Page:A Comprehensive History of India Vol 1.djvu/224

 190

HISTORY OF INDIA.

[Book I.

AD. 1537. Solyinan was a great and a successful warrior, and his irnajrination fired at tlie

idea of estahlisliing an additional emj)ire in the Eant Before any 8tep.s were

Turkisii ox- taken, the news of Bahadur's death arrived, but tliis only confirmed the deter-

peditioii to ''

Gujerat. inination to fit out an armament on such a .scale as would insure the conquest of Diu. For this pur[)ose instructions were given to Solyman, the Egyptian

Portuguese besieged in Diu.

Heroic defence.

P^=9^-_

General View of Diu. — Brun et Hogenburg, 1574.

pacha, to commence preparations immediately in the port of Suez. There a fleet of seventy-six galleys, having 7000 Turkish soldiers on board, was forthwith equipped; and, sailing under the command of the pacha, arrived off Diu in the beginning of September, 1537.

Thouo'li the dano-er had been foreseen, the Portucjuese councils were at this time so dilatory and distracted, that no adequate preparations were made to meet it.' The government of India had just been conferred on Garcia de Noronha, and the time which ought to have been devoted to the supply of Diu with everything necessary to its defence was spent in petty squabbles between the old governor and the new. The consequence was, that when the Turki.sh fleet arrived, the garrison consisted only of about 600 men, many of them sickly. Nor was this the worst. Both ammunition and provisions were so deficient, that nothing could save the place from capture if the siege was persisted in or relief did not arrive. Nor was the Tm-kish the only armament which the Portuguese had to fear. A Gujerat army, estimated at 20,000 men, was in the vicinity, ready to co-operate with the besiegers.

Such was the apparently desperate state of matters when the governor, Antonio de Silveira, unable to maintain a footing in the town, shut himself up in the fort. In himself, however, he was equal to a host, possessing not only military talents of the highest order, but also the rare gilt of infusing his own lieroic spirit into all who were under his command. Not only was every soldier within the garrison prepared to do his duty, but the women, forgetting the feebleness of their sex, fearlessly encountered every danger, and worked with their own hands in repairing the walls as they crumbled beneath the jwwerful

♦