This excellent natural breakwater perfectly shelters the shipping from the "calemas," or perilous breakers on the seaward side, and the surface is dotted with huts and groves, gardens and palm orchards. At the Ponta do Norte once stood a fort appropriately called Na. Sa. Flór de Rosa; it has wholly disappeared, but lately, when digging near the sea, heaps of building stone were found. Barbot here shows a "toll-house to collect the customs," and at the southern extremity a star-shaped "Fort Fernand."
This island was the earliest of Portuguese conquests on this part of the coast. The Conquistador Paulo Dias de Novaes, a grandson of Bartholomeo Dias, was sent a second time, in A.D. 1575, to treat with the king of "Dongo," who caused trouble to trade. Accompanied by 700 Portuguese, he reached the Cuanza River, coasted north, and entered by the Barra de Corimba, then accessible to caravels. He landed without opposition amongst a population already Christianized, and, after occupying for a few months the island, which then belonged to Congo, he founded, during the next year, the Villa de São Paulo de Loanda on the mainland.
The importance of the island arose from its being the great money bank of the natives, who here collected the zimbo, buzio, cowrie, or cypræa moneta. Ample details concerning this industry are given by the old writers. The shell was considered superior to the "impure or Braziles," brought from the opposite Bahia (de Todos os Santos), though much coarser than the small Indian, and not better than the large blue Zanzibar. M. Du Chaillu ("Second Expedition," chap, iv.) owns to having been puzzled whence to derive the four sacred cowries: "They are unknown on the Fernand Vaz, and I believe them to have come across the continent from eastern Africa." There are, indeed, few things which have travelled so far and have lasted so long as cowries—they have been found even amongst "Anglo-Saxon" remains.
The modern Muxi-Loandas hold aloof from the shore-folk, who return the compliment in kind. They dress comparatively well, and they spend considerable sums in their half-heathen lembamentos (marriages) and mutambé (funerals).
As might be expected, after three centuries of occupation, the Portuguese, both in East and West Africa, have naturalized a multitude of native words, supplying them with a Lusitanian termination. The practice is very useful to the traveller, and the despair of the lexicographer. During the matumbé the relations "wake" the toasted, swaddled, and aromatized corpse with a singular vigour of drink and general debauchery.
I arrived with curiosity at the capital of Angola, the first Portuguese colony visited by me in West Africa. The site is pleasing and picturesque, contrasting favourably with all our English settlements and with the French Gaboon; for the first time after leaving Teneriffe, I saw something like a city. The escarpment and the sea-bordering shelf, allowing a double town like Athenæ or Thebæ, a Cidade Alta and a Cidade Baixa, are favourites with the Lusitanians from Lisbon to the China seas, and African São Paulo is reflected in the Brazilian Bahia. So Greece affected the Acropolis, and Rome everywhere sought to build a Capitol. The two lines follow the shore from north-east to south-west, and they form a graceful amphitheatre by bending westward at the jutting headland, Morro de São Miguel, of old de São Paulo. Three hundred years of possession have built forts and batteries, churches and chapels, public buildings and large private houses,white or yellow, withample green verandahs—each an ugly cube, but massing well together. The general decline of trade since 1825, and especially the loss of the lucrative slave export, leave many large tenements unfinished or uninhabited, while the aspect is as if a bombardment had lately
026—- taken place. Africa shows herself in heaps of filthy hovels, wattle and daub and dingy thatch; in "umbrella-trees" (ficus), acacias and calabashes, palms and cotton-trees, all wilted, stunted, and dusty as at Cairo. We are in the latitude of East African Kilwa and of Brazilian Pernambuco; but this is a lee-land, and the suffering is from drought. Yet, curious to say, the flora, as will appear, is here richer than in the well- watered eastern regions.
Steaming onwards, at one mile off shore, we turned from south- east to south-west, and presently rounded the north-east point of Loanda Island, where a moored boat and a lantern showed the way. We passed the first fort, São Pedro do Morro (da Cassandama), which reminded me of the Aguada at the mouth of Goa Harbour. The two bastions and their batteries date from A.D. 1700, and have been useful in administering a strongish hint—in A.D. 1826 they fired into Captain Owen. The next work is the little four-gun work, Na. Sa. da Conceição. We anchored in five fathoms about 1,200 yards off shore, in company with some fifteen craft, large and small, including a neat despatch cruizer, built after the "Nimrod" model. Fort São Francisco, called "do Penedo," because founded upon and let into a rock, with the double-tiered batteries à la Vauban, carefully whitewashed and subtended by any amount of dead ground, commands the anchorage and the northern road, where strings of carregadores, like driver-ants, fetch and carry provisions to town. A narrow causeway connects with the gate, where blacks on guard lounge in fantastic uniform, and below the works are the coal-sheds. Here the first turf was lately turned by an English commodore—this tramway was intended to connect with the water edge, and eventually to reach the Cuanza at Calumbo. So Portugal began the rail system in West Africa.
The city was preparing for her ecclesiastical festival, and I went ashore at once to see her at her best. The landing-place is poor and mean, and the dusty and sandy walk is garnished with a single row of that funereal shrub, the milky euphorbia. The first sensation came from the pillars of an unfinished house—
"Care colonne, che fate quà?
—Non sappiamo in verità!"