While Waiting At Arguin For The Other
Ships, Alfonso Paid Many Visits To The Continent, Where He Made Prisoners
Of Twenty-Five Of The Natives.
When the other two ships of the squadron
had joined, they went to the Rio del Ouro in search of their countryman,
Juan Fernandez, who had been several days anxiously looking out for a
vessel to carry him off.
After experiencing many hardships, Fernandez had succeeded in gaining the
friendship of a considerable person among the Moors, and was accompanied
to the shore by that mans slaves in a body. The natives exerted
themselves to procure the release of some of their countrymen who were
prisoners with the Portuguese, to whom they gave nine negroes and a
quantity of gold dust by way of ransom. To the place where this
transaction took place, the navigators gave the name of _Cabo do Resgati_,
or Cape Ransom; where likewise Fernam Tavares, an aged nobleman, received
the honour of knighthood, a distinction he had long been entitled to, but
which he would only receive upon the newly discovered coast. During the
homeward voyage, Gonzales touched at a village near Cape Branco, where he
increased his captives to ninety.
Juan Fernandez described the natives of the coast as wandering shepherds,
of the same race with the Moor who had been brought over to Portugal by
Antonio Gonzales in the former voyage. After he had been conveyed to a
considerable distance inland, he was stripped of all his clothes, and
even deprived of all the provisions he had taken on shore. A tattered
coarse rug, called an _alhaik_, was given him instead of the clothes he
had been deprived of. His food was principally a small farinaceous seed,
varied sometimes by the roots which he could find in the desert, or the
tender sprouts of wild plants. The inhabitants, among whom he lived as a
slave, unless when better supplied by means of the chase, fed on dried
lizards, and on a species of locust or grasshopper. Water was bad, or
scarce, and their chief drink was milk. They only killed some of their
cattle on certain great festivals; and, like the Tartars, they roamed
from place to place in quest of a precarious sustenance for their flocks
and herds. The whole country presented only extensive wastes of barren
sand, or an uncultivated heath, where a few Indian figs here and there
variegated the dreary and extensive inhospitable plain. A short time
before he rejoined his countrymen, Fernandez acquired the protection and
kindness of Huade Meimon, a Moor of distinction, who permitted him to
watch for the arrival of the ships, and even assigned him a guard for his
protection.
In the interval between these two voyages of Gonzales, Denis Fernandez, a
gentleman of Lisbon, who had belonged to the household of the late king,
fitted out a vessel for discovery under the patronage of Don Henry, with
a determination to endeavour to penetrate farther to the southwards than
any preceding navigator.
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