There are two churches and a hospital in ruins at Massangano; and the remains of two convents are pointed out, one of which is said to have been an establishment of black Benedictines, which, if successful, considering the materials the brethren had to work on, must have been a laborious undertaking. There is neither priest nor schoolmaster in the town, but I was pleased to observe a number of children taught by one of the inhabitants. The cultivated lands attached to all these conventual establishments in Angola are now rented by the government of Loanda, and thither the bishop lately removed all the gold and silver vessels belonging to them.
The fort of Massangano is small, but in good repair; it contains some very ancient guns, which were loaded from the breech, and must have been formidable weapons in their time. The natives of this country entertain a remarkable dread of great guns, and this tends much to the permanence of the Portuguese authority. They dread a cannon greatly, though the carriage be so rotten that it would fall to pieces at the first shot; the fort of Pungo Andongo is kept securely by cannon perched on cross sticks alone!
Massangano was a very important town at the time the Dutch held forcible possession of Loanda and part of Angola; but when, in the year 1648, the Dutch were expelled from this country by a small body of Portuguese, under the Governor Salvador Correa de Sa Benevides, Massangano was left to sink into its present decay. Since it was partially abandoned by the Portuguese, several baobab-trees have sprung up and attained a diameter of eighteen or twenty inches, and are about twenty feet high. No certain conclusion can be drawn from these instances, as it is not known at what time after 1648 they began to grow; but their present size shows that their growth is not unusually slow.
Several fires occurred during our stay, by the thatch having, through long exposure to a torrid sun, become like tinder. The roofs became ignited without any visible cause except the intense solar rays, and excited terror in the minds of the inhabitants, as the slightest spark carried by the wind would have set the whole town in a blaze. There is not a single inscription on stone visible in Massangano. If destroyed to-morrow, no one could tell where it and most Portuguese interior villages stood, any more than we can do those of the Balonda.
During the occupation of this town the Coanza was used for the purpose of navigation, but their vessels were so frequently plundered by their Dutch neighbors that, when they regained the good port of Loanda, they no longer made use of the river. We remained here four days, in hopes of obtaining an observation for the longitude, but at this season of the year the sky is almost constantly overcast by a thick canopy of clouds of a milk-and-water hue; this continues until the rainy season (which was now close at hand) commences.
The lands on the north side of the Coanza belong to the Quisamas (Kisamas), an independent tribe, which the Portuguese have not been able to subdue. The few who came under my observation possessed much of the Bushman or Hottentot feature, and were dressed in strips of soft bark hanging from the waist to the knee. They deal largely in salt, which their country produces in great abundance. It is brought in crystals of about 12 inches long and 1-1/2 in diameter. This is hawked about every where in Angola, and, next to calico, is the most common medium of barter. The Kisama are brave; and when the Portuguese army followed them into their forests, they reduced the invaders to extremity by tapping all the reservoirs of water, which were no other than the enormous baobabs of the country hollowed into cisterns. As the Kisama country is ill supplied with water otherwise, the Portuguese were soon obliged to retreat. Their country, lying near to Massangano, is low and marshy, but becomes more elevated in the distance, and beyond them lie the lofty dark mountain ranges of the Libollo, another powerful and independent people. Near Massangano I observed what seemed to be an effort of nature to furnish a variety of domestic fowls, more capable than the common kind of bearing the heat of the sun. This was a hen and chickens with all their feathers curled upward, thus giving shade to the body without increasing the heat. They are here named "Kisafu" by the native population, who pay a high price for them when they wish to offer them as a sacrifice, and by the Portuguese they are termed "Arripiada", or shivering. There seems to be a tendency in nature to afford varieties adapted to the convenience of man. A kind of very short-legged fowl among the Boers was obtained, in consequence of observing that such were more easily caught for transportation in their frequent removals in search of pasture. A similar instance of securing a variety occurred with the short-limbed sheep in America.