138 NATRES OF AFRICA IN THE i6tI[ CENTUkV. 



I did not spend much time in studying it. The Decades of Jcao 

 de Barros and of Diogo de Couto also contain much interesting 

 material, hut they relate militar\' feats accomplished hy the Portu- 

 guese in India and East Africa rather than ethnographical facts. 

 The mcst interesting documents which I met with are the reports 

 of four shipwrecks which occurred on the coast of Natal and 

 Dqlagoa Bay between 1550 and 1598, which were incorporated by 

 Gomes de Brito in his Historia trai^icoinaritinia. pulilished in 

 1736 in ten volumes. I'his extensive work was reproduced in 

 1904 in the Bihliothcca dc classicos Portugueses, and the wrecks 

 which interest us more directly are de.5cri!ied in Vols. I. 1\' and 

 V of that edition. I have found since then that these stories 

 were reproduced in Vols. 1 and 11 of the Records of South Ea.-^t 

 Africa, jmblished by the Cape (iovernment. The Portuguese 

 text is given, together with the English translation, and one uiay 

 be thankful thtit these records, written without any ])rec()nceived 

 idea in the most genuine and simple way, historical documents 

 of the best type, have thus been put within the reach ( f the South 

 African public. 



The same collection contains letters of two Jesuit Brethren 

 who made an attempt to convert the iSratives in the neighbour- 

 hood of Inhambane in 1560-15O2. These letters coming from 

 men whose first object was to influence the minds and hearts of 

 the Natives and who stayed amongst them a certain time, trying 

 to understand them, ha^'e even more value than the records of 

 the shi])wrecks for the solution of the question which T have put 

 in the beginning. 



T confess that all these documents are uot absolutely new, 

 but they have not yet been studied with a sutificient knowledge 

 of the Natives of to-day, and they certainly contain most precious 

 details on the condition of the Black tribes of South East Africa 

 300 to 350 years ago. Shall we find in them glimpses of a further 

 past? This remains to be seen. 



Tn the first part of this paper, 1 intend giving the contents 

 of the documents on which our study bears and a short resume 

 of the doings of their heroes; then, we shall extract. from them 

 what information they contain about the Natives of these pre- 

 historic times, more particularly about those of Delagoa Bay, 

 who played tjuite a prominent part in these tragic events. 



Part 1. 'JTie Documents. 



Delagoa Pay was discovered in the beginning of the i6th 

 centurv by Antonio de Cam])o, the captain of one of the ships 

 W'hich composed the second fleet of \'asco da Gama. It was only 

 in 1554 that two Portuguese cf Mozambique, LourencoMarques 

 and Antonio Caldeira undertook an exploration in the country 

 round it. They were very successful. Having peneratcd into the 

 interior bv a river which reaches the sea on the 25° South 

 latitude (evidently the PimiKjio) they found the Natives dis- 

 posed to sell copper, " which they had in abundance " ; they also 



