by Ann Wroe
For all their instruments and careful observations, men still resorted to fantasy. Navigators often did not know which country they were in, what adjoined it, where the rivers led, or what its nature was; but, not knowing, they pretended to. The globe, after all, was confidently covered with named places. Grand claims made with panache were hard to disprove. You, too, could name a kingdom on a map and say you had been there (bringing back with you a leaf, a brown man, a small piece of gold). And you, too, could draw a prince on a map (giving him a turban or a tall hat, seating him cross-legged in a silk pavilion underneath a palm tree), and then – a marvel! – claim to have found him.
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Pero Vaz was directly involved in the stories of lost or mysterious kings. In 1489, two years after Brampton’s boy had joined his service, the one-eyed knight was sent to the Senegal on the King of Portugal’s business. Since, by most accounts, the boy was still in Portugal and with him, it is likely that he went too.
Very little of Africa would have been known to him, beyond the usual tall tales. In Tournai (if that was his place) the only hint of Africa had come, on various occasions in the century, with the appearance in town of a wild group of men and women called ‘the Egyptians’. Their leader, ‘Sire Miquiel, Prince de Latingem en Egypte’, appealed for Tournai’s charity, and received it, with the story that his people were Christians who had been driven from their land by the Saracens. They could not stay more than three days in any town, he explained, because they had to wander like pilgrims through the world for seven years before they could return to their country. The Tournaisiens, moved, put them up in the Cloth Hall and gave them bread and beer. But the women, dirty and badly dressed, stole and ‘spun their fairy tales’ all around the town and trained their children to cut purses from people’s belts, while the men swindled buyers over horses. In the Cloth Hall, like beasts, ‘they were not ashamed to do their necessaries and works of nature in front of everyone’. The scandalised chronicler who recorded this said they were actually serfs from a town in Germany called Mahode. In Tournai they remained ‘Egyptians’ each time they appeared, and were given herrings and firewood with the injunction that no one in town was to hurt them. Eventually, however, the ‘Grand Count of Little Egypt’ was stiffly turned away.
Moving north to the bigger cities, proper Africans were still rarely seen. Madeira sugar – ‘sugar of Portugal’, as it was served at the tables of the Dukes of Burgundy – and pepper, as Brampton shipped it, were the only African goods that were handled wholesale. More muddled and tantalising hints of Africa appeared on the market-stalls: ivory, dragon’s blood, sticky gums and dried roots, cinnamon bark with its dusty dark smell, brilliantly coloured feathers. Souvenirs came occasionally to northern Europe, like the elephant’s tusk and foot that were presented to Isabella of Portugal, Duchess of Burgundy, by Cadamosto, who had helped to eat the rest of the creature. (He thought it chewy and tasteless.) The Burgundian Netherlands, like England, contained a few bits and pieces of Africa; but they were for the cabinet of curiosities, and could not easily be joined to make a picture.
In Portugal, that changed. The travel notes of Dr Münzer, Behaim’s ghost-writer, who visited from Germany in 1494, showed what northerners especially noticed there. On the door of the church of St Blaise in Evora, Dr Münzer wrote, was the skin of a cobra some thirty palms long, which had been killed with flaming spears. It had colours as varied and beautiful as the stars, scattered with golden spots. ‘Ethiopian Guinea’ was the land it had come from, ‘and they say it can kill two men with its tail and coils, and that it fights with elephants’. In the church of the Franciscans in Lisbon, a big dried crocodile hung in the choir. Both here and elsewhere grew dragon’s-blood trees ‘from the equinoctial regions’, curiously spongy and full of tiny veins from which, in March, came bright red blood. On one Sunday excursion to Sancta Maria do Luz, a mile outside Lisbon, Dr Münzer was shown a pelican’s beak (‘smaller than a swan’s but bigger than a goose’s, with a sort of bag for its stomach opening’), reeds from Madeira ‘as thick as my arm and sixteen palms high’, and the skeletons of swordfish, ‘with saws on their faces two ells long, really hard, that can cut up ships’. When he visited Behaim’s father-in-law in Lisbon he was given a present of dried musk-glands from a gazelle, with which – as a doctor – he was delighted.
Black faces, too, made Portugal different. In the streets where the boy walked they were common, if no less strange than they had seemed before. Their darkness came in different gradations, from the almost-white Berbers and Moroccans to the near-black Canarians, jumping and hooting and cave-dwelling, and the jet-black Guineans. To the northern European eye – his eye – negro faces were as far removed as possible from the ideal of beauty. The sun had ‘discoloured’ them. The demons of Hell had such faces, with squashed-up noses and broad grinning mouths, their skin seared by the heat. Their lack of faith made Africans not only live, but look, like brutes.
The land they came from remained as mysterious and frightening as they did. A party of Flemings had landed on the Gold Coast in 1475; the natives feasted on their delicate white flesh, and the next visitors were offered their clothes as barter. Except for exploring Guinea in search of gold, the Portuguese had penetrated little beyond the shore of West Africa. Having set up on headlands the engraved stone pillars topped with crosses that were now being prefabricated in Lisbon, having built the rudimentary forts and established contact with whatever native traders they could find not too far from the shore, they moved on south. Most of the stuff they acquired there could have been found on a beach, or in the trees that lined it: whale amber, pepper, gum arabic, turtle oil. There was little need to go further inland, and every need to press on. Diaz had left behind, at various points down the coast, well-fed Africans in European clothes who were to act as walking advertisements for trading contacts with Portugal. They were not required to speak; like the boy in Lisbon, they were simply dropped among strangers, and made on the shore a sort of solitary dumb-show of unaccustomed elegance.
As they pushed on down the coast, the Portuguese made detours only for the great rivers of West Africa – the Senegal, the Gambia and the Congo – for it was always possible that these huge estuaries marked the first swing of the sea away to the east. Eastwards lay the land of Prester John, the Christian priest-king, and the Paradise Terrestre, surrounded with fire flaming to the clouds, from which the world’s chief rivers flowed down over gravel crunching with jewels. Portuguese sailors tried these river entries to Prester John’s land, though there were reputed to be far more marvels in the land of the Great Khan, which could be reached by going overland. They dared them, too, despite the rumour that the sea approaches to his kingdom flowed over rocks of adamant that sucked out the nails from ships.
Over the years, details of this priest-king had accumulated at the Portuguese court. He was descended from one of the Magi who had come to adore the infant Christ, and his land (in which parrots were as plentiful as gulls in Lisbon harbour) was called Pentexoire, or something similar. He could field an army of as many as a million men, naked or in crocodile skins, to fight the Saracens, and went into battle himself behind three great jewelled crosses of gold. His soldiers had weapons of pure gold, and gold roofed their houses. The precious stones there were so huge (fresh-picked from the gravel brought down by the floods from Paradise) that men made plates and cups of them. It was Prester John’s treasure, as much as his faith, that made men long to find him.
His envoys had been seen in Europe. One, called George, had visited Isabella of Burgundy (her elephant’s foot perhaps still on display, unless it had begun to stink). Alfonso V of Aragon had received letters from him. Yet this king of mystery had to be more than a humdrum letter-writer. In 1485, ambassadors from the King of Benin reported that whenever a king acceded to their kingdom, a prince called Ogané, from a kingdom twenty moons’ journey to the east, would send him a staff and a headpiece of shining brass, ‘fashioned like a Spanish helmet’. More suggesti
vely, Ogané would also send a cross of brass to be worn round the neck, ‘a holy and religious emblem similar to that worn by the Commanders of the Order of St John’. The ambassadors, however, never saw this prince. He sat behind curtains of silk which, as the envoys left, were raised a little to show the princely foot, a limb so holy that his people kissed it as if it were a relic. By the late 1480s, João and his cosmographers had determined that this ruler must be Prester John. The king decided to check on him, probing the mystery of the cross and the curtains, just as he was to send out envoys later to check on Richard Plantagenet.
The arrival of the fair-haired boy in Lisbon coincided closely with the departure from Santarem, in May 1487, of João’s overland expedition to find the dimly glimpsed king in his imagined country. Two men were sent. One of them soon died; the other, a secret agent, crossed the Indian Ocean, went in disguise to Mecca and at last, after seven years, found his king in Ethiopia. Diaz, too, was originally sent out to find Prester John, but after rounding the Cape his sailors would go no further. His fleet came back to Lisbon in December 1488, kingless.
In the same year, however, another African prince arrived in Lisbon. His name was Bemoy, King of the Jalofs, a claimant to a disputed throne who had been forced to flee by his enemies and had appealed to the Portuguese for help. Cadamosto described him as ‘a tall man, strong and good-looking, forty years old, with a long bushy beard, so that he did not seem a negro, but a prince worthy of all respect’. He and his entourage wore rich Portuguese robes and had been given mules and horses, the necessary accoutrements of princeliness. Yet his skin was blue-black; the hair on his head was short and crinkled, like dry black moss; and his hands when he held them out had pale pink undersides, as if that part only had been touched by God. Of his kingdom, which lay some way south-east of the Senegal river, not much was known except that it was humid and hot, that the people lived on millet grown in silt, and that the summer heat made clefts in the ground so deep that horses could be buried in them.
The arrival of Bemoy, the prince in distress, was extraordinary. The royal residences in Setubal had been hung with tapestries and silk for him, and all lords and nobles were commanded to attend. Pero Vaz would have been there, his page following. The king received Bemoy in the state room, on a high dais under a canopy of brocade. Bemoy at once tore off his turban; João, with the typical restraint of civilised and Christian rulers, took two or three steps from the dais and raised his hat slightly. At this, Bemoy and his men threw themselves on the ground at the king’s feet, ‘making as though they took the earth from under them and threw it over their heads, in token of humility and obedience’. João bade them rise and, leaning against his chair, commanded the interpreter to tell Bemoy to speak. The exiled king then poured out his story ‘with such majesty of person, and with so many effects to arouse pity for his miserable banishment, that he was understood even before the interpreter translated his words’. The chronicler Rui de Pina thought his speech, with its ‘swift sighs and many tears’, so notable ‘that [it] did not seem to come from a savage negro but from a Greek prince, educated in Athens’. The force of this piece of theatre was not likely to be lost on other exiled princes, or princes in training.
In order to accommodate himself to his Portuguese allies, Bemoy also agreed to be baptised. This was the occasion for immense celebrations: bullfights, tournaments, fancy-dress balls, astounding displays of horsemanship by Bemoy’s men. At the centre of it all, in a special chair set opposite the king’s, sat Bemoy himself, with his broad black face and his carefully copied courtesy, perhaps barely understanding what he had done. He had put on proper Christian clothes of hose, surcoat, doublet and robe, with shoes on his feet; he had consented to live, as Christians did, in a house built of stone and roofed with tile, rather than woven of grass. The king had made him a knight in honour of his baptism, and he now possessed a red shield emblazoned with a gold cross and bordered with Portuguese escutcheons. He had a new name, too, João, or John, the name of the priest-king and of the king his godfather. The holy baptismal water had flowed over him, though it did not run down, as on Christians, but caught in his tight curls like dew. At his first Mass he had instinctively knelt and removed his cap as the priest elevated the Body of Christ. But he remained berry-black, ink-black, raven-wing black, with no outward sign that salvation might have been effected in him. In his own country, among his own people, it was always likely that some other Bemoy would appear: imperious, confident, violent, even devilish, his blackness finally overpowering all the grace that had been poured out on him.
Not long after the baptism, João arranged that Bemoy should be restored to his kingdom. It was Pero Vaz, old one-eyed Hatchet-face, who was picked as captain-major to escort him as far as the Senegal. For this ‘great and costly expedition’ he was given twenty armed caravels, a huge force. Delivering Bemoy was only one part, the first and easiest, of his task. His further instructions were to establish a fort similar to the one up the coast at São Jorge da Mina, in Guinea, which Columbus had admired. He was also commanded by the king, since ‘a great part of the land of Guinea was bled of its gold’, to tap the gold that came into the markets of Timbuktu and Mombaré, both of them supposedly close to the river in its distant and higher reaches. He was expected, in other words, to stay there for some time. Many soldiers and craftsmen went with him, and a large group of priests (headed by the king’s chaplain), with portable altars, vestments, chalices and all that was needed to furnish churches and save souls. Stone had been cut for the fortresses, and lengths of timber planed. There were several big guns on board, and supplies that were intended to last for months.
Leaving Lisbon, the caravels steered south-south-west for 200 leagues, calling in at Jandia Point in the Canaries and then heading south for the gulf of the Rio de Ouro. This first sighting of the African mainland – the boy’s first sighting – showed it ‘high and flat like a table’, until the River of Gold itself, which could be seen from the mast as a lake lying among sandhills. For 100 leagues after this the coast was treeless desert, though the water swarmed with fish. The course was kept to the south to avoid Cape Barbas, where great reefs of rock ran out into the sea and destroyed unwary ships. After this the landmarks were passed in order: Pedra de Galha, a great rock like a vessel under sail; Cabo Branco, with its white hill; the island of Arguim, with a fort and factory where brown-skinned Arabs bartered negroes and tapir hides for cheap cloths and kerchiefs; then fifty leagues of desert where, if the ship sailed close enough (though the shallows made this dangerous), you could glimpse gazelles and naked savages on the heat-shimmering sand, pinnacles of wind-weathered rock, camels swaying under blocks of white salt. Beyond this was the town of Oadem, a centre for the Guinea gold trade, where suddenly high palm groves shaded the houses and the Arabs offered, besides gold, sweet dates and goat meat.
The Senegal was now close. The sign of this, on the low deserted coast where men ate each other, was a single grove of palms three leagues from the river. The north bank of the river was forested, and its shallows ran for a league or more into the sea. A wise captain anchored at the palms and considered how to navigate the peculiar tides of the bar, ‘contrary to the flow of the tides in Spain’. So here, presumably, Pero Vaz lingered for a while and mulled over the tasks he had been given, his page in attendance. They were about fifteen degrees north of the equator, in the searing heat and glare of the dry season in West Africa.
Pero Vaz had been ordered not only to take Bemoy home, but also to push up the Senegal in search of Prester John. This almost went without saying. For at least a decade Portuguese sailors had been looking for this prince along the great rivers of West Africa. In 1485 a band of Portuguese explorers had got ninety miles up the Congo and carved their names on rocks, together with crosses and coats of arms; but some of their number were already dying, and they did not get much further. The Senegal had been passed years before, and men had explored it as far as the Felu cataracts, but it remained a dangerous
river. Its mouth was the place where the familiar Berbers, with their milk-brown skin, gave way to the unknown blacks. These blacks were not cowed by bombard fire from the caravels, but swarmed to attack in their dugout canoes, throwing spears and arrows tipped with poison so strong that a wound meant certain death. The river itself was scarcely navigable, turbulent in the wet season and, in the dry, obstructed by rocks and sandbanks. Great ‘lizards’ and serpents infested the waters, and were pecked full of holes by flocks of birds as they swam towards the sea. In tropical waters caravels did not last in any case, but were eaten through by worms and freighted with huge barnacles. Ships like these, riddled with worm-holes, were beached as a warning in the harbour at Lisbon.
For these reasons, as well as others, Pero Vaz seemed to become increasingly uneasy the further he got from Portugal. The climate became steadily more humid; he sweated in his European clothes. Cloth and woollen garments were believed to putrefy in that heat, unless they were regularly rinsed in the sea. His page would have brought him cool wine and water, waved off the evil biting insects, folded and smoothed his damp sheets. For himself, the African sun would have tormented his pale young skin unless, like one traveller mocked by João, he wore a sunhat and gloves against it. Around him, men were falling ill. The river was known to be rife with fever, the same fever that had caused the coastal fort at Benin to be abandoned three years before. ‘[Pero Vaz] wanted to go back,’ wrote Garcia de Resende, ‘and he was afraid of dying there, because the land was full of disease.’ He suffered also, perhaps, that different and pervasive sickness: fear of going too far in.
