A Voyage to Abyssinia
- Pages
- about 150
- Category
- History
- Language
- English
- Reading time
- 2.8 h at 250 wpm
From the opening
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.
A short sample. Read the whole book
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