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.
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