ABSTRACT
In October 1639, the Jesuit missionary Martino Martini found himself adrift in the Atlantic. On route to Goa, the Portuguese vessel that contained nine Jesuits destined eventually for the Chinese mission had met with catastrophic conditions. The boat, along with its companion vessel, was forced to make an unplanned forty-six-day stop on the Guinean coast that drained its supplies, infected its passengers with horrific maladies, and forced a return to Lisbon. “To tell the truth to Your Reverence,” Martini wrote to his erstwhile mathematical mentor at the Collegio Romano, Athanasius Kircher, “the land and sea along that coast generally called Guinea appear to have been damned from all eternity, such are the heat, the rain, the pestilence, things that you would never believe.”
