The negroes shouted back that they could not be mistaken about the strangers, they were Christians. What could they have to do with them; they knew how they had behaved to the King of Senegal. No good men could stand Christians who ate human flesh. What else did they buy negro slaves for? Christians were plundering brigands too and had come to rob them. As for their king, he was three days' journey from the river, which was called Gambra.
When Cadamosto tried to come to closer quarters, the natives disappeared, and the crews refused to venture any farther upstream. So the caravels turned back, sailed down the river, and coasted away west to Cape Verde, and so home to Portugal. But before the Venetian ends his journal, he tells us how near Prince Henry's ships had now come to the Equator. "When we were in the river of Gambra, once only did we see the North Star, which was so low that it seemed almost to touch the sea." To make up for the loss of the Pole Star--sunk to "the third part of a lance's length above the edge of the water,"--Cadamosto and his men had a view of six brilliant stars, "in form of a cross," while the June night was "of thirteen hours and the day of eleven."
Cadamosto only went home to refit for a second voyage. Though at first he had been baffled by the "savagery of the men of Gambra" from finding out much about them, he resolved to try again, sailed out the very next year by way of the Canaries and Cape Blanco, and found, after three days' more sailing, certain islands off Cape Verde, where no one had been before. The lookouts saw two very large islands, towards the larger of which they sailed at once, in the hope of finding good anchorage and friendly natives. But no one, friend or foe, seemed to live there.
So next morning, says Cadamosto, that I might satisfy my own mind, I bade ten of my men, armed with missiles and cross-bows, to explore the inland. They crossed the hills that cut off the interior from the coast, but found nothing except doves, who were so tame that they could be caught in any number by the hand.
And now from another side of the first island they caught sight of three others towards the north, and of two more towards the west, which could not be clearly seen because of the great distance. "But for the matter of that, we did not care to go out of our way to find what we now expected, that all these other islands were desolate like the first. So we went on our way (due south) and so passed another island, and, coming to the mouth of a river, landed in search of fresh water and found a beautiful and fruitful country covered with trees. Some sailors who went inland found cakes of salt, white and small, by the side of the river, and immense numbers of great turtles, with shells of such size that they could make very good shields for an army."