Much more real and important were the explorations of Pero de Covilhão; who travelled in Sofala and reached Abyssinia in 1490 on his return from India, and remained in that country for the rest of his life. Passing over Francisco Barreto, who explored Zambezia more for immediate political purposes in 1569 and subsequent years, we may next note the exploration of a Portuguese gentleman named Jaspar Bocarro, who in 1616 made a journey overland from the central Zambezi, across the river Shiré, near Lake Nyasa and the Ruvuma river, and thence to the east coast at Mikindani. From Mikindani he continued his journey to Malindi by sea. In 1613-18 two Portuguese Jesuit missionaries, Pedro Paez and Jeronimo Lobo, explored Abyssinia, even far to the south. Paez visited the source of the Blue Nile, and Lobo directed his travels to the quasi-Christian states to the south of Abyssinia. In 1622, Lobo and other Portuguese missionaries attempted to enter Abyssinia by way of Zeila (Somaliland). They met with great misfortunes and much cruelty at the hands of the Somalis and the Egyptian Turks. Six missionaries died or were murdered. Lobo found his way from Mombasa to India, and, nothing daunted, returned to the Danákil coast in 1625 and landed at Bailul, opposite Mokha. His clothes tattered and his feet bleeding, he passed through the rough Danákil country, climbed the Abyssinian mountains, and reached the Jesuit mission centre at Fremona, near Axum. He then made a really remarkable exploration of Abyssinia, and visited the source of the Blue Nile; but the jealous Abyssinians expelled him and the other Jesuits from Abyssinia in 1633 by handing them over as prisoners to the Turks at Masawa[166]. It was thanks to the travels of Paez and Lobo that Abyssinian geography became so well known in Europe when all the rest of interior Africa was a blank. Numbers of unnamed, unremembered Portuguese soldiers and missionaries must have plunged into the interior of Africa between 1445 and the end of the 17th century, bringing back jumbled information of lakes and rivers and negro states; but their information has perished—except in an indirect form—and their names are lost to history.