I answered that if I might escape to the city of Canonor, I doubted not but that I would get their pardon of the governor of the navy. There is small hope of mercy, said they, we are so famous and well known to many other kings in the way, which favor the Portugals, and lay wait to take us. In which their talk I perceived how fearful a thing is a guilty conscience, and called to remembrance the saying of the poet: ‘Multa male timeo, qui feci multa proterve.’ That is, ‘I fear much evil because I have done much evil.’ For they had not only made many such pieces of artillery for the infidels, to the great damage of Christians, and contempt of the holy name of Christ and his religion, but had also taught the idolaters both the making and use of them; and at my being there I saw them give a model or mould to certain idolaters, whereby they might make brazen pieces, of such bigness that one of them may receive the charge of a hundred and five tankards (cantoros) of powder. At the same time, also, there was a Jew, which had made a very fair brigantine, and four great pieces of artillery of iron. But God shortly afterwards gave him his due reward; for, when he went to wash him in the river, he was drowned.” Nor did the two Christians escape much better. The Portuguese commander agreed to pardon them; but, in attempting to escape to him, they were killed. Maffei, in his Indian History, refers to the aid which the native princes derived from these and other Christian renegadoes. NOTE D FERNAM MENDEZ PINTO The ill fortune of which Pinto complained as having pursued him through life did not spare him even after he was laid in the grave, the narrative of his adventures which he left behind him having been assailed by the wits and critics with hardly less ferocity than poor Pinto himself was while alive by the corsairs, infidels, and barbarians, with whom he came in contact. He is indeed chiefly known to English readers by an ill-natured fling of Congreve, who, in his “Love for Love,” makes one of his characters address another in those oft-quoted words: “Ferdinand Mendez Pinto was but a type of thee, thou liar of the first magnitude!” It is said also that Cervantes, three or four years before whose death Pinto’s book was published, speaks of him somewhere as the “prince of liars.” I have not been able to find the passage; but likely enough Cervantes might have been a little vexed to find his “Persiles and Sigismunda,” a romance, under the guise of a book of travels, first published about the time with Pinto’s book, so much outdone by what claimed to be a true narrative of real adventures.