The Strange Adventures of Andrew Battell, of Leigh, in Angola and the Adjoining Regions

In 1589, an English sailor named Andrew Battell set sail for South America and instead found himself imprisoned in Angola for nearly eighteen years. This is his account: a document so strange, so far-fetched, that it reads less like a travel memoir than like a fever dream of empire and survival. Captured by the Portuguese after a shipwreck, Battell was held captive in the kingdom of Ndongo, forced to serve as a soldier, and witnessed ceremonies and customs that no Englishman had ever described. He escaped multiple times. He befriended African rulers. He wandered through regions whose names most of his contemporaries could not have located on a map. The result is a window into a world that existed just on the edge of Elizabethan England's awareness: dangerous, exhilarating, and utterly alien. Nearly 500 years later, Battell's narrative remains one of the earliest and most bizarre first-person accounts of West Africa by an Englishman, a document that proves truth was always stranger than fiction.