Our men being recovered, we set forward again, very well stored with
provisions, and water sufficient, and bending our course a little to
the westward of the north, travelled in hopes of some favourable stream
which might bear a canoe; but we found none till after twenty days'
travel, including eight days' rest; for our men being weak, we rested
very often, especially when we came to places which were proper for our
purpose, where we found cattle, fowl, or anything to kill for our food.
In those twenty days' march we advanced four degrees to the northward,
besides some meridian distance westward, and we met with abundance of
elephants, and with a good number of elephants' teeth scattered up and
down, here and there, in the woody grounds especially, some of which
were very large. But they were no booty to us; our business was
provisions, and a good passage out of the country; and it had been much
more to our purpose to have found a good fat deer, and to have killed
it for our food, than a hundred ton of elephants' teeth; and yet, as
you shall presently hear, when we came to begin our passage by water, we
once thought to have built a large canoe, on purpose to have loaded it
with ivory; but this was when we knew nothing of the rivers, nor knew
anything how dangerous and how difficult a passage it was we were likely
to have in them, nor had considered the weight of carriage to lug them
to the rivers where we might embark.
At the end of twenty days' travel, as above, in the latitude of three
degrees sixteen minutes, we discovered in a valley, at some distance
from us, a pretty tolerable stream, which we thought deserved the name
of a river, and which ran its course N.N.W., which was just what we
wanted. As we had fixed our thoughts upon our passage by water, we took
this for the place to make the experiment, and bent our march directly
to the valley.
There was a small thicket of trees just in our way, which we went by,
thinking no harm, when on a sudden one of our negroes was dangerously
wounded with an arrow shot into his back, slanting between his
shoulders. This put us to a full stop; and three of our men, with two
negroes, spreading the wood, for it was but a small one, found a negro
with a bow, but no arrow, who would have escaped, but our men that
discovered him shot him in revenge of the mischief he had done; so we
lost the opportunity of taking him prisoner, which, if we had done, and
sent him home with good usage, it might have brought others to us in a
friendly manner.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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