the Kings of Kongo

A Sketch of the History of Angola to the end of the Seventeenth Century

A List of the Governors of Angola

Index and Glossary

INTRODUCTION.

OUR Englishmen are known to have visited Angola towards the close of the sixteenth century, namely, Thomas Turner, Andrew Towres, Anthony Knivet and Andrew Battell. All four were taken by the Portuguese out of English privateers in South-American waters, and spent years of captivity as prisoners of war; happy, no doubt, in having escaped the fate of many of their less fortunate companions, who atoned with their lives for the hazardous proceedings in which they had engaged.

Thomas Turner,1 although he furnished Samuel Purchas with a few notes on Brazil, never placed on record what happened to him whilst in Portuguese Africa. Towres was sent to prison at Rio de Janeiro for the heinous offence of eating meat on a Friday; he attempted an escape, was retaken, and condemned to spend the rest of his captivity in Angola. He died at Masanganu, as we learn from Knivet. Knivet himself has left us an account of his adventures in Angola and Kongo; but this account contains so many incredible statements that it was with some hesitation we admitted it into this volume, as by doing so we might be supposed to vouch for the writer’s veracity.

Andrew Battell, fortunately, has left behind him a fairly circumstantial record of what he experienced in Kongo and Angola. His narrative bears the stamp of truth, and has stood the test of time. It is unique, moreover, as being the earliest record of travels in the interior of this part of Africa; for, apart from a few letters of Jesuit missionaries, the references to Kongo or Angola printed up to Battell’s time, were either confined to the coast, or they were purely historical or descriptive. Neither F. Pigafetta’s famous Relatione del Reame di Congo, “drawn out of the writings and discourses of Duarte Lopez,” and first published at Rome in 1591, nor the almost equally famous Itinerarium of Jan Huyghen van Linschoten, of which an English translation appeared as early as 1598, can be classed among books of travel.2 Samuel Braun, of Basel, who served as barber-surgeon on board Dutch vessels which traded at Luangu and on the Kongo, 1611-13, never left the coast.3 Nor did Pieter van der Broeck, who made three voyages to the Kongo between 1607 and 1612 as supercargo of Dutch vessels, penetrate inland.4 Nay, we are even able to claim on behalf of Battell that he travelled by routes not since trodden by European explorers.

Of Andrew Battell’s history we know nothing, except what may be gathered from his “Adventures,” and an occasional reference to him by his friend, neighbour, and editor, the Rev. Samuel Purchas. He seems to have been a native of Leigh, in Essex, at the present day a mere fishing village by the side of its populous upstart neighbour Southend, but formerly a place of considerable importance. As early as the fifteenth century it could boast of its guild of pilots, working in harmony with a similar guild at Deptford Strond, the men of Leigh taking charge of inward bound ships, whilst Deptford provided pilots to the outward bound. Henry VIII incorporated both guilds as the “Fraternity of the Most Glorious and Indivisible Trinity and of St. Clement;” and in the venerable church of St. Clement, at Leigh, and the surrounding churchyard may still be seen monuments erected in honour of contemporaries of Battell who were Brethren of the Trinity House; among whom are Robert Salmon (born 1567, died 1661) and Robert Chester (died 1632). But there is no tombstone in memory of Andrew Battell; and if a memorial tablet was ever dedicated to him, it must have been removed when the church was renovated in 1837. Nor do the registers of the church afford a clue to Battell’s death, for the earliest of these documents only dates back to the year 1684. At the present time no person of the name of Battell lives at Leigh.

Samuel Purchas was Vicar of Eastwood, a small village two miles to the north of Leigh, from 1604 to 1613. Battell returned to Leigh about 1610, bringing with him a little negro boy, who claimed to have been kept a captive by a gorilla (see p. 55). Purchas had many conferences with Battell, and the information obtained in this manner was incorporated by him in Purchas His Pilgrimage, the first edition of which was published in 1613,5 and will be found in this volume, pp. 71-87. Battell’s papers, however, only reached Purchas after the author’s death, and were first published by him in Hakluytus Posthumus, or Purchas His Pilgrimes, in 1625.6 There is reason to fear that