“Ah,” I said. “The famed Portuguese justice!”
“I am here to make formal notice to you, and to ask if you have requests we may fulfill.”
“I do appeal my sentence to Don João, and demand an audience with him, to make show to him of my innocence.”
“That will avail you nothing,” said Vasconcellos. “But I will do as you say.”
That afternoon four Portuguese warders came for me, and without one word took me from my cell. I thought joyously that I was indeed now to be brought to Don João, and it gave me heart, since that I had spent some hours resigning myself to death for these phantasmical crimes of mine. But it was a cruel disappointment, for the Portugals conveyed me only as far as the courtyard of the presidio, where they fastened me to their whipping-stake and did beat me with knotted cords, so that by the time they were done there was not a spot on all my body that was not swollen and aching, and in some places bleeding. After this punishment they did return me to my cell, and a keeper entered, and, saying he was doing this at the governor’s command, did clinch to my legs great bolts of iron of thirty pounds’ weight, that dragged upon me like the Devil’s own grip. “This is done because that you are a known escaper,” he said, and left me.
Enfeebled, shackled, sore with my whipping, I lay like one benumbed and bereft of all will. Each morning when I arose I expected to be taken out and put to death; and each night when I lay me down to sleep I tallied one more day of life, with gratitude and despair all at the same time, for what was the use of living if my remaining few days were to be so empty? I thought of Warwyck’s ship, that must be halfway to Holland by now, and I wept from rage. I thought of Matamba, and wondered sorrowfully what had become of her, now that I was condemned. I thought of Dona Teresa, by whose jealousy and treachery this had befallen me, and I meditated much and deep on how love could turn to bitter enmity. And I gave my thoughts greatly to England, to my friends there and such family as I might still have, to the Queen Her Majesty, to the soft mists and gentle rains and green fields full of sheep and all that I would never see again. In this way I passed through despair to resignation, and grew calm, telling myself that I had lived some thirty-five years, which was more than is granted to most, and had known much delight in that time along with a proper measure of grief. If I had to die now, why, I would accept that judgment, for it is true beyond quarrel that we each owe God a death, He who gave us life, and I was merely paying the debt a little earlier than was my preferred time. Furthermore there are many ways to die that are more hideous than hanging, and now I would suffer none of them.
But as it happened I was spared the gallows as well. For two months I did languish in that foul stinking prison awaiting my doom and thinking, whenever a warder approached my cell, that it was to take me to the gibbet. But then came the one that had fastened the iron hoops to my legs, and he did cut them from me; and then the lawyer Vasconcellos entered my cell and said, “I bring you happy tidings, Englishman.”
“Aye, that I am to be drowned slowly in good wine of the Canary Islands, instead of being hanged, is that it?”
He looked displeased at my levity and said most soberly, “His Excellency Don João has taken mercy upon you despite your great crimes. Your sentence of death is raised.”
“God be thanked!” I cried.
But my jubilation was misplaced. For Vasconcellos went on to tell me that I was not pardoned, but merely given a new sentence: which was to be banished for ever to the fort of Masanganu, and to serve for the rest of my days in that place of fevers and monstrous heat, to defend the frontiers of the colony. My first impulse upon hearing that was to call out for hanging instead, as being greatly more preferable. Which I did not say; but I did tell myself inwardly that Don João had earned little thanks from me for this show of kindness. For he had sent me into a suffering beyond all measure, to a Hell upon earth, from which death was likely to be the only release.
As I went on board the pinnace that was to take me up the river into imprisonment, I drew from my pouch the small woman-idol that Dona Teresa had given me long before, and I looked at it most long and hard. Still did it seem to embody the sinister irresistible beauty of that woman, and still did it cling to my hand as though by some secret force in the wood. I drew my breath in deep, and clamped my jaws tight closed, and with all my strength did I hurl that idol into the dark waters, and stood staring as it dropped from sight.
The which deed gave me some measure of comfort and release from constraint. I braced myself against the rail, and stood sweating and gasping in the aftermath of it, until they hurried me onward with a rude jostle onto the ship. But the discarding of that idol was the only action I was able to take against those who had brought me to this pass, and precious little good did it in truth do me. For even if I had broken free of Dona Teresa’s witch-spell at last, yet still was I condemned inexorably to torment most extreme, at Masanganu the torrid, Masanganu the terrible.
BOOK THREE: Warrior
1
At Masnganu I lived a most miserable life for the space of six years without any hope to see the sea again.
How swiftly I am able to say that! It takes me not even two dozen words to encompass that statement of simple fact. And in so saying, so quickly and easily, I reduce to a seeming trifle what was indeed a most doleful burden. Not even two dozen words to tell of it! But the actual living of six years cannot be done in one hour less than those six years, as even a fool will attest; and I do swear to you by the Savior’s own beard that to dwell at Masanganu for six years is much like living anywhere else for sixty, or perhaps six hundred.
Yet did I endure it, day by day, minute by minute, which is the only way such a thing can be done. When I think back to the years of my servitude there, the time does indeed fold and compress in upon itself, so that I can speak of six years and make it seem to have gone by as rapidly as it takes me to tell of it; and yet also I can still feel the weight of those years within me, hanging on my soul as iron gyves did once hang on my legs. A prisoner can put down his chains, when his pardon comes, but I can never put down my years at Masanganu until that last day when I do lay down all the freight that my soul does carry.
I have told you already something of this place, which lies at the meeting of the waters of the Kwanza and the Lukala, toward the inner side of the Angolan coastal plain, in a region both foggy and most stifling hot. Among the swamps and marshes of Masanganu stands the pale stone fort of the Portugals upon a little headland, in a zone where the heat is greatest, the sun hanging overhead all the day long, and, I trow, half the night as well, since it is no cooler in the hours of darkness than at noontide. This fort is well situated to guard the inner lands, for it looks toward the mountains that rise in Angola’s interior, and any hostile force descending out of those jungled uplands must of necessity come within notice of Masanganu before it can hope to menace São Paulo de Loanda. So there is at Masanganu a permanent garrison to guard against any intrusion of enemies from the east or north.
Permanent, that is, in the sense that there always are men stationed at Masanganu, to a number of several hundreds; but the men themselves are far from permanent, being constantly carried off by the maladies of the place. That God chose to excuse me from those ailments is, I suppose, an example of His great mercy toward me, that He showed in many ways during my adventures in Africa; but all the while I was there, I moved among men who had been stricken horridly by this plague or that, and I learned not to form fast friendships, since there was slender chance that any such would last. There is in that place a colic that is most deadly, and a bloody flux, and a kind of headache that gives a pain beyond all understanding; and there is also the fever that smote me on my first visit, which I saw carry off any number of others, though it left me alone after the one time. And as well there is a kind of worm in Masanganu that covertly enters the body, most commonly in the fleshy parts, as the thighs, the haunches, the breasts, or even the scrotum and the yard, and I think the malady this worm causes is the most worst of all. The worm generally shows itself by the swelling of the flesh; in some it causes violent agues, with great shiverings; others it torments with intolerable pains all over the body, so that they cannot rest in any posture; others it casts into a violent fever, and continual deliriums. But those men that are afflicted in their private parts suffer beyond any others, and in their torment grow perfectly mad and outrageous, so that it is requisite to bind them very fast. The only way to cure this loathly disease is to take hold of the worm very gingerly as soon as the head has made its way out of the swelling, and make it fast to a small piece of wood, on which it is slowly and carefully drawn forth by winding the stick, sometimes for a whole month, until it emerges entire. If the worm should happen to break by being too hastily drawn out, that part which remains in the body will soon putrefy or break out at some other part, which occasions double pain and trouble. I saw men thus served, for whom no other remedy could be found to preserve their lives than cutting off a leg or an arm, or the privy parts; and if the worm is lodged in the trunk of the body, and broken, it is almost a miracle if the man does not die of the gangrene working to the vital parts. From my arrival in Masanganu in the latter part of 1594 until my departure from it early in Anno 1600 there was no single day on which I did not search my body for the intrusion of this worm, with fear and tremblings until I was sure it had not penetrated me.