قصة الكتاب :
OUR Englishmen are known to have visited Angola towards\r\nthe close of the sixteenth century, namely, Thomas Turner, Andrew Towres, Anthony Knivet and Andrew Battell. All four were taken by the Portuguese out of English privateers in South-American waters, and spent years of captivity as prisoners of war; happy, no doubt, in having escaped the fate of many of their less fortunate companions, who atoned with their lives for the\r\nhazardous proceedings in which they had engaged.\r\nThomas Turner,1 although he furnished Samuel Purchas with a few notes on Brazil, never placed on record what happened to him whilst in Portuguese Africa. Towres was sent to prison at Rio de Janeiro for the heinous offence of eating meat on a Friday; he attempted an escape, was retaken, and condemned to spend the rest of his captivity in Angola. He died at Masanganu, as we learn from Knivet. Knivet himself has left us an account of his adventures in Angola and Kongo; but this account contains so many incredible statements that it was with some hesitation we admitted it into this volume, as by doing so we might be supposed to vouch for the writer’s veracity.\r\n