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

have built forts and batteries,
churches and chapels, public buildings and large private houses,white

or yellow, withample green verandahs--each an ugly cube, but massing
well together. The general decline of trade since 1825, and especially
the loss of the lucrative slave export, leave many large tenements
unfinished or uninhabited, while the aspect is as if a bombardment had
lately
026--- taken place. Africa shows herself in heaps of filthy hovels,
wattle and daub and dingy thatch; in "umbrella-trees" (ficus), acacias
and calabashes, palms and cotton-trees, all wilted, stunted, and dusty as
at Cairo. 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, São 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 Conceição. 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 São Francisco, called "do Penedo," because
founded upon and let into a rock, with the double-tiered batteries à 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 quà? --Non sappiamo in verità!"
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 façades of
old São 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 praça, 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)