Since this is so, said Captain Gomes Pires to the archers, draw your bows upon these rascals, that they may know we are people who can do them a damage.
But the negroes returned the fire with arrows and assegais--deadly weapons, the arrows unfeathered and without a string-notch, but tipped with deadly poison of herbs, made of reed or cane or charred wood with long iron heads, and the assegais poisoned in like manner and pricked with seven or eight harpoons of iron, so that it was no easy matter to draw it out of the flesh.
So they lost heart for going farther, with all the coast-land up in arms against them, and turned back to Lagos, but before they left the Cape they noticed in the desert island, where they had found the Prince's arms, trees so large that they had never seen the like, for among them was one which was 108 palms round at the foot. Yet this tree, the famous baobab, was not much higher than a walnut; "of its fibre they make good thread for sewing, which burns like flax; its fruit is like a gourd and its kernels like chestnuts." And so, we are told, all the captains put back along the coast, in a mind to enter the aforesaid River of Nile, but one of the caravels getting separated from the rest and not liking to enter the Senegal alone, went straight to Lagos, and another put back to water in the Bay of Arguin and the Rio d'Ouro estuary, where there came to them at once the Moors on board the caravel, full of confidence because they had never had any dealings before with the merchants of Spain, and sold them a negro for five doubloons, and gave them meat and water from their camels, and came in and out on board the ship, so that there was great fear of treachery, but at last without any quarrel they were all put on shore, under promise that next July their friends would come again and trade with them in slaves and gold to their hearts' content. And so, taking in a good cargo of seal-skins, they made their way straight home.
Meantime two of the other caravels and a pinnace, which had been separated early in the voyage from the main body, under the pilotage of the veteran Diniz Diaz, had also made their way to C. Verde, had fought with the natives in some desperate skirmishes--one knight had his "shield stuck as full with arrows as the porcupine with quills," and had turned back in the face of the same discouragements as the rest; and so would have ended the whole of this great enterprise but for the dauntless energy of one captain and his crew.