less than a hundred years had absolutely relapsed into Heathenism, when once more, against their wishes, missionaries returned to Western Congoland. Jesuit priests also accompanied Portuguese conquerors to the Zambezi and the south-east of Africa. Here they met with relatively little success, though they left their traces on Zambezia in the most marked manner by founding a settlement at Zumbo high up the Zambezi and even establishing stations beyond in the little known Batoka country, where their presence is attested to this day by the groves of fruit trees descended from those they introduced. Tete, the modern capital of Portuguese Zambezi, also began as a missionary station. Elsewhere, in Portuguese East Africa, the priests had very little success, as Muhammadanism had already got a hold. Indeed the first missionary explorer of Zambezia, who visited the court of the King of Monomotapa, was martyred there at the instigation of the Arabs[135]. Portuguese priests also travelled over Abyssinia during two centuries after the Portuguese discovery of that country at the end of the 15th century. Christian Abyssinia—the most probable origin of the myth of the Kingdom of Prester John—attracted a good deal of attention from Portugal since she commenced her exploration of the outer world. But the Portuguese priests were quite unsuccessful in converting the Abyssinians from their debased form of Greek Christianity to the Roman Catholic Church; and after bitter quarrels with the native clergy these missionaries had been either killed or expelled from the country by 1633. The French traders who frequented the Senegal coast between 1550 and 1650 nearly always took a missionary chaplain with them. Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian priests vainly attempted at different times to convert the Moors of North Africa. Finding this a hopeless task, they directed their efforts towards relieving the sufferings of the unfortunate Christian captives of the Barbary pirates, and practically continued this work down to the French occupation of Algeria. The Protestant peoples did little in the way of missionary work in Africa till quite the end of the 18th century; though the good Huguenots, who went out to South Africa, endeavoured, somewhat to the surprise of the Dutch, to treat the Hottentots as fellow men fitted for baptism; and the Moravians, attracted by the Hottentots, began evangelizing work at the Cape of Good Hope in 1732, but were soon checked in their efforts by the Dutch Company.