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A Voyage To Abyssinia
Father Jerome Lobo

A Voyage to Abyssinia
Father Jerome Lobo

translated from the French by Samuel Johnson.

INTRODUCTION by Henry Morley, Editor of the 1887 edition

Jeronimo Lobo was born in Lisbon in the year 1593. He entered the
Order of the Jesuits at the age of sixteen. After passing through
the studies by which Jesuits were trained for missionary work, which
included special attention to the arts of speaking and writing,
Father Lobo was sent as a missionary to India at the age of twenty-
eight, in the year 1621. He reached Goa, as his book tells, in
1622, and was in 1624, at the age of thirty-one, told off as one of
the missionaries to be employed in the conversion of the
Abyssinians. They were to be converted, from a form of Christianity
peculiar to themselves, to orthodox Catholicism. The Abyssinian
Emperor Segued was protector of the enterprise, of which we have
here the story told.

Father Lobo was nine years in Abyssinia, from the age of thirty-one
to the age of forty, and this was the adventurous time of his life.
The death of the Emperor Segued put an end to the protection that
had given the devoted missionaries, in the midst of dangers, a
precarious hold upon their work. When he and his comrades fell into
the hands of the Turks at Massowah, his vigour of body and mind, his
readiness of resource, and his fidelity, marked him out as the one
to be sent to the headquarters in India to secure the payment of a
ransom for his companions. He obtained the ransom, and desired also
to obtain from the Portuguese Viceroy in India armed force to
maintain the missionaries in the position they had so far won. But
the Civil power was deaf to his pleading. He removed the appeal to
Lisbon, and after narrowly escaping on the way from a shipwreck, and
after having been captured by pirates, he reached Lisbon, and sought
still to obtain means of overawing the force hostile to the work of
the Jesuits in Abyssinia. The Princess Margaret gave friendly
hearing, but sent him on to persuade, if he could, the King of
Spain; and failing at Madrid, he went to Rome and tried the Pope.
He was chosen to go to the Pope, said the Patriarch Alfonso Mendez,
because, of all the brethren at Goa, the 'Pater Hieronymus Lupus'
(Lobo translated into Wolf) was the most ingenious and learned in
all sciences, with a mind most generous in its desire to conquer
difficulties, dexterous in management of business, and found most
able to make himself agreeable to those with whom there was business
to be done. The vigour with which he held by his purpose of
endeavouring in every possible way to bring the Christianity of
Abyssinia within the pale of the Catholic Church is in accordance
with the character that makes the centre of the story of this book.
Whimsical touches arise out of this strength of character and
readiness of resource, as when he tells of the taste of the
Abyssinians for raw cow's flesh, with a sauce high in royal
Abyssinian favour, made of the cow's gall and contents of its
entrails, of which, when he was pressed to partake, he could only
excuse himself and his brethren by suggesting that it was too good
for such humble missionaries. Out of distinguished respect for it,
they refrained from putting it into their mouths.

Good Father Lobo gave up the desire of his heart, when it was proved
unattainable, and returned to India six years after the breaking up
of his work in Abyssinia, at the age of forty-seven. He came to be
head of the Provincials of the Jesuit settlement at Goa, and after
about ten more years of active duty in the East returned in 1658 to
Lisbon, when he died in the religious house of St. Roque in 1678, at
the age of eighty-five. A comrade of Father Lobo's, Baltazar
Tellez, said that Lobo had travelled thirty-eight thousand leagues
with no other object before him but the winning of more souls to
God. His years in Abyssinia stood out prominently to his mind among
all the years of his long life, and he wrote an account of them in
Portuguese, of which the manuscript is at Lisbon in the monastery of
St. Roque, where he closed his life.

Of that manuscript, then and still unprinted (though use was made of
it by Baltazar Tellez in his History of 'Ethiopia-Coimbra,' 1660),
the Abbe Legrand, Prior of Neuville-les-Dames, and of Prevessin,
published a translation into French. The Abbe Legrand had been to
Lisbon as Secretary to the Abbe d'Estrees, Ambassador from France to
Portugal. The negotiations were so long continued that M. Legrand
was detained five years in Lisbon, and employed the time in
researches among documents illustrating the Portuguese possessions
in India and the East. He obtained many memoirs of great interest,
and published from one of them an account of Ceylon; but of all the
manuscripts he found none interested him so much as that of Father
Lobo. His translation was augmented with illustrative
dissertations, letters, and a memoir on the circumstances of the
death of M. du Roule. It filled two volumes, or 636 pages of forty
lines. This was published in 1728. It was on the 31st of October,
1728, that Samuel Johnson, aged nineteen, went to Pembroke College,
Oxford, and Legrand's 'Voyage Historique d'Abissinie du R. P. Jerome
Lobo, de la Compagnie de Jesus, Traduit du Portugais, continue et
augmente de plusieurs Dissertations, Lettres et Memoires,' was one
of the new books read by Johnson during his short period of college
life. In 1735, when Johnson's age was twenty-six, and the world
seemed to have shut against him every door of hope, Johnson stayed
for six months at Birmingham with his old schoolfellow Hector, who
was aiming at medical practice, and who lodged at the house of a
bookseller. Johnson spoke with interest of Father Lobo, whose book
he had read at Pembroke College. Mr. Warren, the bookseller,
thought it would be worth while to print a translation. Hector
joined in urging Johnson to undertake it, for a payment of five
guineas. Although nearly brought to a stop midway by hypochondriac
despondency, a little suggestion that the printers also were
stopped, and if they had not their work had not their pay, caused
Johnson to go on to the end. Legrand's book was reduced to a fifth
of its size by the omission of all that overlaid Father Lobo's
personal account of his adventures; and Johnson began work as a
writer with this translation, first published at Birmingham in 1735.
H.M.

THE PREFACE

The following relation is so curious and entertaining, and the
dissertations that accompany it so judicious and instructive, that
the translator is confident his attempt stands in need of no
apology, whatever censures may fall on the performance.

The Portuguese traveller, contrary to the general vein of his
countrymen, has amused his reader with no romantic absurdities or
incredible fictions; whatever he relates, whether true or not, is at
least probable; and he who tells nothing exceeding the bounds of
probability has a right to demand that they should believe him who
cannot contradict him.

He appears by his modest and unaffected narration to have described
things as he saw them, to have copied nature from the life, and to
have consulted his senses, not his imagination; he meets with no
basilisks that destroy with their eyes, his crocodiles devour their
prey without tears, and his cataracts fall from the rock without
deafening the neighbouring inhabitants.

The reader will here find no regions cursed with irremediable
barrenness, or blessed with spontaneous fecundity, no perpetual
gloom or unceasing sunshine; nor are the nations here described
either devoid of all sense of humanity, or consummate in all private
and social virtues; here are no Hottentots without religion, polity,
or articulate language, no Chinese perfectly polite, and completely
skilled in all sciences: he will discover, what will always be
discovered by a diligent and impartial inquirer, that wherever human
nature is to be found there is a mixture of vice and virtue, a
contest of passion and reason, and that the Creator doth not appear
partial in his distributions, but has balanced in most countries
their particular inconveniences by particular favours.

In his account of the mission, where his veracity is most to be
suspected, he neither exaggerates overmuch the merits of the

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