THE SOURCE OF THE NILE. 137 



author, his prefent teflimony will not weigh much, from 

 whatever hand this performance may have come. 



M. de Montesquieu, among all his other talents a molt 

 excellent and accurate geographer, obferves, that man-eat- 

 ers were ftrft mentioned when the fouthern parts of the eafl 

 coaft of the peninfula of Africa came to be unknown. Travel- 

 lers of Jerome Lobo's call, delighting in the marvellous, did 

 place thefe unfociable people beyond the promontory of 

 Praffum, becaufe nobody, at that time, did pafs the promon- 

 tory of Praffum.. 



Above 1200 years, thefe people were unknown, till 

 Vafques de Gama difcovered their coail, and called them the 

 civil or kind nation. By fome lucky revolution in that long 

 period, when they were left to themfelves, they feem molt 

 unaccountably to have changed both their diet and their 

 ■manners. The Portuguefe conquered them, built towns a- 

 mong them, and, if they met with confpiracies and treachery, 

 thefe all originated in a mixture of Moors fromSpain and Por- 

 tugal, Europeans that had fettled among them, and not a- 

 mong the natives themfelves. No man-eaters appeared till af- 

 ter the difcovery of the Cape of Good Hope, when that of the 

 new world, which followed it, made the Portuguefe abandon 

 their fettlements in the old ; and this coaft came as unknown 

 to them as it had been to the Romans, when they traded on- 

 ly to Raptum and PralTum, and made Anthropophagi of all 

 the reft. One would be almoft tempted to believe that Je- 

 rome Lobo was a man-eater himfelf, and had taught this 

 cuftom to thefe favages. They had it not before his coming ; 

 they have never had it fince ; and it mull have been with 

 fome finifter intention like this, that a flranger would vo- 



v ol- HI. S luntarily 



