This Indicates A Much Greater Impartiality
Than Has Obtained In Our Own Dealings With The Caffres,
For We Have Engaged
In most expensive wars with them without once inquiring
whether any of the fault lay with our frontier colonists.
The
Cassange traders seem inclined to spread along the Quango,
in spite of the desire of their government to keep them on one spot,
for mutual protection in case of war. If I might judge
from the week of feasting I passed among them, they are generally prosperous.
As I always preferred to appear in my own proper character,
I was an object of curiosity to these hospitable Portuguese.
They evidently looked upon me as an agent of the English government,
engaged in some new movement for the suppression of slavery. They could
not divine what a "missionario" had to do with the latitudes and longitudes,
which I was intent on observing. When we became a little familiar,
the questions put were rather amusing: "Is it common for missionaries
to be doctors?" "Are you a doctor of medicine and a `doutor mathematico' too?
You must be more than a missionary to know how to calculate the longitude!
Come, tell us at once what rank you hold in the English army."
They may have given credit to my reason for wearing the mustache,
as that explains why men have beards and women have none;
but that which puzzled many besides my Cassange friends
was the anomaly of my being a "sacerdote", with a wife and four children!
I usually got rid of the last question by putting another:
"Is it not better to have children with a wife, than to have children
without a wife?" But all were most kind and hospitable;
and as one of their festivals was near, they invited me
to partake of the feast.
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