106 Oruno D. Lara
arrobas and, in 1624, according to an account given by Garcia Mendes, some
twenty big ships loaded 400,000 arrobas of sugar aboard in Sao Tomé harbour.
After this there was a decline, caused chiefly by the destruction wrought by
the Dutch and the Angolese.
Tradition has it that a vessel loaded with slaves from Angola was wrecked
between 1540 and 1550 near the Sete Pedras Islands not far from the south-
east coast of Sao Tomé. Most of the Negroes were drowned or eaten by sharks.
Only a few dozen survivors reached land. The fine bay of the Lulas where
they landed was uninhabited at the beginning of the sixteenth century, as were
the nearby southern regions of the island. They settled to the north-east of the
bay in the mountains which were later to take their name and they lived pro-
tected by the forest, raising pigs, cutting wood and engaging in a typically
African form of agriculture. Furthermore, Cunha Matos states that up until
1550 the island prospered and the Angolese did not become a threat until the
second half of the century.
In 1574, he says, they revolted, drawing other Negroes into the fray, and
armed with bows and assegais they invaded the fazendas agrícolas, or agricul-
tural estates, and the city, sacking everything, pillaging and destroying the
engenhos and killing anyone who tried to stop them. The terror was such that
years later, in 1593, Philip I commuted the sentence of banishment to five
years for those exiles who had participated as volunteers in supressing the
revolt. This had already been done in the case of other convicts who fought
against the slaves in 1584. Cunha Matos also mentions the last and most
destructive revolt of the Angolese, the one which occured in 1693 and ended
with the capture of Negro women in the surrounding fazendas. It was Mateus
Pires, capitäo do mato or da serra who drove them back into the mountains
and rescued the captives. However, Sao Tomé had already lost a large propor-
tion of its moradores (inhabitants) almost a century earlier, the richer ones
having left for Brazil for fear of the Negro revolts.
Two documents dated 1536 lead us to think that the first act of violence
of the Angolese did not occur in 1574, as was believed,^10 but around the years
1530^40," at which time the king of Portugal, John III (1521-57), after again
receiving alarming reports from Sao Tomé, wrote that he was sending Paulo
Nunes with arms to restore order. Three days later he wrote again—the matter
was urgent—to the island authorities to tell them that Paulo Nunes would not
be going. In fact he demanded extraordinary privileges to command the capi-
tanía, which could not be granted in view of the fact that a corregedor (mayor)
had already been appointed with authority 'to act in the island against the
rebel Negroes and with the mission of pacifying them '. The revolt had broken
out several months beforehand, since the king had had to appoint a corregedor
and send him out with instructions to deal with it. The king must then have
received further information to the effect that the insurrection had spread and