28 
To Sao Paulo de Loanda. 
(a.d. 1666) found the whites the most deceitful and 
the wickedest of men,—an effect caused by the 
penal settlement. Father Merolla (a.d. 1682) de¬ 
clares that “ the women, being bred among blacks, 
suffer themselves to be much perverted—they 
scarcely retain anything white about them except 
their skins.” J. C. Feo Cardoso (Memoir pub¬ 
lished in Paris in 1825) attributes the decadence 
of Angola and Benguela to three reasons ; rare 
marriages amongst the higher orders ; poverty 
amongst the lower; and the immorality and in¬ 
continence of both. Lopes de Lima (p. 149 loc. 
cit) traces the decline and fall of Christianity in 
the eighteenth century to the want of priests, to the 
corruption of the regular clergy (Carmelites and 
Franciscans), for whom West Africa, like Syria 
and Palestine, was made a kind of convict station, 
and to the inhuman slave-export, as opposed to 
domestic slavery. All has now changed for the 
better ; society in Angola is not a whit inferior to 
that of any English colony in West Africa, and, 
as a convict establishment, Loanda is a great 
success. 
The theoretical garrison is one regiment of the 
line, a squadron of cavalry, and two companies of 
artillery with three-pounders ; the real force is of 
some 800 men, mostly convicts. No difference is 
madebetween white and black, nor is the corps force, 
which was once very cruelly used, severely treated 
