Jerónimo Lobo

He was born in Lisbon the third of at least five sons and six daughters to Francisco Lobo da Gama, the Governor of Portuguese Cape Verde, and Maria Brandão de Vasconcelos.

[3] In 1621 he was ordained a priest[3] and was ordered as a missionary to India, and after surviving an attack on the fleet carrying him by English and Dutch ships off Portuguese Mozambique a year later,[3] he arrived at Goa in December 1622.

After a month spent crossing the desert into the Ethiopian highlands, the party reached Fremona, where Lobo assumed the responsibilities of superintendent of the missions in Tigray.

The abdication of Emperor Susenyos (1632) deprived the Catholics of their protector; his successor, Fasilides, first confined them once again at Fremona, then in 1634 Lobo and his companions were exiled from Ethiopia, who were exposed to robbery, assaults and other indignities by the local population before reaching the Ottoman Naib at Massawa.

Despite settling for a ransom of 4300 patacas (which he borrowed from local Banyan merchants), at the last moment the Pasha insisted on keeping Patriarch Mendes and three other senior priests for further money.

Unwilling to settle for just freeing the patriarch, Lobo embarked for Portugal, and after he had been shipwrecked on the coast of Natal, then captured by pirates, he arrived at Lisbon.

This was not the same manuscript that le Grand translated; both were copies, with variations, of the original autograph left at the Casa de São Roque at the time of Lobo's death.