And that was all of England that remained to me, a list of kings and some jingling rhyming lines, a burning spear and a horse of air, as I lay in the black woman’s arms ten leagues beyond the wide world’s end. Yet did I not abandon hope of home. Yet did that hope not leave me never.
5
Then it came time for me to take up my musket and go to the wars for the Portugals, I being by then half a Portugal myself, I suppose, by the mere contagion of living among them so long. So off I went with all that rampscallery roguey army of cutpurses and rackrents and dandiprat costermongers, the dregs of Lisbon, that had been sent out by the government of old King Philip to defend Angola against the forces of darkness.
I said my farewells to Matamba, most long and lovingly and tearfully, doubting I would ever see her again, and marched off with my new companions to Sowonso, which is a town ruled by a lord that obeys the Duke of Mbamba, and from thence to Saminabansa, and then to Namba Calamba, which is under a great lord, who did resist us. But we burned his town, and then he obeyed us, and brought three thousand warlike Negroes to join our force. From thence we marched to the town of Sollancango, a little lord, that fought very desperately with us, but was forced to obey; and then to Kumbia ria Kiangu, where we remained many months. From this place we gave a large number of assaults and brought many lords to subjection. We were fifteen thousand strong, counting our blacks, and marched to the mountain known as Ngombe. But first we burned all Ngazi, which is a country along the north of the River Mbengu well eastward of São Paulo de Loanda, and then we came to the lord who ruled at Ngombe, at his chief town.
This lord of Ngombe did come upon us with more than twenty thousand archers, and spoiled many of our men. But with our shot we made a great spoil among them, whereupon he retired up into the mountain, and sent one of his captains to our general João de Velloria, signifying that the next day he would obey him. In the morning the lord of Ngombe entered our camp with great pomp, with drums and fifes and great ivory trumpets, and was royally received; and he gave great presents, and greatly enriched General de Velloria and his officers. We went into his town upon the top of the mountain, where there is a great plain, well farmed, full of palm-trees, sugar-canes, potatoes, and other roots, and great store of oranges and lemons. Here is a tree called the ogheghe, that beareth a fruit much like a yellow plum that is very good to eat, and has a very sweet smell, and is a remedy against bile and the wind-colic. Here, too, is a river of fresh water, that springs out of the mountains and runs all along the town.
We were here five days, and then we marched up into the country, and burned and spoiled for the space of six weeks, and then returned to Ngombe again, with great store of the cowrie-shells which are current money in that land. Here we pitched our camp a league from this pleasant mountain, and remained there for months.
In telling you of these adventures, and our burnings and sackings and conquerings, I am aware that I have told you nothing of what passed through my own mind, in those several years of marching up and down the inner provinces. That is because very little passed through my mind in those years. I had taught myself the trick of shutting off my mind, and concerning myself only with my private safety, and my three meals a day, and doing as I was told. For by now I had arrived to the central philosophy of my African life; which was, to resist nothing, to glide along uncomplainingly, obeying all my orders, serving whoever my master of the moment might be, and biding my time until I could seize some opportunity of quitting this land forever. To resist, to think for mine own self, to show independence of the spirit—I had learned that all these things led only to the dungeon, and, on the field of battle, might very well bring me a summary execution.
So I mutinied no mutinies, not even inward ones. I marched, I ate and drank, I fought. I fought well. It mattered not to me that I was fighting for Portugal. What I was in deepest truth doing was fighting to stay alive. We all every one must do our God-ordained task, whatsoever it may be, and if God in His mysterious wisdom had appointed Andrew Battell of Leigh in Essex to pass certain of his days as a soldier in the armies of Portugal, well, so be it. So be it!
Now and again I suffered a wound for my masters’ sake. These were in the main not serious ones, but the trifling things one collects in battle, a slash here, a bruise there, a twisting of a leg or an ankle that has one hobbling for a week or two, and the like. But in the last of my battles in this region of Ngombe I took an arrow deep within my right thigh, that struck so heavily among the tendons and the thick muscles that I thought the leg was all to destroyed. I heard the dread whistling sound that the arrow’s feathers made as it came toward me, but there was no hiding from its onrushing point, and when it went into me it made a sound like the striking of a hatchet against a tree. A cunning surgeon pried the arrow out, and bound me in such a way that my sundered tissues would quickly knit; but all the same, that put an end to me as an infantryman in that campaign, since that I would not be able to stand or walk for so many months. Along with many other wounded men I was carried to the city of São Paulo de Loanda to be cured. And most grateful was I, both that I was leaving the field of battle and that God had spared my leg, God and that Portuguese surgeon, who did not tell me his name. He had a gray beard and a squinted eye and great skill in his hands, that is all I know of him.
Now did my fortunes take a kinder turn.
As soon as I could leave my bed I was summoned to the palace of the governor to speak with Don João de Mendoça. This was the first meeting I had had with him in long years, seven or eight, since my attempt to sail home on the Dutch ship, and I knew that he was not sending for me merely to chastise me or to renew my banishment.
The sight of him was greatly shocking to me. Don João had grown immensely fat, and it was not the healthy copious flesh of an inveterate glutton, but rather something sickly and evil, a sort of spongy growth of a vegetable kind, that billowed and eddied about him like a vast flabby blanket, with the original man trapped somewhere deep within. The greenish pallor that I had noted on him earlier was now more pronounced, and did make him seem like one from the next world, who has escaped the grave and wanders among us. I could not disguise my horror at the look of him. But he seemed to take no notice of that; he sat in his great chair, slumped and old, and studied me in a most careful way, searching my face as though to read in it all that I had experienced since last we had met. He did not speak, and I dared not. I felt myself to be in the presence of Death himself.