The house of the renowned traveller became a centre of attraction. The first question asked by his guests was, invariably, whether, in his long residence among the Christians, he had learned to prefer their manners to those of his own people. He was happy to be able to assure them that this was not the case. He had met in Europe, he said, some admirable men, and he thought the people there, in general, quite as intelligent as those of his own country, but far less amiable; they were, perhaps, even more energetic, especially the Portuguese and English; but he was obliged to add, that their energies were not as constantly employed in the service of mankind as their professions gave reason to expect. What he had found very displeasing in the manners of the Europeans was their disregard of cleanliness. Their negligence in this respect was a thing inconceivable to an African who had not lived among them.
He was much embarrassed, when called upon to speak of the religion of the Europeans and their mode of professing it. His audience was indignant at the hypocrisy of the Christians. But he was of opinion that their enthusiasm for their creed and their zeal for its propagation were undoubtedly genuine. Why, then, did they allow it no influence on their conduct? He could only conclude that they knew it to be too good for them, and that, though they found it, for this reason, of no use at all to themselves, they were perfectly sincere in thinking it an excellent religion for other people.
The result of his observations on the Christian nations was, that their genius especially displayed itself in the art of war, in which they had already attained to great eminence, and yet were intent on new inventions. Indeed, he gave it as his unqualified opinion, that the European had a great natural superiority over the African in everything which concerns the science of destruction.
The Mandingo had news, from time to time, through the travelling merchants, of what was going on in the North. He heard, in this way, of the captivity and miserable end of the Infant Ferdinand, of the accession of a fifth Alphonso, and of the revival of the bloody dissensions of the royal house of Portugal. He waited long for tidings of Henry's expeditions, although the year of his own return from Europe was the same in which John Gonçalvez Zarco and Tristam Vaz set off on the search for Guinea. But the looked-for news came at last, to bring with it a revival of his old foreboding.
You must allow that I have been tender of Europe. I might have introduced our traveller to it at a worse moment. Instead of going to England in the time of a chivalrous, popular prince, like Henry the Fifth, he might have seen it under Richard the Third; or I might have taken him there to assist at the decapitation of some of the eighth Henry's wives, or at a goodly number of the meaner executions, which went on, they say, at the rate of one to every five hours through that king's extended reign. Instead of making him report that human burnt-offerings, though not unknown in England, were infrequent, and that only a single victim was immolated on each occasion, I might have let him collect his statistics on this subject in the time of the bloody Mary. I am not sure that he could have seen France to much less advantage than in the days of the Bourgignon and Armagnac factions; but perhaps he would not have formed a very different judgment, if, going there a century and a half later, he had happened on the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew.
The African traveller sometimes a little misapprehended what he saw, no doubt; but he noted nothing in malice. If he did not see our English ancestors precisely with their own eyes or with ours, at least he did not fall into the monstrous mistakes of the Greek historian Chalcondyles, of whose statements in regard to English manners Gibbon says,—"His credulity and injustice may teach an important lesson: to distrust accounts of foreign and remote nations, and to suspend our belief of every tale that deviates from the laws of Nature and the character of man."