It was not that favorable region, situated between the Cordilleras and the coast, where straggling villages abound, and where missions are hospitably opened to all travelers.
They were far away, those provinces of Peru and Bolivia, where the tempest would have surely carried the "Pilgrim," if a criminal hand had not changed its course, where the shipwrecked ones would have found so many facilities for returning to their country.
It was the terrible Angola, not even that part of the coast inspected by the Portuguese authorities, but the interior of the colony, which is crossed by caravans of slaves under the whip of the driver.
What did Dick Sand know of this country where treason had thrown him?
Very little; what the missionaries of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had said of it; what the Portuguese merchants, who frequented the road from St.Paul de Loanda to the Zaire, by way of San Salvador, knew of it; what Dr.Livingstone had written about it, after his journey of 1853, and that would have been sufficient to overwhelm a soul less strong than his.
Truly, the situation was terrible..