CHAPTER XVI - How Antam Gonçalvez went to make the first ransom

Summary

As you know that naturally every prisoner desireth to be free, which desire is all the stronger in a man of higher reason or nobility whom fortune has condemned to live in subjection to another; so that noble of whom we have already spoken, seeing himself held in captivity, although he was very gently treated, greatly desired to be free, and often asked Antam Gonçalvez to take him back to his country, where he declared he would give for himself five or six Black Moors; and also he said that there were among the other captives two youths for whom a like ransom would be given.

And here you must note that these blacks were Moors like the others, though their slaves, in accordance with ancient custom, which I believe to have been because of the curse which, after the Deluge, Noah laid upon his son Cain, cursing him in this way:—that his race should be subject to all the other races of the world.

And from his race these blacks are descended, as wrote the Archbishop Don Roderic of Toledo, and Josephus in his book on the Antiquities of the Jews, and Walter, with other authors who have spoken of the generations of Noah, from the time of his going out of the Ark.