Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo, vol 2 | Page 7

We are in the latitude of East African Kilwa and of Brazilian Pernambuco; but this is a lee-land, and the suffering is from drought. Yet, curious to say, the flora, as will appear, is here richer than in the well- watered eastern regions.
Steaming onwards, at one mile off shore, we turned from south- east to south-west, and presently rounded the north-east point of Loanda Island, where a moored boat and a lantern showed the way. We passed the first fort, S?o Pedro do Morro (da Cassandama), which reminded me of the Aguada at the mouth of Goa Harbour. The two bastions and their batteries date from A.D. 1700, and have been useful in administering a strongish hint--in A.D. 1826 they fired into Captain Owen. The next work is the little four-gun work, Na. Sa. da Concei??o. We anchored in five fathoms about 1,200 yards off shore, in company with some fifteen craft, large and small, including a neat despatch cruizer, built after the "Nimrod" model. Fort S?o Francisco, called "do Penedo," because founded upon and let into a rock, with the double-tiered batteries �� la Vauban, carefully whitewashed and subtended by any amount of dead ground, commands the anchorage and the northern road, where strings of carregadores, like driver-ants, fetch and carry provisions to town. A narrow causeway connects with the gate, where blacks on guard lounge in fantastic uniform, and below the works are the coal-sheds. Here the first turf was lately turned by an English commodore--this tramway was intended to connect with the water edge, and eventually to reach the Cuanza at Calumbo. So Portugal began the rail system in West Africa.
The city was preparing for her ecclesiastical festival, and I went ashore at once to see her at her best. The landing-place is poor and mean, and the dusty and sandy walk is garnished with a single row of that funereal shrub, the milky euphorbia. The first sensation came from the pillars of an unfinished house--
"Care colonne, che fate qu��? --Non sappiamo in verit��!"
The Ponta de Isabel showed the passeio, or promenade, with two brick ruins: its "five hundred fruit-trees of various descriptions" have gone the way of the camphor, the tea-shrub, and the incense-tree, said to have been introduced by the Jesuits. "The five pleasant walks, of which the central one has nine terraces, with a pyramid at each extremity, and leads to the Casa de Recreio, or pleasure-house of the governor-general, erected in 1817 by Governor Vice-Admiral Luiz da Motta Feio," have insensibly faded away; the land is a waste, poor grazing ground for cattle landed from the south coast, whilst negrokins scream and splash in the adjoining sea.
Beyond the Government gardens appears the old Ermida (chapel), Na Sa. da Nazareth, which English writers have dubbed, after Madeiran fashion, the Convent. The frontage is mean as that of colonial ecclesiastical buildings in general, and even the epauletted fa?ades of old S?o Paulo do not deserve a description. Here, according to local tradition, was buried the head of the "intrepid and arrogant king of Congo," Dom Antonio, whose 100,000 warriors were defeated at Ambuilla (Jan. ist, 1666) by Captain Luiz Lopes de Sequeira, the good soldier who lost his life, by a Portuguese hand, at the battle of Matamba (Sept. 4th, 1681). A picture in Dutch tiles (azulejos) was placed on the right side of the altar to commemorate the feat.
After the Ermida are more ruined houses and ragged plantations upon the narrow shelf between the sea-cliff and the sea: they lead to the hot and unhealthy low town skirting the harbour, a single street with small offsets. A sandy strip spotted with cocoa-nuts, represents the Praia do Bungo (Bungo Beach), perhaps corrupted from Bunghi, a pra?a, or square; it debouches upon the Quitanda Pequena, a succursale market-place, where, on working- days, cloth and beads, dried peppers, and watered rum are sold. Then come a single large building containing the Trem, or arsenal, the cavalry barracks, the "central post-office," and the alfandega, or custom-house, which has a poor platform, but no pier. The stables lodge some half-a-dozen horses used by mounted orderlies--they thrive, and, to judge from their high spirits, the climate suits them. In Captain Owen's time (A.D. 1826) there was "a respectable corps of cavalry."
Passing the acting cathedral for the See of Angola and Congo, which deserves no notice, you reach the Quitanda Grande, where business is brisker. There is a sufficiency of beef and mutton, the latter being thin-tailed, and not "five-quartered." Fish is wisely preferred to meat by the white man, "affirming that it is much easier digested;" and a kind of herring, and the sparus known upon the Brazilian coast as the "tainha," the West African "vela," and the French "mulet," at times superabound. All the tropical fruits flourish, especially the