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, Sao 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 Conceicao.  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 Sao Francisco, called “do Penedo,” because founded upon and let into a rock, with the double-tiered batteries a 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 qua? 
—­Non sappiamo in verita!”

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 facades of old Sao 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.