Page:Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile - In the Years 1768, 1769, 1770, 1771, 1772, and 1773 volume 2.djvu/684

668 two were heads of the only great families in Amhara, who took that government as it were by rotation. Woodage, in one of the excursions into Atbara, had made an Arab's, or a Shepherd's daughter, prisoner, baptized her, and lived with her as his mistress. The passion Woodage bore to this fair slave was not, however, reciprocal. She had fixed her affections upon his eldest son, and their frequent familiarities at last brought about the discovery. This very much shocked Woodage; but, instead of having recourse to public justice, he called his brothers, and some other heads of his family before him, and examined into the fact with them, desiring his son to defend himself. The crime was clearly proved in all its circumstances. Upon which Woodage, by his own authority, condemned his son to death; and not only so, but caused his sentence to be put in execution, by hanging the young man over a beam in his own house. As for the slave, he released her, as not being bound to any return of affection to him, from whom she had only received evil, and been deprived of her natural liberty.

seems this claim of patria potestas was new in Abyssinia; and Bacuffa took it so ill, that he deprived Woodage of his office, and banished him to Amhara, then governed by Palambaras Durè. To this loss of influence another circumstance contributed. He was a relation of Yasous's first wife, who, by the Iteghé's intrigues, had been sent with her two sons to the mountain of Wechné, and Joas, a young son of Yasous, preferred in their places.

happened that Palambaras Durè died; and as the succession fell regularly upon the unpopular Woodage, the king's uncle, Lubo obtained a promise of the government