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A man taking to wife, after the Mosaic law, a woman left in widow-hood by his kinsman, is severely scourged, and the same happens to a man who marries his cousin, besides being deprived of a profitable employment. Every city and town in Sonho had a square with a central cross, where those who had not satisfied the Easter command or who died unconfessed were buried without privilege of clergy.
After this great effort missionary zeal seems to have waxed cold, and disestablishment resulted, as happens in such cases, from unbelief within and violent assaults from without. Under the attacks of the Dutch and French the Church seems to have lost ground during the eighteenth century. In A.D. 1700 James Barbot found at Sonho only two Portuguese friars of the Order of Bernardins.
This is probably the "Island of Horses," where the Portuguese, flying from the victorious Hollanders, were lodged and fed by the courteous Count of Sonho; perhaps it is Battel's "Isle Calabes."
According to Fathers Carli and Merolla, Pope Alexander VII. sent twelve to fifteen Capuchins and apostolic missioners, who baptized the King and Queen of Congo and the Count of Sonho. Between A.D. 1490 and 1690 were the palmy days of Christianity in Congo-land, and for two centuries it was more or less the state religion.
In A.D. 1768 the Loango Mission was established, and in A.D. 1777 the fathers were followed by four Italian priests sent by the Propaganda for the purpose of re-christianizing Sonho. Embarking at La Rochelle they entered the Nzadi, where one died of poison, and the survivors escaped only by stratagem.
Tom Peter offered to show us other relics of the past if we would give him two days. A little party was soon made up, Mr. J. C. Bigley, the master, and Mr. Richards, the excellent gunner of the "Griffon," were my companions. We set out in a south-by-easterly direction to the bottom of Sonho, or Diogo's Bay, which Barbot calls "Bay of Pampus Rock."
Whilst the friars talk of "that meekness which becomes a missioner," their unwise and unwarrantable interference extends to the Count of Sonho himself; whose election was not valid unless published in the church, owning withal that, "though a Black, he is an absolute Prince; and not unworthy of a Crown, though he were even in Italy, considering the number of his Servants and the extent of his Dominions."
The reasons why the Portuguese never succeeded in making themselves masters of Sonho are reduced by the missioner annalists to three. Firstly, the opposition of the people caused by fear; secondly, the objections of the Sonhese to buying arms and ammunition; and, thirdly, the small price paid by the Portuguese for "captives."
Whereupon the Count of Sonho, we are told, "changed his countenance almost from black to yellow," and complained to the bishop at Loanda that the sacraments were not administered: the appeal was in vain, and, worse, an extra aid was sent to the truculent churchmen. Happily for them, the small- pox broke out, and the ruler was persuaded by his subjects to do the required penance.
The charts have lately shifted it some two miles west of its old position. Six or seven miles beyond it rise the blue uplands of the "Earldom of Sonho." On our right, in mid-stream, lay a "crocodile bank," a newly fixed grass islet, a few square feet of green and gold, which the floods will presently cover or carry away.