In 1569, King Sebastian of Portugal sent his greatest soldier, Francisco Barreto, with a thousand men and all the pomp of the Portuguese empire up the Zambezi River to find the legendary gold mines of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. What followed was one of the most disastrous military expeditions in African history — ending with most of the army dead from fever, the general dying in a straw hut, and the famous mines turning out to be a few holes in the ground yielding grains of dust.
Gold dust in little quills sealed with wax. That was what came down from the mines of Sofala — small amounts, laboriously carried by native traders, sold for strings of blue and yellow clay beads and strips of striped cloth. Not much to show for all the Portuguese blood and treasure spent trying to get it. But the stories that came back with the gold were enormous. Gold so plentiful, said one writer, that great lumps of it were forced up out of the ground by the trees and found in the forks of branches. Nuggets the size of yams. Places where the stuff lay on the ground like ginger in the Indies. That — most people agreed — could only be Ophir. The place where Solomon got his gold. The mines of the Queen of Sheba. And in 1569, young King Sebastian of Portugal sent his greatest soldier to find them.
Francisco Barreto — A Great Soldier on a Fool's Errand
Francisco Barreto had fought the Moors in North Africa and served as Governor of India. He was advanced in years, but his soldiers loved him like a father. When he was appointed to command the expedition, his men mobbed his vessel in their eagerness to be enrolled. Half the six hundred on his ship were noblemen. Two hundred were servants of the king. The fleet set out on a brave April day in 1569 with processions of priests, waving banners, and the blare of martial trumpets. Of all that brilliant assembly, only a few fever-stricken wretches were destined to see Portugal again. We have two good accounts of what followed. One is by Diego de Couto, a soldier who was not on the expedition but gathered testimony from those who survived it. The other is by Father Monclaro, a Jesuit priest who accompanied Barreto and blamed everything on the Moors. De Couto blamed the Jesuits. Both seem to have been right about the other.
The Zambezi — Where Empires Go to Die
The expedition had already lost a hundred men to fever before it even left Mozambique. Then politics delayed the start further, burning two more years in disputes about whether to go by way of Sofala (the direct route, and the sensible one) or up the Zambezi River (the Jesuit preference, since a priest had been killed in that direction and they wanted revenge). The Jesuits won. In November 1572 the army finally started up the Zambezi, dragging boats by hand against the current through mangrove swamps populated by apes the size of greyhounds and savages who ground their teeth to points and wore their hair piled into horns a foot long. The soldiers shot hippos and crocodiles from the river banks and made breastplates from crocodile skin. At Sena, two hundred miles upstream, they found twenty peaceful Arab traders who welcomed them warmly. Father Monclaro convinced Barreto that these Arabs had poisoned the expedition's horses and cattle — the actual cause was the tsetse fly, as is now understood — and seventeen of them were tortured to death in ways the Jesuit describes with what one can only call enthusiasm. One was baptized before being hanged, "accompanied by the crucifix." The horses and cattle continued to die anyway.
Imagine sixteenth-century soldiers in shining steel helmets and breastplates blazing in the African sun, marching along mountain banks of the Zambezi into the heart of Africa — searching for gold they would never find.
The Battle — and the Disastrous Retreat
Marching inland from the river, Barreto's much-reduced army eventually met a large force of the Monga people — a tribe that had rebelled against the local supreme chief, the Monomotapa. The battle was interesting. Barreto drew his men up in a hollow square with artillery around the perimeter, almost exactly as Lord Chelmsford would march against the Zulus three centuries later. The Mongas advanced in a crescent formation, almost surrounding the square — exactly as the Zulus would do later too. A Monga sorceress led the advance, throwing dust in the air to blind the Portuguese. Barreto ordered his artillery to fire at her. The ball shattered her, which horrified the Mongas who believed her to be immortal. Still they attacked, charging to within a few yards of the guns before the muskets and cannon drove them back. More than four thousand of the enemy were killed. Barreto had won. But then came the retreat — and it was worse than any battle. The water was stagnant, green-slimed pools exposed to the sun. The sick had to be carried because there was no one left who could walk. Even the old general carried sick men behind him on his horse as they retraced their steps seventy miserable miles back to the boats. Barreto heard that there was intrigue against him at Mozambique and went to deal with it, leaving the remnant at Sena. When he came back, he found the army dying in their huts. Fifty soldiers were barely able to stand. Their guns lay on the ground — only one man, a little stronger than the rest, could fire a salute when the general arrived. Barreto went among the sick, tending them with his own hands. Eight days later he too was struck down by fever. He died in a straw hut on the bank of the Zambezi, and when they searched his belongings for money to cover his burial expenses, they found not a single cruzado.
The Gold — Found at Last, and Worthless
Of the army, only one hundred and eighty men remained alive and they were dying fast. The new commander, Homem, managed to form a second army and eventually found his way to the mines — traveling by way of Sofala, the direct route that everyone had wanted to take in the first place. At last they reached Ophir. Solomon's mines. The Queen of Sheba's gold. The men's eyes glistened. They expected everything to be gold. They expected to find it in the streets and the woods and to come away loaded. What they found was a few deep holes in the earth with some Africans painfully at work. "With the earth which they dug up they filled their basins and went to wash it in the river," wrote de Couto, "each one obtaining from it four or five grains of gold — it being altogether a poor and miserable business." So ended the great expedition. They marched in with trumpets and banners. They fought in the style of heroes. All they gained was a few tusks of ivory, a few lumps of ambergris, a few grains of gold dust — and a hole in the ground.
The gold mines the Portuguese sought so desperately turned out to be small operations yielding only grains of dust — not the mountains of treasure the legends promised.
The story of Barreto's expedition stands as one of history's great cautionary tales about the gap between legend and reality. The gold was real — the mines of Zimbabwe did produce gold for centuries. But the scale was never what the Portuguese imagined, and the cost of finding them out destroyed one of the finest armies Portugal ever sent to Africa. The legend of Prester John and Solomon's mines did its damage and moved on. But the ruins of Zimbabwe, which the Portuguese never reached, still stand today — mute and magnificent, still teasing us with their mystery.
