Further India/The Coming of the Filibusters
CHAPTER III
THE COMING OF THE FILIBUSTERS
IT was in November, 1497, that Vasco da Gama, after those two desperate beatings to seaward and tacks to the south which have made him famous, during which he faced and overcame, not only the fury of the elements, but the fears and the mutinous murmurings of his comrades, came at last to land on the eastern shores of southern Africa. The story of the last great tack is told to us by Gaspar Correa in a fashion which leaves a wonderful picture upon our memories, and his words may fittingly be quoted here.
"As he (da Gama) was a very choleric man, at times with angry words he made them silent, although he well saw how much reason they had at every moment to despair of their lives and they had been going for about two months on that tack, and the masters and pilots cried out to him to take another tack; but the captain major did not choose, though the ships were now letting in much water, by which their labours were doubled, because the days were short and the nights long, which caused them increased fear of death; and at this time they met with such cold rains that the men could not move. All cried out to God for mercy upon their souls, for now they no longer took heed of their lives. It now seemed to Vasco da Gama that the time was come for making another tack, and he comported himself very angrily, swearing that if they did not double the Cape, he would stand out to sea again as many times until the Cape was doubled, or there should happen whatever should please God. For which reason, from fear of this, the masters took much more trouble to advance as far as they could; and they took more heart on nearing the land, and escaping from the tempest of the sea: and all called upon God for mercy, and to give them guidance, when they saw themselves out of such great dangers. Thus approaching the land, they found their labour less, and the seas calmer, so they went on running for a long time, steering so as to make the land and case the ships, which they were better able to do at night when the cap- tain slept, which the other ships did also, as they followed the lantern which Vasco da Gama carried: at night the ships showed lights to one another so as not to part com- pany. Seeing how much they had run, and did not find the land, they sailed larger so as to make it; and as they did not find it, and the sea and wind were moderate, they knew that they had doubled the Cape; on which great joy fell upon them, and they gave great praise to the Lord on seeing themselves delivered from death. The pilots continued to sail more free, spreading all the sails; and running in this manner, one morning they sighted some mountain peaks which seemed to touch the clouds; at which their pleasure was so great that they all wept with joy, and all devoutly on their knees said the Salve."
It is true that Vasco da Gama was not the first of the Portuguese mariners to double the Cape of Good Hope, the feat having already been performed by John Infante and Bartholomew Dias, and that da Gama had with him pilots who had sailed with these captains. It is true also that da Gama, unlike Magellan and Columbus, was not the originator of the design which it fell to his lot to carry into effect, and that he owes his fame, less to his own adventuresome spirit and to his individual enterprise and initiative, than to the happy accident of his selection by the King of Portugal for the post of captain-major of the pioneering fleet. All this must be admitted, but nothing can weaken the impression which we receive from Correa's narrative of the dogged strength, the grim resolution, the unshakable courage, moral and physical of the man. The ships held upon that cruel two-months' tack, through angry seas, through cold and tempest, with seams gaping under the long strain, with crews half-fam- ished by the bitter weather, mad afraid, and worn to death with weary toiling at the sails and pumps, and never once did they swerve from the appointed course, because "the captain-major did not choose!" When every soul in all that fleet was calling upon God in his extremity, and was beseiging the captain with entreaties to abandon the desperate enterprise, he alone was de- termined, fearless, and answered their prayers with fierce threats of yet other tacks which he would take if this one failed to accomplish the purpose upon which his will was set. Here in a few words we have the man revealed to us, and if even in this the hour of his greatest achieve- ment we see traces of the ruthlessness, the absence of all care or sympathy for others, which later led him into the commission of crimes more cruel than those of Cortez or Pizarro, we see also in him the embodiment, as it were, of the strenuous spirit of Portugal at the beginning of the sixteenth century—the spirit which made possible the miracles of conquest which then were wrought in Asia, the spirit which awoke that bitter, impotent hatred of the white men which still lingers in the East in the tradi- tions of a people little apt to forgive or to forget.
After Vasco da Gama had opened up the new highway of trade to the East which, diverting the wealth of Asia from its old markets on the shores of the Adriatic, ruined many an Italian city while it brought a hitherto un- dreamed of prosperity to the towns of Portugal, it be- came the custom for a large and well-equipped fleet to sail from Lisbon in the spring of each year. These fleets bore with them reinforcements for the white ad- venturers in Asia wherewith to carry on the ruthless war which then was raging between the newcomers and the ancient kingdoms of the East. They bore too large numbers of men fired by a desire to win for themselves a share of the plunder concerning which such dazzling accounts had reached Europe—men who, like Alexander, lusted after new worlds to conquer, and regarded the re- cently discovered lands as mere stepping-stones to wealth. It was in a spirit of frank brigandage that the Portuguese, from the highest to the lowest, swarmed into Asia. They were utterly without any sense of responsibility in so far as the lands and the men who were their appointed victims were concerned, for the belief in the mission of the white races to order the destinies of the East for the greater good of the Orientals is a comfortable doctrine of quite modern growth. Instead they occupied in their own sight something of the position of the Children of Israel, and never doubted but that the spoiling of the Egyptian must be pleasing to the God of justice and love. Moreover, since the Portuguese were a people of the Peninsula, with whom the hatred of the Moors was an inherited superstition, their religious faith tended to stimulate them to ill-doing, and was in no sense a re- straining influence. Many of the early adventurers were animated by a sincere zeal for their religion, and by a keen desire to force its acceptance upon all and sundry whom they might encounter, and to these the invasion of the East undoubtedly presented itself in the light of a new Crusade. The religious motive is found cropping up in the most unlikely people, and in the most gro- tesquely improbable circumstances, throughout the his- tory of the doings of the early filibusters, and the cruelty and ruthlessness which avarice and ambition dictated found their constant justification in Christian fanaticism. It is necessary to appreciate the existence of this double incentive to conquest by which the Portuguese were ani- mated in order to understand how it was possible for so much wickedness to be done under the cloak of religion. To the filibuster of the sixteenth century God fought ever on his side, and the stubborn fight in which he was engaged was battle done for the Cross. The enemy, therefore, was of necessity the child of the devil, and to such all rights of person or property were of course de- nied. The earth and the fulness thereof was God's gift to his people; the Muhammadan or the pagan who chanced to be in possession was logically to be regarded as a usurper of the Christian's inheritance, and force or fraud were weapons which might be freely used in order to deprive him of that to which, in the sight of the Al- mighty, he had no just claim. It was in this spirit that the Papal Bulls divided the newly discovered earth between the kings of Spain and Portugal; it was in this spirit that the filibusters set to work to give effect to those sweeping decrees; and it was in this spirit that deeds were wrought in Asia which have done more than aught else to rear up between the brown and the white races barriers which few, even in our own day, have the tact, the patience, the sympathy or the energy to sur- mount.
With the first few flects which sailed from Portugal during the years that succeeded the rounding of the Cape of Good Hope, we have at present no concern, since their goal was India, and they did not penetrate to the seas or ports of southeastern Asia. In 1508, how- ever, on April 5th, of that year, Diogo Lopez de Siqueira, the Chief Almotaçel of the kingdom of Portugal, set sail as captain of four vessels with royal instructions to explore and conquer Malacca, a rumour concerning the wealth and importance of that city hav- ing reached the Portuguese in India, and having by them been reported to headquarters. A great deal has been made of the treachery of the Sultan of Malacca, and of his double-dealing with Siqueira, and it is there- fore well to note that the latter came to his kingdom, not merely in the guise of a peaceful trader, as others of many nationalities had come before him, but with the deliberate design of "conquering" the land. It was here that the white men differed so materially from the Arabs, the natives of India, and the Chinese, all of whom had during many centuries carried on an exten- sive commerce in Asia. With none of these people were exploration and conquest synonymous terms. The Hindus, at a very early period, had deeply impressed Java, Lâmbok and Bâli with their influence, and they have left an enduring mark upon the superstitious beliefs and upon the magic practices of the Malayans. None the less, there is no record of anything resembling a Hindu invasion of these islands. Similarly the Mu- hammadan traders settled in the Archipelago and in the Malay Peninsula had succeeded, by the beginning of the sixteenth century, in converting the bulk of the native populations to the faith of Islâm, but they had not profited by the moral and intellectual ascendency thus gained to wrest the reins of government from the rulers of the land. The Chinese, too, after the period of the great Tartar invasion and the innumerable expeditions of Kublai Kaan, had traded freely with Persia, with India and with Malaya without seeking to annex an inch of foreign territory. The Portuguese, on the other hand, and many of the white nations after them, trusted, not so much to peaceful commerce, but to lawless pillage for their speedy enrichment, and the annual fleets sent out from Lisbon started on nothing more nor less than a succession of filibustering raids. Their objects were to confirm the power of Portugal in the regions already reduced to subjection, to extend the conquest in new directions, and thus to squeeze the kings and the popula- tions of the East dry of all the wealth which they could be made to yield, employing for that purpose every device which cunning could suggest, and which force, courage, and an unscrupulous ruthlessness could translate into action.
When Diogo Lopez de Siqueira reached Cochim he found the affairs of Portugal in a condition which was far from edifying. The viceroy for the time being was Dom Francisco Dalmeida, but the great Alfonso Dalboquerque, fresh from his furious battles in the Persian Gulf, claimed that the government ought to be handed over to him by virtue of certain documents, giving him the reversion of the viceroyalty, which he had received from the King prior to his departure from Portugal. Dalmeida was very loth to resign his author- ity to any man, least of all to Dalboquerque towards whom he seems to have entertained a lively feeling of dislike, and at the moment of the arrival of Siqueira the position had become extremely critical. Dalmeida, recognising this, thought to find a way out of his diffi- culties by inviting Siqueira to assume the governorship of the Indies, declaring that if this could be arranged he, Dalmeida, would forthwith set out for Portugal taking Alfonso Dalboquerque with him. The prudent Siqueira, however, would have nothing to do with any such proposal. "Laissez moi donc planter mes pois," he said in effect; for while he did his best to ingratiate himself with both contending factions, he pointed out that he had come to the East for the purpose of exploiting Malacca, and that his only desire was to set forth upon that undertaking so soon as his ships should have under- gone certain much needed repairs. Eventually, there- fore, taking with him some of the followers of Dalbo- querque who had incurred the anger of Dalmeida, he left the quarrelsome atmosphere of Cochim, and sailed across the Indian Ocean to the Straits.
The Malay chronicler tells us in the Hikâyat Hang Tûah that from the first moment of their arrival in the port the strangers began to abuse the hospitality ex- tended to them, and that having obtained a grant from the Sultan of as much land as could be enclosed by a buffalo's hide, they adopted the stratagem of the Pious Æneas, and cutting it into thin strips made it the bound- ary line for a goodly plot of ground. Upon this, so the chronicler tells us, they proceeded to build a formidable citadel whose position menaced the town and the royal precincts, whereupon trouble ensued. The version which comes to us from Portuguese sources is somewhat differ- Here we learn that Siqueira received a warning from a Javanese girl, who was the mistress of one of his men, that treachery was meditated. This girl swam off to the Portuguese ships under the cover of darkness, and brought word that the Sultan intended to massacre the white men at a great banquet to which he would pres- ently invite them, and that when this piece of business had been despatched, he would seize upon their ships. This intelligence, which may quite possibly have been true, does not appear to have been in any way tested by Siqueira, who seems to have accepted it unreservedly, and to have acted at once with more, perhaps, of promp- titude than of wisdom. He sent a native man and woman ashore "with an arrow passed through their skulls" to the Sultan, "who was thus informed," de Barros tells us, "through his subjects that unless he kept a good watch the treason which he had perpetrated would be punished with fire and sword." The Sultan retaliated by arresting Ruy de Araujo, the factor," and twenty other men who were on land with him attending to the collection of the cargo of the ships," though it is to be noted that the Muhammadan monarch used them with no such atrocious barbarity as that which the Chris- tian captain had practised upon his Malay victims. Siqueira, finding his force thus considerably dimin- ished, burnt two of his vessels, since he had not enough men to navigate them, and sailed out of Malacca, pro- ceeding himself direct to Portugal, after despatching a couple of vessels to bear the tidings of his abortive en- terprise to Cochim, where the great Alfonso Dalboquer- que was now reigning unopposed.
The news of the check which Siqueira had received caused considerable annoyance to the authorities both in Portugal and in India, and on March 12th, 1510, Diogo Mendez de Vasconcellos with a fleet of four ships set out "to go and conquer Malacca." The situation in India,
however, was at this moment so critical that Alfonso 
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Alfonso Dalboquerque
From The Commentaries of Dalboquerque, by permission of the Hakluyt Society Dalboquerque refused to allow Vasconcellos to proceed upon his way, and retained him and his fleet to aid him in a combined attack upon Goa. The hands of the greatest of the Portuguese viceroys were more than usually full at this juncture. The coming of the filibus- ters had set the whole of the western coast of India in a flame of war; the Portuguese settlements on the island of Socotra and in the neighbourhood of the Persian Gulf were importunate in their prayers to Dalboquerque to come to their assistance; and meanwhile, in distant Malacca, a number of white men, held in captivity by the Malays, were scanning the sky-line to the north hoping to sight the rescuing fleet for which, during so weary a period, they looked in vain.
By February, 1511, however, Goa had been retaken, and the Coromandel coast was for the moment cowed into submission, wherefore Dalboquerque had leisure at last to look to the more remote portions of his dominions. In that month, accordingly, he set out for the Straits of Hormuz to carry succour to those of his countrymen in that direction whose clamour, backed by repeated orders from the King to erect a fort at Aden, had distracted him all the time that he was too deeply engaged in India to be able to spare them a man or a ship. But the winds proved adverse, and finding that he battled with them in vain, Dalboquerque decided to make a virtue of necessity, and to turn his face towards the Straits of Malacca. Diogo Mendez de Vasconcellos who, it will be remem- bered, had been sent out for the special purpose of chas- tising the Sultan of their kingdom, had throughout shown great restlessness under the restraint imposed upon him by Dalboquerque, and at last, defying the viceroy, he actually set sail for Malacca on his own ac- count. Dalboquerque, however, succeeded in recalling him, and as a punishment for his insubordination sent him back to Portugal in disgrace. Accordingly the task of subduing the Sultan of Malacca now fell to Dalboquer- que's lot without the assistance of the men actually ap- pointed by the King of Portugal for that purpose, and the viceroy set about its accomplishment in his own thorough fashion.
The lawlessness which characterised the proceedings of the Portuguese at this period is well exemplified by the first incident recorded by the author of the Commentaries as having occurred during the voyage to Malacca. "When they had got as far as Ceilao (Ceylon)," he tells us, "they caught sight of a ship. Alfonso Dalboquerque gave orders to chase her, and they took her, and he was very glad to find that it belonged to the Guzerates, as he felt his voyage would now be carried out safely, for the Guzerates understand the navigation of those parts much more thoroughly than any other nations, on account of the great commerce they carry on in those places." Here we have given to us an instance of the acts of unprovoked piracy which the Portuguese, from the moment of their arrival in the East, were accustomed to commit as a matter of course; and if some excuse be found in the fact that pilots were needed, no similar justification can be alleged for the capture of four other
Guzerati vessels which Dalboquerque chased and took 
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Malay Peninsula, by Waldsiemuller. Strassburg Ptolemy 1513
(Copied from the Canerio map 1502) between Ceylon and Sumatra. The man who was acting in this fashion, too, was no irresponsible free- booter, but the Portuguese viceroy of the Indies, and his piracies afford us a just index to the spirit and con- duct of his countrymen in Asia. It is true that sea- brigandage in the East has been suppressed finally by the nations of Europe, but it is well to remember that at an earlier period the white men themselves were the most ruthless and daring of all the rovers who infested Asiatic waters.
The first port touched at by Dalboquerque was that of Pêdir in Sumatra, where he found one Joao Viegas and "eight Christians of the company of Ruy de Araujo, who had arrived thus far in their flight from the city of Malacca, and Joao Viegas recounted to him how the king of Malacca had endeavoured to force them to become Moors, and had ordered some of them to be tied hand and foot and circumcised; and they had suffered many torments because they would not deny the faith of Jesus Christ." All of which was probably true, and was, of course, excessively improper, though the Sultan of Malacca's conduct still compares favourably with that of Siqueira in the matter of the arrow passed through the skulls of a man and a woman. Viegas also told Dalboquerque that "a principal Moor of Malacca," named Naodabegea, [Nakhôda Bêgak] who had instigated the Sultan to cut off Siqueira, and had subsequently joined with the Bendǎhâra of Malacca in a plot against the throne, was even then in hiding in the neighbouring Sumatran kingdom of Pâseh. To Pâseh, therefore, Dalboquerque forthwith sailed, and demanded that the "Moor" in question should be de- livered up to him, but the King of Pâseh, as became a Malayan râja, made all manner of specious excuses, and professed his utter inability to lay hands on the con- spirator. Dalboquerque, conceiving that the hour had. not yet come for the declaration of hostilities with the King of Pâseh, concealed his chagrin as best he might, and proceeded on his way to Malacca. Chance, how- ever, favoured him, for he presently caught sight of a large native vessel, which his people captured after a hard fight. On board this ship they found Naodabegea him- self, "half dead, without any blood flowing from the numerous wounds which he had received. Aires Pereira commanded the mariners to throw him into the sea just as he was; but when they perceived that he was richly clothed, they sought first of all to strip him, and then they found on his left arm a bracelet of bone, set in gold, and when they took this off his blood flowed away and he expired." The survivors of the crew informed. Dalboquerque that "the bracelet was formed of the bones of certain animals which were called cabals, that are bred in the mountain ranges of the kingdom of Siam, and the person who carries these bones so that they touch his flesh can never lose his blood, however many wounds he may receive, so long as they are kept on him."
The term used by the natives was unquestionable kĕbal (often pronounced kâbal by the Malays of Sumatra) which means invulnerable, and all they intended to con- vey was, we may surmise, that the bracelet was a charm which conferred this advantage upon its possessor, and that it had been brought to the Peninsula from Siam. Such charms are worn to this day by many a warrior in Malayan lands.
After taking this vessel, Dalboquerque, for some unexplained reason, retraced his steps towards Pâseh, and fell in with two native ships, one from the Coramandel coast, which struck at once, and another from Java, which was only captured after a very spirited resistance, in the course of which the Javanese set fire to their own craft. On board this vessel Dalboquerque found the unfortunate King of Pâseh, "and when he saw him," the Commentaries tell us "he begged his pardon very earnestly for this un- fortunate affair"—in truth an euphemistic way of describ- ing such an unprovoked act of piracy"—which should not have happened if he had known of his Royal High- ness being on board, and he showed him those cere- monies and that good treatment which is due to a personage of such dignity." Dalboquerque also promised to aid the king in subduing certain of his rebellious sub- jects,—an engagement which cost him nothing since he never intended to keep it—and he then continued his voyage to Malacca, capturing a "very rich junk” upon the way.
He had already pillaged five Guzerati ships between Ceylon and the port of Pêdir; between Pâseh and Malacca he had taken three, one belonging to the Coramandel coast, one manned by men from Java, and a third whose ownership and nationality are unknown. This was sufficient to spread the evil reputation of the strangers far and wide throughout the seas of southeastern Asia, and to set all the countries bordering them on the defensive, while he now meditated a more decisive stroke—the conquest of Malacca, which then was the head and front of all the Malayan kingdoms— having for his object the establishment of the power of Portugal in the very centre of the commerce of all the eastern Archipelago.
Such then was the first coming of the European filibusters, with which began the real exploration of the lands of southeastern Asia,—lands which were destined, with hardly an exception, to fall under the dominion of the white peoples, lands in which, after a weary period of suffering and of strife, the men of the brown and yellow races were to watch their birthrights pass into the keep- ing of the strangers.
It was in dramatic fashion that Dalboquerque made his entry into the harbour of Malacca—the entry of the white men into the inviolate lands which destiny had marked for their possession. It was about the hour of sundown, the author of the Chronicles tells us, and to one who knows the Malay Peninsula that phrase conjures up at once a vivid picture. The merciless heat of the tropic day was passed; a grateful coolness, which yet carries with it a suggestion of melancholy, of spent energies, of exhaustion, had succeeded. The sun lay upon the horizon out yonder in the direction of Sumatra, with great banks of resplendent cloud grouped about it; enormous fan-shaped rays of light stretched upward from
it till they attained the very summit of the heavens, 
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gold, showed here and there little inlets of an ethereal azure. Beneath that glory in the skies, the sea, steel- blue under the gathering darkness, heaved gently, mo- notonously, as a weary sleeper draws his breath, a ruddy sheen marking the furrows between wave and wave. To the landward the native town clung to the beach, swarmed up the sides of small conical hills, and fell away into the heavy forest inshore. Near its centre rose a rude stone building surrounded by a wall draped in crowding creepers, but for the rest the place was a hud- dle of thatched roofs, rising at all angles, sloping unevenly, set in all directions without order or arrange- ment, with a blue haze of smoke hanging above them in the motionless air. In the harbour itself junks from China, sharp-nosed prâhus from Java or the Archipelago, and fishing-smacks innumerable lay at anchor, and on the yellow stretch of sand before the town, crowds of men and women strolled listlessly, chaffering with the fisherfolk, and enjoying the peace. and the coolness after the burden of the day and the heats.
That scene had been enacted daily, repeated in this unchanging climate each succeeding evening for years. It may be witnessed to-day down to its last least detail in the capital of Trĕnggânu which, like ancient Malacca, lies upon the seashore, and as I have sat watching it in this former place, whither as yet the tide of the white man's invasion has not yet attained, it has seemed to me that I have looked back through the centuries upon the Malayan lands which as yet were free from the aggression of the filibusters of Portugal.
But this evening the beach was thronged more densely than was common, and there was withal a subtle restlessness, a tenseness of expectancy in the air. Word had reached Malacca of the approach of the mysterious strangers from afar, the men with the bearded faces and the corpse-like complexions, the rumour of whose evil doings. on the Coramandel coast had carried into the remotest corners of the East. The besetting peril was at hand, even at the gates of the city, but how it might be averted, stayed or met were problems surpassing the wis- dom of the wisest.
And then, before the last of the daylight died, as the mobs of gaily clad natives stood upon the shores, op- pressed by fear, restless with suspense, their dark faces darker in the gathering gloom, suddenly the West was upon them ere they well knew it. The fleet of Dal- boquerque, "all decked with flags, and the men sounding their trumpets," swept into sight from behind the shelter- ing islands to the north, the great bellying squares of strangely rigged canvas catching the faint breeze. On and on it came, inevitable as Fate, the Power of the West sailing into the heart of Malaya unresisted and ir- resistible, and with panic in its heart the East stood in impotence watching it from the shore. One by one the vessels came to anchor, and then from all there roared a salvo of artillery, the salute of the white men to their victims, an explosion that broke upon the peace of the quiet sccnc and sounded the knell of the brown man's free enjoyment of the lands which God had given to him.
We of this latter age know how much, in the fulness of time, the rule of the white man had served to ease the burden of the peoples of the Malay Peninsula at least; but none the less there is something infinitely pathetic in the contemplation of this rude breaking in of the strangers from the West, the hard and restless workers, upon the indolent peace of these ease-loving peoples; the thought of the storm-torn ships from distant Portugal sailing in- solently into this quiet haven while the dusky men of the East stood gazing at them fearfully from the shore, see- ing in their coming a sure presage of what the future held for them and for their children.
Upon the arrival of Dalboquerque there followed negotiations of the usual wolf-and-lamb character. The Sultan of Malacca made haste to send a messenger to the Portuguese viceroy, asking why he had come with so great an armament, declaring that he had, poor soul, no keener desire than to live on terms of amity with the King of Portugal, "and giving him to know that the Bendará (Bĕndăhâra) had been put to death on account of his complicity in the rising which had taken place against the Portuguese captain (Diogo Lopez de Siqueira) who had come to that port, and had resulted in the murder of the Christians who were there in the land, but this was no fault of his." The author of the Commentaries char- acterises this pathetic attempt to delay the inevitable as an artful apology," and tells us that the great Alfonso "dissembled with" the Sultan in the hope that he might by that means get Ruy de Araujo and the other Chris- tians—who, by the same token, do not appear to have been murdered—into his hands, and so into safety, before he delivered his contemplated assault upon the town. The unfortunate Sultan, however, who saw in the posses- sion of hostages the only lever by the aid of which he could hope to bring pressure to bear upon the intruders, replied that he could not regard the surrender of the prisoners as a condition precedent to peace. He was fully prepared to hand them over to Dalboquerque, but pleaded that an agreement of friendship should in the first instance be ratified between himself and the repre- sentatives of the King of Portugal. In the circumstances this can only be regarded as a stipulation dictated by common prudence, the more so when the reputation which the Portuguese had earned for themselves in Asia be remembered, but this attempt to "curb the spirit of Alfonso Dalboquerque," as his chronicler calls it, served only to precipitate the doom of Malacca.
The author of the Commentaries pretends that Dal- boquerque at this time was really averse from war, and would have been well contented if a peaceful settlement could have been arrived at. But viewing the matter im- partially, we are forced to accept the conclusion that war was intended from the first, and that the only object of the preliminary parleys was the removal of the captives from the power of the enemy before matters were pushed to an extremity. The pious Alfonso, we are told, seeing that the Sultan remained firm and that he was preparing himself as best he might to repel an attack, arrived at the comfortable conclusion that "this was a judgment that had come upon the king, and that Our Lord desired to make an end of him for good and all, and to cast the Moors and the very name of Mafamede, out of the land, and to have his Gospel preached in these regions, and their mosques transformed into houses of God's praise by means of the King D. Manuel and by the labours of his subjects, so he gave orders for an attack with armed boats and two large barges with heavy bombards, with the object of viewing the men who rallied at the alarm, and seeing where they had stationed their artillery, and how they managed their defence." For your Portuguese filibuster of the sixteenth century, while he recognised the awful finger of God guiding him in even his most unjustifiable actions, took care that it should lose nothing of its force through any neglect on his part to "keep his powder dry."
All being now ready, and the mind of the great Al- fonso determined upon war, councils were held, plans laid, the scheme of attack explained, and two hours be- fore daybreak on the feast of St. James, July 25th, 1511, a trumpet on board the viceroy's ship called the men of Portugal to arms. The force which consisted, according to the chroniclers, of only 800 Portuguese and 200 na- tives of Malabar armed with swords and shields, was di- vided into three bodies which delivered a simultaneous assault upon the northern and southern quarters of the city, and upon the bridge by which they were connected. Sounding their trumpets, and shouting their war-cry of Sanctiago! (St. James!) the Portuguese rushed to the attack, "and on this," says de Barros, "the air was rent with a confusion of noises, so that the trumpets, the can- non, and the shouts could not be distinguished from one another, the whole forming a doomsday of fear and terror."
The Malays and the Muhammadan traders who fought with them resisted stoutly, though the mosque and many of the stockades were won from them, and the white men began to entrench themselves upon the ground gained. All day long the battle waged, and the Portuguese toiled at the construction of their defences under the merciless Malayan sun, but gloss it over though they will, the chroniclers are forced to admit that in the end the assault failed, and that by nightfall all the Europeans had been obliged to withdraw to their ships, bearing many dead and wounded with them.
One cannot but marvel at the stubborn courage of these filibusters, battling here under a tropical sun at a distance of thousands of miles from their base; bearding the mightiest of the kings of Malaya in his very strong- hold; and daring to oppose their puny numbers to the fighting strength of a town whose population was esti- mated at 100,000 souls. It was a stupendous enterprise, almost insolent in its scorn of opposing odds, and no parallels to it are found in history save in the story of the European conquests of the earth. The supreme self- confidence which alone could inspire such audacity as this, the reckless courage, and the pride which held the power of the enemy so cheap, no less than the wonderful energy which made success a possibility, would seem to be qualities which are developed to the full only in the European character, which can be communicated to the Oriental only when he is upheld by the leadership of white men in whom he trusts. If the traditional reward of the meek has fallen to the lot of the white nations, it is not through meekness that they have inherited the earth.
After the first abortive assault upon Malacca there fol- lowed a period of nine days during which Dalboquerque instituted a rigorous blockade of the place with a view to starving it into submission. Once more the slender band. of Portuguese adventurers flung itself at the teeming na- tive city, and this time the bridge, which was throughout the key to the entire position, was wrested from the Ma- lays, and they and their allies were routed. On each oc- casion the Sultan of Malacca had himself taken an active part in the fighting, and in the mélée the elephant upon which he was mounted was badly hurt, whereupon, says de Barros, "feeling the pain of its wound, it seized the negro that guided it with its trunk, and dashed him to the ground, on which the king, wounded in the hand, dismounted, and not being recognised, effected his es- cape." And thus Malacca fell, and passed for ever out of the keeping of the Malays, though it was destined to be reft from Portugal by Holland, from Holland by Great Britain, to be surrendered once more to the Dutch for a little space, and to come finally into the hands of England.
"In this second time of taking the city," says the author of the Commentaries, "many of our men were wounded, and some of those who were wounded with poison died, but all the others were cured, because Alfonso Dalboquerque took very good care to give orders for their cure, and of the Moors, women and children, there died by the sword an infinite number, for no quarter was given to any of them."
The city having now fallen into his hands, and being, as Dalboquerque rightly foresaw, the beginning of yet another empire in the East, he next set himself, with all his accustomed energy, ruthlessness, shrewdness and wisdom, to the task of consolidating the power of Portugal in the newly won possession.
Order was also taken for the organisation of the gov- ernment of Malacca; a coinage was instituted; a gov- ernor was appointed; and the Javanese headman, Utemutaraja, a man of ninety years of age, and his sons, being suspected of a conspiracy against the conquerors, were publicly executed by way of a salutary example to all malcontents. It was their sheer ruthless- ness, and their complete freedom from the trammels of a too exacting sense of justice that alone enabled the Portuguese to hold what they had gotten, and to rule teeming native populations, bound to them by no con- sciousness of benefits received, who were simply cowed into submission. But it is to these qualities and to the methods whose adoption followed from them that the eventual loss by Portugal of the bulk of her colonial empire is to be traced. She made no friends in Asiatic lands, and when in the fulness of time her European enemies fell upon her, the men of the brown races, her power over whom she had abused, watched her defeat. with jubilant satisfaction, and raised none save reluctant hands in her defence.
But in another direction Dalboquerque showed a sounder and more far-seeing policy. Before the second assault had been delivered, he had allowed the Chinese junks, of which mention has already been made, to start for Canton, only exacting from them a promise that they would put in on their way at the port of Siam. With these traders he despatched one Duarte Fernandez, who had escaped from the cap- tivity which he had shared with Ruy de Araujo and his fellows in Malacca, to act as his ambassa- dor at the Siamese Court. This man was the first European of whom we have any record to visit the ancient capital of Ayutha, some miles further up the Menam River than the modern city of Bangkok, and thus from the fall of Malacca begins also the earliest exploration of Siam by men of the white races.
The rumour of the daring deeds wraught by the Portuguese in Asia had already spread far and wide, travelling with that marvellous speed which is one of the stock wonders of the East, and the King of Siam, be- tween whose subjects and the Malays no love was ever yet lost, hastened to send a return embassy to Dalbo- querque, to wish him all success in his adventures in Malacca, and to cement a friendship between the white men and the Court of Ayutha. Dalboquerque in reply despatched a second mission to Siam under one Antonio de Miranda, who seems to have sailed round the Malay Peninsula as far as Trĕnggânu (Taranque) on the east coast, whence he made his way to Ayutha overland "with horses and draft oxen." Beyond the bare fact that this journey was undertaken no record of it has been preserved to us, but even in our own time it would be long and arduous, and the traveller would have to make his way, mainly by means of the seashore which here is for the most part sandy, through Kĕlantan, Lěgeh, Pětâni, and Sĕnggôra into Lower Siam, and so along the Isthmus of Kra to the Valley of the Menam. It is difficult to believe that such a journey was really performed by a white man as early as the year 1511 or 1512, the more so since sailing craft of many types and various sizes abound on this coast, and afford far superior means of transport to any which in the same regions are found ashore. There is one fact, however, which lends vraisemblance to the account given to us by the author of the Commentaries concerning the route followed by Antonio de Miranda. The mission to Ayutha would seem to have started from Malacca. shortly before Dalboquerque himself set out on his return to India, that is to say in the autumn of 1511, and by that season the northeast monsoon would have begun to make itself felt. Miranda sailed with the Chinese junks as far as Trĕnggânu, and it is almost certain that by the time he reached that port the strong headwinds would have made further navigation to the northward impossible to native vessels. He would then have to make his choice between wintering in Trĕnggânu and undertaking the arduous march to Ayutha overland, and as the men of his race and age were little apt to be daunted by obstacles, we may perhaps conclude that he decided upon the latter alternative. If this be so, we must hail Antonio de Miranda, who to us is nothing but a name, as the first if the least articulate of the European explorers of Lower Siam and a portion of the Malay Peninsula.
The noise which the invasion of Malacca had oc- casioned had not been without its effect upon other kingdoms of Malaya, and before ever Dalboquerque sailed for India, embassies reached him from the Sultan of Kampar, whose kingdom was situated on the western shores of Sumatra, who, though he was a son-in-law of the ill-fated Sultan Muhammad Shah, was moved by his fear of "the fury of the Portuguese” to make terms for himself with the conquerors. From Java too came overtures of friendship, dictated by the wholesome dread which the prowess of the Portuguese had inspired, and the Sultan of the Sumatran kingdom of Měnangkâbau hastened to follow the example set by his neighbours. Thus Dalboquerque's design to build up Malacca as the centre of trade in southeastern Asia, preserving under the flag of Portugal the position which it had occupied under the rule of its own kings,—a design which he had kept steadily in view from the first—was accomplished with little difficulty, and the conquest of this single port served to establish the power of the aliens upon a firm basis in this region, and through the prestige it brought to them secured immediately a political and commercial superiority such as had never before been enjoyed by any single kingdom of Malaya.
One other thing was done by the great Alfonso ere he turned back to India and to the warfare which awaited him at Goa. He despatched a fleet of three ships, under the command of Antonio Dabreu, who had received wounds and earned distinction in the assault upon the bridge at Malacca, upon a voyage of discovery in the Malayan Archipelago. "And the instructions which Alfonso Dalboquerque gave to Antonio Dabreu, were, on no account whatever on that voyage to take any prizes, and to go on board of no vessel whatever, nor to consent to any of his men going on shore, but in all the harbours and in all the islands at which he might touch to give presents and gifts to the kings and lords of the country, and for this purpose he ordered there should be given out many pieces of scarlet and velvets of Méca, and many other kinds of merchandise; and, further, he gave orders that the captains should not interfere with a single ship of Malacca or of the other ports (whether they belonged to the Moors or to the Hindoos) which he might meet with in these Clove islands (i. e., the Moluccas) or Apple islands taking in cargo, but rather show them favour and give them as much assistance as he possibly could; and in the same way that such ships as these ne- gotiated for their cargo, so also in like manner was he to act for his cargo, observing all the customs of the re- spective countries." From which it will be seen that the great Alfonso added the wisdom of a statesman to the reckless daring of a filibuster, and that on occasion even his religious zeal could yield to considerations of policy.
We possess, unfortunately, no details concerning Da- breu's voyage, though there seems to be some reason to believe that he penetrated sufficiently far to the south- east to lay up his ships for refitting at the island of Am- boyna, which lies to the south of the western extremity of the island of Ceram. This would lead us to the infer- ence that the southern coast of Borneo was skirted by Dabreu's fleet, and that the islands of the Celebes and Molucca groups were visited and explored in so far, at any rate, as their principal ports were concerned. More- over, if Dalboquerque's instructions were obeyed, this voyage of exploration was conducted with a policy and in a spirit which were little common among the adven- turers of the early sixteenth century, its object being to attract trade to Malacca instead of the commission of acts of piracy and pillage, wherefore the Portuguese, who had earned a great reputation as warriors, must have been free from molestation, and since they were in no aggressive mood must have sailed whither they would. without let or hindrance. This voyage, then, although we possess such scant details concerning it, is an event of importance in the history of exploration in south- eastern Asia, and to its pacific character is largely to be attributed the rapidity with which during the succeeding fifty years the Portuguese traders spread themselves through the ports of Malaya, a matter which we shall have to examine more particularly in the following chapter.