to be familiar with us afterwards. The first thing we did to try them, was,
we held up our hands to our mouths, as if we were to drink, signifying that
we wanted water. This they understood presently, and three of their women
and two boys ran away up the land, and came back in about half a quarter of
an hour, with several pots, made of earth, pretty enough, and baked, I
suppose, in the sun; these they brought us full of water, and set them down
near the sea-shore, and there left them, going back a little, that we might
fetch them, which we did.

Some time after this, they brought us roots and herbs, and some fruits
which I cannot remember, and gave us; but as we had nothing to give them,
we found them not so free as the people in Madagascar were. However, our
cutler went to work, and, as he had saved some iron out of the wreck of the
ship, he made abundance of toys, birds, dogs, pins, hooks, and rings; and
we helped to file them, and make them bright for him, and when we gave them
some of these, they brought us all sorts of provisions they had, such as
goats, hogs, and cows, and we got victuals enough.

We were now landed upon the continent of Africa, the most desolate, desert,
and inhospitable country in the world, even Greenland and Nova Zembla
itself not excepted, with this difference only, that even the worst part of
it we found inhabited, though, taking the nature and quality of some of the
inhabitants, it might have been much better to us if there had been none.

And, to add to the exclamation I am making on the nature of the place, it
was here that we took one of the rashest, and wildest, and most desperate
resolutions that ever was taken by man, or any number of men, in the world;
this was, to travel overland through the heart of the country, from the
coast of Mozambique, on the east ocean, to the coast of Angola or Guinea,
on the western or Atlantic Ocean, a continent of land of at least 1800