A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels — Volume 06: Arranged in Systematic Order: Forming a Complete History of the Origin and Progress of Navigation, Discovery, and Commerce, by Sea and Land, from the Earliest Ages to the Present TimeKerr, Robert
History
A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels — Volume 06: Arranged in Systematic Order: Forming a Complete History of the Origin and Progress of Navigation, Discovery, and Commerce, by Sea and Land, from the Earliest Ages to the Present Time
Kerr, Robert
Voyages and travels
Nuno de Cuna, appointed governor-general of India, arrived in May 1529
at Ormuz. Setting out too late from Lisbon in the year before with
eleven ships, he had a tedious voyage. One of his ships was lost near
Cape Verd, when 150 men perished. After passing the line, the fleet was
dispersed in a violent storm. Nuno put in at the port of St Jago in
Madagascar, where he found a naked Portuguese soldier, who had belonged
to one of two ships commanded by Lacerda and Abreu, which were cast away
in 1527 at this place. The people fortified themselves there, in hopes
that some ships passing that way might take them up. After waiting a
year, one ship passed but could not come to their assistance; and being
no longer able to subsist at that place, they marched up the country in
two bodies to seek their fortunes, leaving this man behind sick. In
consequence of intelligence of these events sent home to Portugal by
Nuno, Duarte and Diego de Fonseca were sent out in search of these men.
Duarte perished in Madagascar; and Diego found only four Portuguese and
one Frenchman, who had belonged to three French ships that were cast
away on that island. These men said that many of their companions were
still alive in the interior, but they could not be got at. From these it
was thought had sprung a people that wore found in Madagascar about
eighty years afterwards. This people alleged that a Portuguese captain,
having suffered shipwreck on the coast, had conquered a district of the
island over which he became sovereign; and all his men taking wives from
among the natives, had left numerous issue, who had erred much in
matters of faith. _Great indeed must have been their errors, to have
been discovered by the atheistical Hollanders!_ Doubtless these people
did not descend from that shipwreck only, but might have sprung likewise
from the first discoverers, _who were never heard of_, and among others
from three ships that sailed from Cochin in 1530 along with Francisco de
Albuquerque.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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