Strange to say it was the Portugals at Masanganu who suffered worst from these maladies, but the blacks were rarely touched except by the worm; and there were various Moors and Gypsies there who also seemed safe against the fevers. These men had been sent to Masanganu by banishment, even as I. The Gypsies or Ciganos had been expelled from Portugal by King Philip, under pain of death if they did not quit the kingdom four months after his decree, and many of these folk had gone to seek their fortunes in Africa, which is where their kind originally did proceed from, they being Egyptians by ancestry. The ones at Masanganu were all criminals sent down from São Tomé or the Kongo, and a dangerous bunch they were, that would cheerfully slit you open just to see the color of your inner organs. As for the Moors, they were Moriscos from the land of Morocco, who did compete with the Portugals in the trading of slaves along the Guinea coast, and these had been captured and imprisoned for their pains. I never knew many of these Moorish men, who were proud and aloof and spoke a language among themselves that they would not teach to others. But I did befriend a few of the Gypsies, simply because they and I, not falling victim to the evil diseases of the place, were thrown together over a long span of time and grew accustomed to one another.
In those years the Portugals did often make war against the black nations of the interior. The mainmost of these expeditions was led by Don João himself, who had, I think, never gone before into battle. This was an entry up the River Mbengu, which lies north of São Paulo de Loanda a little way, and the purpose of it was the pacifying of the blacks along the upper reaches of Angola’s boundary. In this excursion the shrewd and farsighted Don João proved himself every bit as rash as the unlamented Don Jeronymo, for against all advice he commenced it at the worst time of the year, which is March, and very quickly he lost two hundred men by fever. This I know because reinforcements were summoned from the Masanganu garrison upon these fatalities, though I was not one of those chosen. With these additional men Don João did conquer the district, and, as though to revenge himself on the natives for his own losses through diseases and ignorance of the country, he treated the defeated chieftains with unusual severity. I have it on good authority that many of the hapless sobas were placed in his heavy guns and blown forth by a charge of powder, to the terrible sundering of their limbs.
Well, and I suppose the Portugals may treat their fallen foes in any manner they wish, but I could not come to see Sir Francis Drake ever blowing enemies from guns, nor any other Englishman so doing. Why, I think not even our crookbacked King Richard III, that was the great enemy of our Queen’s grandfather, and is said to have committed such foul crimes in our land an hundred years ago, would have stooped to such a villainy. But the souls of most of these Spaniards and Portugals, methinks, are deficient in the substance that makes other men shrink from monstrous cruelties. Perhaps it is the hot dry air of their forlorn Iberian Peninsula that bakes the mercy out of them, or possibly it is the Popish teachings by which they are reared, that cause them to hold the lives of those of other faiths to be of no account. But I doubt that latter, for the Genoese and the Venetians and the Burgundians and many others are Papists just as well, and they do not stuff their conquered adversaries into cannons.
While Don João was engaged in these pastimes, his captain-major João de Velloria, the Spaniard, was marching through the land of Lamba, which lies between the Rivers Kwanza and Mbengu, and he was doing many the same things. For these triumphs Velloria was nominated as a member in the Order of Christ, which is some holy confraternity of the Portugals, and was granted a pension of twenty thousand reis, which be six pounds a year, and was named to the office of Marcador dos Esclavos, or administrator of slaves, that brought him a fee for every slave taken in this territory. How many blacks he slaughtered in the campaign that won him these honors I cannot say. But at least none of them went to be slaves in the sugar-mills of Brazil, so to that degree he gave them a kindness: it is a quicker death to perish on the field of battle than to bleed your life away cutting cane and hauling millstones.
And I did take no part in all these heroic and pious exploits, being penned up in the hellish presidio at Masanganu. My chief duty there was to bury the dead. The colic or the flux or the fevers carried them off, and then I was summoned, along with three Gypsies and two Portugals who also were reputed to be proof against these diseases, and we did dig a grave and carry the bloated and blackened and sickening corpse to it, and give it its interment. For a time I counted the number of these dead that I saw into the earth, but then I lost the tally, when it was well above an hundred. For indeed this Masanganu was a place, as Thomas Torner had declared in fright long before, where men do die like chickens. But when a chicken dies, no one need labor to dig a great buggardly hole in the ground to put it into, under a sun that gives the heat of a thousand thousand furnaces at once.
Beyond such activities there was little. We marched patrol; we repaired the fort, which was constantly crumbling, owing to the poorness of the mortar in this clime; we made clearings in the jungle, to what end I never was told; we cleaned our guns and swept out the streets. Sometimes we hunted for coccodrillos or river-horses by way of small diversion. We had for our pleasure the native women, many of them poxed, and the soldiers did use them freely, in whatever way that suited their fancy, including one that I think would have had them burned at the stake if the Jesuits got wind of it, that is, by sodomizing them. This became the common fashion at Masanganu at a time, so that when one heard a woman screaming painfully at a distance, one could be sure that some merry Portugal had flipped her on her belly and was ramming himself between her hinder cheeks. This I never chose to do, thinking that it was folly to go poking about in the hole of foulness and excrement when God had afforded us a much sweeter and more natural entrance nearby. From time to time I did take me a woman by the ordinary usage, rarely the same one twice, and never more often than the fires of lust within me did absolutely require. A Gypsy of my acquaintance kindly showed me a remedy for the venereal pox, that was to make a sort of ointment of palm-oil and a new-laid egg, and to rise after carnal doings and immediately to rub that substance all over one’s yard and ballocks and thighs. The which I unfailingly did, despite the foul sliminess of the medicine, and I had me no poxes at Masanganu, though I cannot say whether that was owing to the efficacy of the Gypsy medicine or to my own good fortune.