Jerónimo Lobo, the Lisbon Jesuit who saw the springs of the Blue Nile

The springs did not look like much. On a gentle slope in Sakala, a district of the Ethiopian province of Gojjam, Jerónimo Lobo found two holes in the ground, each about two feet across and a stone's throw apart. His party lowered a plumb line into the first and it stopped at about five and a half feet, perhaps caught on tree roots. In the second, ten feet of line found no bottom, and the local people told him nobody had ever found one.2 sources2 sources

This was the head of the river the Ethiopians called the Abbay, which Lobo translated as the Father of Waters, and which Europeans call the Blue Nile. The ground was so soft that water welled up underfoot. On a hill above, he was told, the Agaw people met once a year to sacrifice cattle and throw a cow's head into one of the springs. Near by was a village he wrote down as Guix, today's Gish.2 sources2 sources

Lobo stood there around 1629, a Portuguese Jesuit sent to a Christian empire that his order hoped to bring under the Pope. He lived almost another half-century. He survived a shipwreck, Ottoman captivity and a ransom haggled down from 30,000 crowns, and he died in the Jesuit house of São Roque in Lisbon on 29 January 1678.4 sources4 sources

His memoirs waited more than three centuries to be printed in Portuguese. A French version of them reached a poor young Englishman named Samuel Johnson, who abridged it into English in 1735. It was the first book Johnson published.3 sources3 sources

Lobo was born in Lisbon, but nobody agrees on the year. Henry Morley's introduction of 1887 and the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica give 1593; the Encyclopaedia Aethiopica and the New Catholic Encyclopedia give 1595; Portugal's National Library catalogues him as born in 1596. He entered the Society of Jesus in 1609 as a novice at Coimbra. He taught Latin at Braga, studied theology at Coimbra and was ordained a priest in 1621.5 sources5 sources

The Jesuits had looked towards Ethiopia almost from the start. Their founder, Ignatius of Loyola, saw a field for missions in the highland empire that Europeans knew as Abyssinia, or the land of Prester John, and from 1555 it was an early focus of the young order.1 source1 source

Lobo was posted to India. He sailed from Lisbon in March 1622 in the fleet of the new viceroy, the Count of Vidigueira. Near Mozambique a squadron of three English and three Dutch ships attacked, and the Portuguese lost three vessels. The rest reached Goa, the capital of Portugal's Asian empire, on 16 December 1622. There Lobo finished his theology and heard letters read from Ethiopia: the emperor had joined the Church of Rome, and more missionaries were needed.1 source1 source

The man who made the mission work was Pedro Páez, a Spanish Jesuit who reached the mission house at Fremona, in northern Ethiopia, on 15 May 1603. He won the trust of the emperor Susenyos, who reigned from 1607. Shortly after receiving Susenyos into the Catholic Church, Páez died at Gorgora, by Lake Tana, in May 1622.2 sources2 sources

Susenyos proclaimed Roman Catholicism the official religion of Ethiopia in 1622. In a letter he called Páez “our spiritual father, the shining sun of the faith who purified Ethiopia from the darkness of Eutyches”. His half-brother Se'ela Krestos backed the new faith, and many of his subjects followed, some only outwardly.3 sources3 sources

Rome then sent a patriarch to govern the Ethiopian Church. Afonso Mendes, a Portuguese Jesuit, was, in the historian Adrian Hastings's words, “totally self-assured” and ignorant of the country. At the ceremony of 11 February 1626 he lectured the court on church history and the authority of Rome; Leonardo Cohen, who has translated the Jesuit account of the day, finds him more interested in old heresies than in the concerns of his hosts.2 sources2 sources

Getting in was the problem. The Ottoman Turks held Massawa, the usual port for the highlands. Eight Jesuits were chosen at Goa: four went by sea, two by way of Zeila on the Somali coast, and Lobo and a companion by a new route through Melinde, in today's Kenya. The two who went by Zeila were thrown into a dungeon by its ruler and beheaded.1 source1 source

Lobo left Goa on 26 January 1624 and landed at Pate, an island off the Kenyan coast, eleven days later. He tried to find a way inland from the mouth of the Jubba, failed, and went back to India. There he joined Mendes, who had arrived from Lisbon, and on 3 April 1625 they sailed together from Diu.2 sources2 sources

To avoid Massawa they landed at Beilul, near the mouth of the Red Sea, on 1 May. Weeks of crossing the hot, barren land of the Afar followed, under the eye of a king who let them go only after long haggling, and they reached Fremona on 21 June 1625.2 sources2 sources

Fremona, near Adwa in Tigray, was the Jesuits' headquarters, one of eighteen mission sites recorded in the sources. Lobo was put in charge of the house and of the Catholics scattered across Tigray, and made the patriarch's vicar for the province. One year a plague of locusts brought famine. He wrote of bodies in the roads and of wolves, maddened by hunger, dragging children from houses.2 sources2 sources

After a spell preaching in Tigray and Shire, Lobo was sent to Damot, beyond the Abbay, where he helped to build a church. On 5 January 1629 he made his solemn profession as a Jesuit at Enfraz. Travelling to Damot he crossed the Abbay on a raft, poled across a river full of hippopotamuses and crocodiles, and the trip set him thinking about the old riddle of where the Nile began.2 sources2 sources

His account follows the river from the springs through Lake Tana to a great waterfall in the land of Alata, the falls now called Tis Abay. Below them he crossed a bridge of beams, later replaced by a bridge of one arch that Susenyos had built by masons brought from India.1 source1 source

Lobo was not the first European at the springs. Pedro Páez had described them in his History of Ethiopia after a visit usually dated 21 April 1618, the date given in Athanasius Kircher's Latin version of 1652. Lobo's own book put Páez's visit in 1613, and the Scottish traveller James Bruce later argued for 1615.2 sources2 sources

Bruce reached Gish Abay on 4 November 1770, claimed to be the first European there and dismissed Páez's account as a later insertion. The scholar Hartmann exposed the claim in 1796, and the geographer Charles Beke later defended what Lobo had written about the Abbay against Bruce.2 sources2 sources

Mendes pushed hard. Having decided that Ethiopian sacraments were of doubtful validity, he ordered everyone rebaptised and all the clergy reordained. The Ethiopian calendar of feasts was to give way to the Roman one, circumcision was forbidden, and so was keeping Saturday as a holy day.1 source1 source

The change was imposed by force, and Lobo took part. In Damot he proclaimed the emperor's edict ordering every subject to renounce their errors and join the Roman Church. He records that sixty monks threw themselves from a precipice rather than obey, and that in a battle with the emperor's troops six hundred monks, marching in front with altar stones on their heads, were among the first killed. He presented their deaths as a lesson that won converts.2 sources2 sources

Many Ethiopians saw an attack on their faith. Belaynesh Michael, writing in the Encyclopaedia Africana, records “bitter resentment among the clergy and adherents of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church”, and rebellions spread through the provinces. Jesuit letters describe noblewomen preaching against the missionaries. Walatta Petros, a noblewoman married to one of the emperor's counsellors, left her husband, defied Susenyos and Mendes, and was exiled; the Ethiopian Orthodox Church later made her a saint.4 sources4 sources

Her life, written down by a monk in 1672 at the request of her disciples, is the oldest known book-length biography of an African woman by an African author. Its publisher describes her movement as a successful, nonviolent effort to preserve African Christian beliefs in the face of European protocolonialism. The church's own account today speaks of persecution.3 sources3 sources

In Tigray, Lobo watched the emperor's heir, a Catholic only for show, begin countermanding his father. The governor of Tigray seized the Jesuits' lands and blockaded Fremona.1 source1 source

Susenyos won the battle of Wayna Daga on 2 June 1632, but, by the Encyclopaedia Africana's account, Fasilides, his eldest surviving son, reminded him that the 8,000 dead were his own subjects. On 24 June, urged on by his wife and Fasilides, Susenyos proclaimed the restoration of the Alexandrian faith. He handed power to Fasilides and died at Danqaz on 16 September. In 1633 Fasilides banished the Jesuits from court; some who stayed behind were later hunted down and executed. Lobo joined the patriarch and eighteen companions at Fremona.3 sources3 sources

The missionaries hid for a time under the protection of a local lord, Yohannes Akay. On 20 May 1634 he handed Lobo, the patriarch and their companions to Ottoman soldiers, who took them to Massawa. The governor's men searched them for the gold they were said to have carried out of Ethiopia and found two chalices and some relics, but squeezed about six hundred crowns out of them with threats.2 sources2 sources

On 24 June they were shipped to Suakin, seat of the pasha who governed the coast. He raged at the ragged priests and threatened to cut off their heads, then asked for 30,000 crowns. Lobo, who negotiated for the group, pleaded poverty. The demand fell to 20,000, then 5,000 less, with talk of impaling and flaying. Some of the pasha's favourites, fearing a Portuguese fleet in the Red Sea if the priests died, offered to advance the money, and the parties settled on 4,300 crowns.2 sources2 sources

At the last moment the pasha kept the patriarch and two priests as security. One was over eighty, and Lobo offered to stay in his place; the pasha agreed to take a younger Jesuit, and the lot fell on Father Francisco Marques. The rest sailed in August in an Arab ship crowded with Mecca pilgrims, sleeping on deck, and reached Diu after forty days.2 sources2 sources

In Goa Lobo begged the viceroy to seize Massawa, build a fort there and reopen the road to Ethiopia. The viceroy would raid the coast but would not garrison it. So it was agreed that Lobo should go to Europe and make the case in person.1 source1 source

He left India in 1635. His ship was wrecked on the coast of Natal, in southern Africa; he was captured by the Dutch; and he reached Europe by way of Cartagena de Indias, where, according to the Encyclopaedia Aethiopica, he inspired the Jesuit Alonso de Sandoval's treatise on the salvation of Africans, published in Madrid in 1647.2 sources2 sources

Mendes wrote that Lobo had been chosen because he was the most learned and ingenious of the brethren at Goa and the most able in business. In Lisbon he was heard kindly and sent on to the King of Spain, who in those years also ruled Portugal. Madrid would not pay for an expedition, and neither would Rome.3 sources3 sources

Lobo returned to India in 1640 and spent most of the next two decades in senior posts: superior of the old college of St Paul in Goa, rector at Bassein, vice-provincial. Older accounts call him provincial. After a quarrel with the political authorities of Goa, during which he was imprisoned, he sailed for Portugal in 1657; Morley dates his return to 1658.4 sources4 sources

He spent his last eighteen years at São Roque, the Jesuits' professed house in Lisbon. There he helped Baltasar Teles, whose history of Ethiopia, printed at Coimbra in 1660, drew heavily on Lobo's writings. Teles reckoned that Lobo had travelled 38,000 leagues for the sake of souls. Lobo died at São Roque on 29 January 1678.4 sources4 sources

Lobo's memoirs, known as the Itinerário, say more about the land and its peoples than about the mission. He made two copies: one around 1639 or 1640, during his stay in Lisbon, and another in the 1660s. Neither was printed in his lifetime. A shorter work on the Nile was published in London in 1669 in Sir Peter Wyche's English translation.3 sources3 sources

The later copy found a translator. Joachim Le Grand, a French priest who spent five years in Lisbon as secretary to an ambassador, published it in French in 1728 with essays and documents of his own. That copy has since been lost. The earlier one survived and was edited by the Portuguese priest Manuel Gonçalves da Costa, who published it in 1971.3 sources3 sources

Samuel Johnson read Le Grand's book as a student at Pembroke College, Oxford. A few years later, short of money and lodging in Birmingham with his school friend Hector at the house of the bookseller Warren, he agreed to translate it for five guineas. He cut Le Grand's two volumes to about a fifth of their length.2 sources2 sources

A Voyage to Abyssinia came out in 1735 under a London imprint, though it was printed in Birmingham. It was Johnson's first separate publication in book form. In his preface the young Protestant praised the Jesuit for telling nothing improbable, while advising readers unhappy with “a Popish account of a Popish mission” to turn to Dr Geddes's history of the Ethiopian Church.3 sources3 sources

Johnson was not proud of it later. On 31 March 1776 James Boswell showed him a copy as a curiosity. Johnson told him not to talk of it, and when Boswell said his style had improved since, answered with a triumphant smile: “Sir, I hope it is.”1 source1 source

Ethiopia stayed with Johnson. In 1759, to pay for his mother's funeral and her small debts, he wrote a philosophical tale in the evenings of one week, he told Joshua Reynolds, sending it to the press in pieces as he went. He set it in Abyssinia.2 sources2 sources

The phrase “father of waters” is the one Lobo used for the Abbay, and Rasselas is confined in a palace with the other royal children until the succession calls him. How much Johnson owed to Lobo, and how much to wider reading about Ethiopia, is argued over: in 1963 Donald Lockhart, who later translated the Itinerário, found the scholarship split between the two views and set out to trace the specific Ethiopian sources.5 sources5 sources

The Catholic interlude left marks on Ethiopia. Archaeologists working between 2006 and 2014 surveyed ten of the Jesuit mission sites, several of them crumbling. In the Ethiopian Orthodox Church's own account the years of Mendes were a time of persecution, and Walatta Petros, who resisted, is a saint.3 sources3 sources

Gish Abay, the spring Lobo measured, is now inside a small church. Pilgrims collect its holy water, which, the church there teaches, cures sins, sickness and misfortune.1 source1 source

For more than two centuries Lobo's story was read mainly in French and English; his surviving manuscript was printed in his own language only in 1971.2 sources2 sources