A Voyage to Abyssinia
The memoir of a Portuguese Jesuit who served in Ethiopia from 1625 until the mission was driven out in 1634. It is an eyewitness account from the Jesuit side, read here in Samuel Johnson’s English version of a French translation.
Lobo went to Ethiopia with the patriarch Afonso Mendes and worked there, by his own reckoning, from 1625 to 1634. The second part of the book describes the country and tells what he saw of the emperor’s edict for the Roman faith, of the resistance to it and of the expulsion.
The text has passed through two translations. The introduction to the edition used says that Lobo’s Portuguese manuscript was not then in print, that the Abbé Le Grand published a French version in 1728, and that Johnson cut Le Grand’s book to about a fifth of its length. The wording is therefore Johnson’s, and the book is cited for what Lobo reports, not for exact words of his. He writes as a missionary: the Ethiopian church is in “error” and its defenders are obstinate.
Cited in
- 1622 to 1632, firm date