forty and fifty huts, with a hedge of living trees
round, intertwined, and the royal palace in the middle.

The Prince of Budomel has a bodyguard of two hundred men, besides the
volunteer guard of his innumerable children, who are broken up in two
groups, one always at Court, "and these are made the most of," the other
scattered up and down the country, as a sort of royal garrison. The
wretched subjects, who "suffer more from their King with a good will
than they would from any stranger under force," are punished with death
for the smallest things. Only two small classes have any privileges:
ministers of religion share with the greatest nobles the sole right of
access to the person of the "Mortal God."

Cadamosto set up a mart in the upland and made what profits he could
from their miserable poverty, making exchanges with cottons, cloths,
oil, millet, skins, palm-leaves, and vegetables, and above all, of
course, with gold, what little there was to be had. "Meantime the
negroes came stupidly crowding about me, wondering at our Christian
symbols; our white colour, our dress and shape of body, our Damascenes,
garments of black silk and robes of blue cloth or dyed wool, all amazed
them; some insisted that the white colour of the strangers was not
natural but put on"; as with Cook and so many others the savages now
behaved with Cadamosto. They spat upon his arm and tried to rub off the
white paint; then they wondered more than ever when they found the flesh
itself was white.

Of gold after all not much was to be got, and the exploring party was
not long in returning to the caravels and pushing on beyond Cape Verde.
To the last the ships and their instruments were the chief terror and
delight of the negroes and above all of the negro women; the whole thing
was the work of demons, they said, not of men, seeing that our engines
of war could fell one hundred men at one discharge; the trumpets
sounding they took to be the yells of a living and furious beast of
prey. Cadamosto gave them a trumpet that they might see it was made by
art; they changed their minds accordingly, and decided that such things
were directly made by God himself, above all admiring the different
tones, and crying loudly that they had never seen anything so wonderful.

The women looked through every part of the ship--masts, helm, anchors,
sails, and oars. The eyes painted on the bow excited them: the ship had
eyes and could see before it, and the men who u