"And though the booty of Diniz Diaz was far less than what others had brought home before him, the Prince made very much of his getting to that land of Negroes and Cape Verde and the Senegal," and with reason, for these discoveries assured the success of his work, and from this time all trouble and opposition were at an end. Mariners now went out to sail to the golden country that had been found or to the spice land that was now so near; men passed at once from extreme apathy or extreme terror to an equally extreme confidence. They seemed to think the fruit was within reach for them to gather, before the tree had been half climbed. Long before Fernando Po had been reached, while the caravels were still off the coasts of Sierra Leone, men at home, from King Affonso to the common seamen of the ports, "thought the line of Tunis and even of Alexandria had been long passed." The difficult first steps seemed all.
Now three volunteers, Antam Gonsalvez, and two others who had already sailed in the Prince's service, applied for the command of ships for the discovery and conquest of the lands of Guinea, and to bring back Joan Fernandez from his exile. Sailing past Cape Blanco they set up there a great wooden cross and "much would it have amazed any one of another nation that should have chanced to pass that way, not knowing of our voyages along that coast," says Azurara gleefully, giving us proof enough in every casual expression of this sort, often dropped with perfect simplicity and natural truthfulness, that to his knowledge and that of his countrymen, to the Europe of 1450, the Portuguese had had no forerunners along the Guinea Coast.
A little south of the Bight of Arguin the caravels sighted a man on the shore making signals to the ships, and coming closer they saw Fernandez who had much to tell. He had completely won over the natives of that part during his seven months' stay, and now he was able to bring the caravels to a market where trinkets were exchanged for slaves and gold with a Moorish chief—"a cavalier called Ahude Meymam." Then he was taken home to tell his story to the Prince, the fleet wasting some time in descents on the tribes of the bay of Arguin.
When he was first put on shore, Joan Fernandez told Don Henry, the natives came up to him, took his clothes off him and made him put on others of their own make. Then they took him up the country, which was very scantily clothed with grass, with a sandy and stony soil, growing hardly any trees. A few thorns and palms were the only relief to the barren monotony of this African prairie, over which wandered a few nomade shepherds in search of pasture for their flocks. There were no flowers, no running streams to light up the waste, so Fernandez thought at first, till he found one or two exceptions that proved the rule. The natives got their water from wells, spoke a tongue and wrote a writing that was different from that of the other Moors, though all these people, in the upland, were Moslems, like the Berbers nearer home. For they themselves were a tribe, the Azaneguy tribe, of the great Berber family, who had four times—in the eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries—come over to help the Moslem power in Spain.
Yet, said Fernandez, these Moors of the west are quite barbarous: they have neither law nor lordship; their food is milk and the seeds of wild mountain herbs and roots; meat and bread are both rare luxuries; and so is fish for those on the upland, but the Moors of the coast eat nothing else, and for months together I have seen those I lived among, their horses and their dogs, eating and drinking only milk, like infants. 'T is no wonder they are weaker than the negroes of the south with whom they are ever at war, fighting with treachery and not with strength. They dress in leather—leather breeches and jackets, but some of the richer wear a native mantle over their shoulders—such rich men as keep good swift horses and brood mares. It was about the trade and religion of the country that Fernandez was specially questioned, and his answers were not encouraging on either point. The people were bigoted, ignorant worshippers of the abominations of Mahumet, he said, and their traffic in slaves and gold was a small matter after all. The only gold he saw in their country was in ankle rings on the women of the chiefs; the gold dust and black bodies they got from the negroes they took to Tunis and the Mediterranean coast on camels. Their salt, on which they set great store, was from the Tagazza salt quarries, far inland. The chief, Ahude Meymam, who had been so kind to Fernandez, lived in the upland; the Christian stranger had been induced to ride up from the coast, and had reached the Court only after tortures of thirst. The water failed them on the way, and for three days they had nothing to drink.
Altogether, Fernandez' report discouraged any further attempts to explore by land, where all the country as far as could be reached seemed to yield nothing but desert with a few slender oases. It was not indeed till the European explorers reached the Congo on their coasting voyages to the south that they found a natural and inviting pathway into the heart of Africa. The desert of the north and west, the fever-haunted swamps and jungle of the Guinea Coast only left narrow inlets of more healthy and passable country, and these the Portuguese did their best to close by occasional acts of savage cruelty and impudent fraud in their dealings with the natives.
Another expedition, and that an unlucky one, under Gonsalo Pacheco, a gentleman of Lisbon, followed this last of Antam Gonsalvez. Pacheco got leave to make the voyage, equipped a caravel that he had built for himself, and got two others to share the risk and profits with him. And so, says Azurara, hoisting the banners of the Order of Christ, they made their way to Cape Blanco. Here they found, one league from the Cape, a village, and by the shore a writing, that Antam Gonsalvez had set up, in which he counselled all who passed that way not to trouble to go up and sack the village, as it was quite empty of people. So they hung about the Bank of Arguin, making raids in various places, and capturing some one hundred and twenty natives, all of which is not of much interest to any one, though as Pacheco and his men had to pay themselves for their trouble, and make a profit on the voyage, these man-hunts were the chief thing they thought about and the main thing in their stories when they got home.
Men like Pacheco and his friends were not explorers at all. They stopped far short of the mark that Diniz Diaz had made for the European Furthest, and their only discovery was of a new cape one hundred miles and more beyond the Bank of Arguin. Sailing south, because the natives fled at their approach and left the coast land all bare, "they came to a headland which they called Cape St. Anne, by which an arm of the sea ran four leagues up the country," where they hunted for more prisoners.
Still in search of slaves and gold they sailed on two hundred and fifty miles—eighty leagues—to Negroland, where Diaz had been before, and where they saw a land, to the north of the Great Western Cape, all green, peopled with men and cattle, but when they tried to near the shore and land a storm drove them back. For three days they struggled against it, but at last they found themselves near Cape Blanco, more than three hundred miles to the north, where they gave up all thought of trying to push into the unknown south, and turned cheerfully to their easier work of slave-hunting. In one of these raids, a party of seven, in a boat away from all the rest, was overpowered and killed like De Cintra's men by a large body of natives, "whose souls may God in His mercy receive in the Habitation of the Saints." The Moors carried off the boat and broke it up for the sake of its nails, and Azurara was told by some that the bodies of the dead were eaten by their brutal conquerors. 'T is certain at least, he adds, that their custom is to eat the livers of their victims and to drink their blood, when they are avenging the death of parents or brothers or children, as they do it to have full vengeance on such as have so greatly injured them.
