Thus We Passed Our Days And Nights In Prayers, In Affliction, And
Tears, Continually Crowded With Widows And Orphans That Subsisted
Upon Our Charity And Came To Us For Bread When We Had Not Any For
Ourselves.
While we were in this distress we received an account that the
viceroy of the Indies had fitted out a powerful fleet against the
King of Mombaza, who, having thrown off the authority of the
Portuguese, had killed the governor of the fortress, and had since
committed many acts of cruelty.
The same fleet, as we were
informed, after the King of Mombaza was reduced, was to burn and
ruin Zeila, in revenge of the death of two Portuguese Jesuits who
were killed by the King in the year 1604. As Zeila was not far from
the frontiers of Abyssinia, they imagined that they already saw the
Portuguese invading their country.
The viceroy of Tigre had inquired of me a few days before how many
men one India ship carried, and being told that the complement of
some was a thousand men, he compared that answer with the report
then spread over all the country, that there were eighteen
Portuguese vessels on the coast of Adel, and concluded that they
were manned by an army of eighteen thousand men; then considering
what had been achieved by four hundred, under the command of Don
Christopher de Gama, he thought Abyssinia already ravaged, or
subjected to the King of Portugal. Many declared themselves of his
opinion, and the court took its measures with respect to us from
these uncertain and ungrounded rumours.
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