A Voyage to Abyssinia | Page 3

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A Voyage to Abyssinia by Father Jerome Lobo translated from the
French by Samuel Johnson.

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. He obtained the ransom, and desired also to obtain from
the Portuguese Viceroy in India armed force to maintain the
missionaries in the position they had so far won. But the Civil power
was deaf to his pleading. He removed the appeal to Lisbon, and after
narrowly escaping on the way from a shipwreck, and after having been
captured by pirates, he reached Lisbon, and sought still to obtain means
of overawing the force hostile to the work of the Jesuits in Abyssinia.
The Princess Margaret gave friendly hearing, but sent him on to
persuade, if he could, the King of Spain; and failing at Madrid, he went
to Rome and tried the Pope. He was chosen to go to the Pope, said the
Patriarch Alfonso Mendez, because, of all the brethren at Goa, the
'Pater Hieronymus Lupus' (Lobo translated into Wolf) was the most
ingenious and learned in all sciences, with a mind most generous in its
desire to conquer difficulties, dexterous in management of business,
and found most able to make himself agreeable to those with whom
there was business to be done. The vigour with which he held by his
purpose of endeavouring in every possible way to bring the Christianity
of Abyssinia within the pale of the Catholic Church is in accordance
with the character that makes the centre of the story of this book.
Whimsical touches arise out of this strength of character and readiness
of resource, as when he tells of the taste of the Abyssinians for raw
cow's flesh, with a sauce high in royal Abyssinian favour, made of the
cow's gall and contents of its entrails, of which, when he was pressed to
partake, he could only excuse himself and his brethren by suggesting
that it was too good for such humble missionaries. Out of distinguished
respect for it, they refrained from putting it into their mouths.
Good Father Lobo gave up the desire of his heart, when it was proved
unattainable, and returned to India six years after the breaking up of his
work in Abyssinia, at the age of forty-seven. He came to be head of the

Provincials of the Jesuit settlement at Goa, and after about