voyage to Europe. At that, Barbosa did cross himself several times and looked much moved, with the beginnings of tears in his eyes just showing.