Page:Early English adventurers in the East (1917).djvu/258

 children, 3,000, were shipped to Muscat and Suhar, with the design that they should be despatched from thence, as opportunity offered, to Goa.

Thus, appropriately on St. George's Day, this famous stronghold of the Portuguese fell into English hands. In its later years, Ormuz had been under a shadow, in common with the other Eastern possessions of Portugal, but it still had upon it the marks of the greatness which it had borne when it was one of the principal entrepôts of Eastern trade in the Middle Ages. Travellers who visited it at the time make mention of its splendid churches and mosques, its bustling streets, and its noble houses, furnished with all the luxurious accessories of the refined Western civilization of the age. Viewed from the sea it presented an appearance of magnificence uncommon in an Oriental port at that period. All this has since vanished like "the baseless fabric of this vision." To-day if you go to Ormuz you will find in the place of the spreading city, with its 40,000 population, a miserable settlement of 500 nomads, encamped on a sterile, rocky expanse which was once the famous seat of Portuguese power. A portion of the fort and a lighthouse, of extraordinarily solid construction, are the sole mementoes of the century-long Lusitanian occupation.

The capture of Ormuz was something more than an incident in a protracted struggle for trade supremacy. It constitutes one of the signposts in the history of British influence in the East. The blow inflicted was a fatal one as far as Portuguese ascendancy in Persia was concerned, and it exercised an enormous effect in hastening the downfall of the Portuguese power in the East as a whole. On our side, as will be demonstrated, it led directly to the planting of our flag on an unassailable basis in India. Further, it