JERONIMO

LOBO (1593-1678)  , Jesuit missionary, was born in Lisbon, and entered the Order of Jesus at the age of sixteen . In 1621 he was ordered as a missionary to India, and in 1622 he arrived at Goa . With the intention of proceeding to Abyssinia, whose Negus (emperor) Segued had been converted to Roman Catholicism by Pedro Paez, he left India in 1624 . He disembarked on the coast of Mombasa, and attempted to reach his destination through the Galla country, but was forced to return . In 1625 he set out again, accompanied by .Mendez, the patriarch of Ethiopia, and. eight missionaries . The party landed on the coast of the Red Sea, and Lobo settled in Abyssinia as superintendent of the missions in Tigre . He remained there until death deprived the Catholics of their protector, the emperor Segued . Forced by persecution to leave the kingdom, in 1634 Lobo and his companions fell into the hands of the Turks at Massawa, who sent him to India to procure a ransom for his imprisoned fellow-missionaries . In this he was successful, but could not induce the Portuguese viceroy to send an armament against Abyssinia . Intent upon accomplishing this cherished project, he embarked for Portugal, and after he had been ship-wrecked on the coast of Natal, and captured by pirates, arrived at Lisbon . Neither at this city, however, nor at Madrid and Rome, was any countenance given to Lobo's plan . He accordingly returned to India in 164o, and was elected rector, and afterwards provincial, of the Jesuits at Goa .

After some years he returned to his native city, and died there on the 29th of

January 1678 . Lobo wrote an account of his travels in Portuguese, which appears never to have been printed, but is deposited in the monastery of St Roque, Lisbon . Balthazar Telles made large use of the information therein in his Historia geral da Ethiopia a Alta (Coimbra, 1660), often erroneously attributed to Lobo (see Machado's Bibliotheca Lusitana) . Lobo's own narrative was translated from a MS. copy into French in 1728 by the Abbe Joachim le Grand, under the title of Voyage historique d'Abissinie . In 1669 a translation by Sir Peter Wyche of several passages from a MS. account of Lobo's travels was published by the Royal Society (translated in M . Thevenot's Relation des voyages in 1673) . An English abridgment of Le Grand's edition by Dr Johnson was published in 1735 (reprinted 1789) . In a Memoire justificatif en rehabilitation des peres Pierre Paez et Jerome Lobo, Dr C . T . Beke maintains against Bruce the accuracy of Lobo's statements as to the source of the Abai branch of the Nile . See A. de Backer, Bibliotheque de la Compagnie de Jesus (ed . C .

Sommervogel, iv., 1893) .