INTRODUCTION by Henry Morley, Editor of the 1887 edition
Jeronimo Lobo was born in Lisbon in the year 1593. He entered the
Order of the Jesuits at the age of sixteen. After passing through
the studies by which Jesuits were trained for missionary work, which
included special attention to the arts of speaking and writing,
Father Lobo was sent as a missionary to India at the age of twenty-
eight, in the year 1621. He reached Goa, as his book tells, in
1622, and was in 1624, at the age of thirty-one, told off as one of
the missionaries to be employed in the conversion of the
Abyssinians. They were to be converted, from a form of Christianity
peculiar to themselves, to orthodox Catholicism. The Abyssinian
Emperor Segued was protector of the enterprise, of which we have
here the story told.
Father Lobo was nine years in Abyssinia, from the age of thirty-one
to the age of forty, and this was the adventurous time of his life.
The death of the Emperor Segued put an end to the protection that
had given the devoted missionaries, in the midst of dangers, a
precarious hold upon their work. When he and his comrades fell into
the hands of the Turks at Massowah, his vigour of body and mind, his
readiness of resource, and his fidelity, marked him out as the one
to be sent to the headquarters in India to secure the payment of a
ransom for his companions.
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