manned by an army of eighteen
thousand men; then considering what had been achieved by four hundred,
under the command of Don Christopher de Gama, he thought Abyssinia
already ravaged, or subjected to the King of Portugal. Many declared
themselves of his opinion, and the court took its measures with respect
to us from these uncertain and ungrounded rumours. Some were so
infatuated with their apprehensions that they undertook to describe the
camp of the Portuguese, and affirmed that they had heard the report of
their cannons.

All this contributed to exasperate the inhabitants, and reduced us often
to the point of being massacred. At length they came to a resolution of
giving us up to the Turks, assuring them that we were masters of a vast
treasure, in hope that after they had inflicted all kinds of tortures on
us, to make us confess where we had hid our gold, or what we had done
with it, they would at length kill us in rage for the disappointment. Nor
was this their only view, for they believed that the Turks would, by
killing us, kindle such an irreconcilable hatred between themselves and
our nation as would make it necessary for them to keep us out of the Red
Sea, of which they are entirely masters: so that their determination was
as politic as cruel. Some pretend that the Turks were engaged to put us
to death as soon as we were in their power.

CHAPTER XIII

The author relieves the patriarch and missionaries, and supports them. He
escapes several snares laid for him by the viceroy of Tigre. They put
themselves under the protection of the Prince of Bar.

Having concluded this negotiation, they drove us out of our houses, and
robbed us of everything that was worth carrying away; and, not content
with that, informed some banditti that were then in those parts of the
road we were to travel through, so that the patriarch and some
missionaries were attacked in a desert by these rovers, with their
captain at their head, who pillaged his library, his ornaments, and what
little baggage the missionaries had left, and might have gone away
without resistance or interruption had they satisfied themselves with
only robbing; but when they began to fall upon the missionaries and their
companions, our countrymen, finding that their lives could only be
preserved by their courage, charged their enemies with such vigour that
they killed their chief and forced the rest to a precipitate flight. But
these rovers, being ac