The Court Of Abyssinia Did Indeed Then Reside In
_Shoa_, The South-East Extremity Of The Kingdom; And, By Its Power And
Influence, Might Have Pushed Its Dominion Through These Barbarians To The
Neighbourhood Of Benin On The Western Ocean.
But all this I must confess
to be a mere conjecture of mine, of which, in the country itself, I never
found the smallest confirmation[2]." To these observations of the
celebrated Abyssinian traveller, it may be added, that the distance from
Benin to Shoa exceeds six hundred Portuguese leagues.
While the king of Portugal continued to encourage his navigators to
proceed to the southwards in discovering the African coast, he became
anxious lest some unexpected rival might interpose to deprive him of the
expected fruits of these discoveries, which had occupied the unremitting
attentions of his predecessors and himself for so many years. Learning
that John Tintam and William Fabian, Englishmen, were preparing, at the
instigation of the Duke of Medina Sidonia, in 1481, to proceed on a
voyage to Guinea, he sent Ruy de Sousa as his ambassador, to Edward IV.
of England, to explain the title which he held from the pope as lord of
that country, and to induce him to forbid his subjects from navigating to
the coast of Africa, in which negotiation he was completely successful.
He likewise used every exertion to conceal the progress of his own
navigators on the western coast of Africa, and to magnify the dangers of
the voyage; representing that the coast was quite inhospitable,
surrounded by most tremendous rocks, and inhabited by savage cannibals,
and that no vessels could possibly live in those tempestuous seas, in
which every quarter of the moon produced a furious storm, except those of
a peculiar construction, which had been invented by the Portuguese ship-
builders.
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