he would sincerely recant his words and beg pardon of the churchman militant.  The answer was, “That would be pleasant indeed; he was the aggressor, yet I must make the excuse!  Must I receive a blow, and, notwithstanding, be thought to have done wrong?” But the peace-maker explained that the blow was given not to offend, but to defend from hearkening to heresies; that it was administered, moreover, out of paternal affection by a spiritual father, whom it did not mis-become, to a son who was not dishonoured by receiving it.  The unfortunate elector not only suffered in the ear, but was also obliged to make an abject apology, and to kiss the offender’s feet before he was re-admitted to communion.  At Maopongo the priests lost favour with the court and the women by whipping the queen, and, by the same process they abated the superhuman pretensions of the blacksmith.

When the chiefs and princes were so treated, what could the subjects expect?  The smallest ecclesiastical faults were punished with fining and a Talmudic flogging, and for disobedience, a man was sent “bound to Brazil, a thing they are more than ordinarily afraid of.”  A man taking to wife, after the Mosaic law, a woman left in widow-hood by his kinsman, is severely scourged, and the same happens to a man who marries his cousin, besides being deprived of a profitable employment.  Every city and town in Sonho had a square with a central cross, where those who had not satisfied the Easter command or who died unconfessed were buried without privilege of clergy.  The missioners insist upon their privilege of travelling free of expense, and make a barefaced use of the corvee.  The following is the tone of a mild address to the laity:  “Some among you are like your own maccacos or monkeys amongst us who, keeping possession of anything they have stolen, will sooner suffer themselves to be taken and killed, than to let go their prey.  So impure swine wallow in their filth and care not to be cleansed.”

A perpetual source of trouble was of course the slave-trade:  negroes being the staple of the land, and ivory the other and minor item, the great profits could not fail to render it the subject of contention.  The reasons why the Portuguese never succeeded in making themselves masters of Sonho are reduced by the missioner annalists to three.  Firstly, the opposition of the people caused by fear; secondly, the objections of the Sonhese to buying arms and ammunition; and, thirdly, the small price paid by the Portuguese for “captives.”  The “Most Reverend Cardinal Cibo,” writing in the name of the Sacred College, complained that the “pernicious and abominable abuse of slave-selling” was carried on under the eyes of the missioners, and peremptorily ordered them to remedy the evil.  Finding this practically impossible, the holy men salved their consciences by ordering their flocks not to supply negroes to the heretical Hollanders and English, “whose religion is so very contrary to ours,” but to the Portuguese, who would “withdraw the poor souls out of the power of Lucifer.”  One father goes so far, in his fear of heretical influences, as to remunerate by the gift of a slave the dealer Ferdinando Gomez, who had supplied him with “a flask of wine for the sacrament and some other small things,” yet he owns F. Gomez to be a rogue.