“against his will, thrust among the boyes of the ship, not used like a man, nor
yet like an honest boy” ( 6 : 151 ). His spirit and his honor battered, Pinteado
himself then died, Eden writes, “for very pensivenesse & thought that stroke
him to the heart” ( 6 : 151 ). While Pinteado is clearly the tragic hero here, the
account ends with a crucial twist. For Eden presents Pinteado finally as “a
man worthy to serve any prince, and most vilely used” not only by England
but also, unconscionably, by Portugal ( 6 : 151 ). For support, Eden appends a
number of documents exposing the treachery of the Portuguese at home, who
“intended to slay [Pinteado], if time and place might have served their wicked
intent” ( 6 : 154 ). Hence, if a Portuguese pilot in the hand is worth two English-
men in the bush, “the Portugals his countrey men” are decidedly not ( 6 : 154 ).
What the West Africans are worth is surprisingly unclear. For even within
accounts ostensibly centered on African ventures, the most extended descrip-
tions of Africa’s lands and peoples appear as narrative digressions, based not
on the explorations at hand but on secondary, largely textual evidence. Eden’s
“briefe desciption of Afrike,” which was obviously written before the English
had ventured much down the coast, provides little more than a categorical
outline—in circuitously random order—of Africa’s parts “knowen in old
time” ( 6 : 144 ). In it, Eden distinguishes North Africa (“Africa the lesse”) from
the south, emphasizes Barbarie as the “best” of the northern domains, sepa-
rates the Moors there, all of “the sect of Mahomet,” from the inhabitants of
Guinea, themselves “pure Gentiles, and idolatrous, without profession of any
religion, or other knowledge of God, then by the law of nature” ( 6 : 143 – 44 ).
But, as these examples attest, his differentiations are general to an extreme.
And if the fact that he, like others before him, locates “the great and mighty
Emperour and Christian king Prester John” in eastern Africa does not strain
his credibility, his admission that this information is “well knowen to the Por-
tugales” suggests the tenuousness of his authority, as well as, again, the om-
nipresence of the Portuguese ( 6 : 144 ).
Similarly, in his account of the second Guinea voyage, Eden interrupts
the report of “the voyage, as it was described by the...Pilot,” to “speake
somewhat of the countrey and people, and of such things as are brought from
thence” ( 6 : 163 ), producing what critics have often cited in defining the terms
of early modern England’s view of Africa. Yet here too fiction clashes with
fact, myths with realities, the textual with the actual. In prefacing the venture,
Eden emphasizes the authority of his eyewitness, remarking that the pilot was
“one of the chiefe in this voyage” and that what he saw was “so well observed”
( 6 : 154 – 55 ). When Eden then breaks in with his own description, he resurrects
Imperialist Beginnings 57