”The tradesmen,” Sergeant Joao Braz complained bitterly, “act like they are in Lisbon, not this forsaken wilderness! The miller demands his twentieth part for grinding flour. What will he spend it on? And the husbands are lazy! All they do is stand around and watch their chickens scratch in the dirt while we guard their miserable lives … .”
The Basque baker, Xanti, ranted against the soldiers, who treated everyone in the community like peasants, putting on arrogant airs and shirking their duty. “Do they stand night watch? Ha! They sleep through night watch, unless a rat runs over their feet. Then they scream like women and swear that Satan himself is loose in the town. Why, that idiot Mauricio even shot at a shadow at three o’clock in the morning! Woke up the whole town …”
The governor complained bitterly that the men were slovenly, undisciplined, and lazy. Nicolau the cooper’s confession was one endless tirade against everyone and everything in Lourenco Marques. “The town would not even exist but for me! My barrels hold the water this fort was built to supply for the ships bound for India! Without me, Lourenco Marques would still be a stretch of mud held by devil-worshipping heathens!”
The blacksmith, too, had his complaints. “Three times in the past month, that idiot of a cooper has broken the handles of his drawing knives. What does he do with them, to break the handles? And the governor demands more guns, then complains at the price when I tell him what it will cost and how long it will take my assistant and myself to make even the simplest…”