Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 12.djvu/821

797 HISTORY.] INDIA 797 Arabia, Persia, and India.&quot; In that year Vasco da Gama sailed again to the East, with a fleet numbering twenty vessels. He .formed an alliance with the rajas of Cochin and Cananore against the zamorin of Calicut, and bom barded the latter in his palace. In 1503 the great Alfonso d Albuquerque is first heard of, as in com mand of one of three expeditions from Portugal. In 1505 a large fleet of twenty-two sail and fifteen thousand men was sent under Francisco de Almeida, the first Portuguese governor and viceroy of India, In 1509 Albuquerque succeeded as governor, and widely extended the area of Portuguese influence. Having failed in an attack upon Calicut, he seized Goa, which has ever since remained the capital of Portuguese India. Then, sailing round Ceylon, he captured Malacca, the key of the navigation of the Indian archipelago, and opened a trade with Siam and the Spice Islands. Lastly, he sailed back westwards, and, after penetrating into the Persian Gulf and the lied Sea, returned to Goa only to die in 1515. In 1524 Vasco da Gama came out to the East for the third time, and he too died at Cochin. For exactly a century, from 1500 to 1600, the Portuguese enjoyed a monopoly of Oriental trade. &quot; From Japan and the Spice Islands to the Ked Sea and the Cape of Good Hope, they were the sole masters and dispensers of the treasures of the east ; while their possessions along the Atlantic coast of Africa and in Brazil complete their maritime empire. But they never commanded the necessary resources either of military strength or personal character for its maintenance and defence. They were also in another way unprepared for the commerce of which they thus obtained the control. Their national character had been f &amp;gt;rmed in their secular contest with the Moors, and above all things they were knights errant and crusaders, who looked on every pagan as an enemy at once of Portugal and of Christ. It is impossible for any one who has not read the contemporary narratives of their discoveries and conquests to conceive the grossness of the superstition and the cruelty with which the whole history of their exploration and subjugation of the Indies is stained. Albuquerque alone endeavoured to conciliate the good will of the natives, and to live in friendship with the Hindu princes, who were naturally better pleased to have the Portuguese, as governed by him, for their neigh bours and allies than the Mahometans whom he had expelled or sub dued. The justice and magnanimity of his rule did as much to extend and confirm the power of the Portuguese in the East as the courage and success of his military achievements ; and in such veneration was his memory held by the, Hindus, and even by the Mahometans, in Goa that they were accustomed to repair to his tomb, and there utter their complaints, as if in the presence of his shade, and call upon God to deliver them from the tyranny of his successors. The cruelties of Soarez, Sequeyra, Menezes, Da Gama, and succeeding viceroys drove the natives to desperation, and encouraged the princes of western India in 1567 to form a league against the Portuguese, in which they were at once joined by the king of Achin. Their undisciplined armies were not able to stand against the veteran soldiers of Portugal, 200 of whom, at Malacca, utterly routed and put to flight a force of 15, 000. of the enemy. When, in 1578, Malacca was again besieged by the king of Achin, the small garrison of Portuguese succeeded in inflicting a loss on him of 10,000 men and all his cannon and junks. Twice again, iu 1615 and for the last time in 1628, it was besieged, and on each occasion the Achinese were repulsed with equal bravery and good fortune. But these incessant attacks on the Portuguese evinced the decline of their empire, while the increased military forces sent out to the East proved an insupportable drain on the revenues and population of Portugal. &quot; In 1580 the crown of Portugal, consequent on the death of King Sebastian, became united with that of Spain, under Philip II., an event which proved the last fatal blow to the maritime and commer cial supremacy of Portugal. It proved fatal in many ways, but cliielly because the interests of Portugal in Asia were subordinated to the European interests of Spain. In 1640 Portugal again became a separate kingdom, but in the meanwhile the Dutch and English had appeared in the Eastern Seas, and before their indomitable com petition the Portuguese trade and dominion of the Indies withered away as rapidly as it had sprung up. The period of the highest development of Portuguese commerce was probably from 1590 to 1610, on the eve of the subversion of their political power by the Dutch, and when their political administration in India was at its lowest depth of degradation. At this period a single fleet of Portu guese merchantmen sailing from Goa to Cam bay or Surat would number as many as 150 or 250 carracks. Now only one Portu guese ship sails from Lisbon to Goa iu the year.&quot; The only remaining Portuguese possessions in India are Goa, Daman, and Diu, all on the west coast, with an area of 1086 square miles and a population of 407,712 souls. The general census of 1871 also returned 426 Portuguese dwelling in British India, not including those of mixed descent, of whom about 30,000 are found in Bombay and 20,000 in Bengal, chiefly in the neighbourhood of Dacca and Chittagong. The latter are known as Eiringhis ; and, excepting that they retain the Roman Catholic faith and European surnames, are scarcely to be distinguished either by colour or by habits of life from the natives among whom they live. The Dutch were the first European nation to break Dutch through the Portuguese monopoly. During the 16th cen- settle- tury Bruges, Antwerp, and Amsterdam became successively mellts - the great emporia whence Indian produce, imported by the Portuguese, was distributed to Germany and even to England. At first the Dutch, following in the track of the English, attempted to find their way to India by sailing round the north coasts of Europe and Asia. William Barents is honourably known as the leader of three of these arctic expeditions, in the last of which he perished. The first Dutchman to double the Cape of Good Hope was Cornelius Houtman, who reached Sumatra and Bantam in 1596. Forthwith private companies for trade with the East were formed in many parts of the United Provinces, but in 1602 they were all amalgamated by the states-general into &quot;The Dutch East India Company.&quot; Within a few years the Dutch had established factories on the continent of India, in Ceylon, in Sumatra, on the Persian Gulf, and on the Red Sea, besides having obtained exclusive possession of the Moluccas. In 1618 they laid the foundation of the city of Batavia in Java, to be the seat of the supreme government of the Dutch possessions in the East Indies, which had previously been at Amboyna. At about the same time they discovered the coast of Australia, and in North America founded the city of New Amsterdam or Manhattan, now New York. During the 17th century the Dutch maritime power was the first in the world. The massacre of Amboyna in 1623 led the English East India Company to retire from the Eastern seas to the continent of India, and thus, though indirectly, contributed to the foundation of the British Indian empire. The long naval wars and bloody battles between the English and the Dutch within the narrow seas were not terminated until William of Orange united the two crowns in 1689. In the far East the Dutch ruled without a rival, and gradually expelled the Portuguese from almost all their territorial possessions. In 1635 they occupied Formosa; in 1640 they took Malacca, a blow from which the Portuguese never recovered; in 1651 they founded a colony at the Cape of Good Hope, as a half-way station to the East ; in 1658 they captured Jaffnapatam, the last stronghold of the Portuguese in Ceylon; in 1664 they wrested from the Portuguese all their earlier settlements on the pepper-bearing coast of Malabar. The rapid and signal downfall of the Dutch colonial empire is to be explained by its short-sighted commercial policy. It was deliberately based upon a monopoly of the trade in spices, and remained from first to last destitute of the true imperial spirit. Like the Phoenicians of old, the Dutch stopped short of no acts of cruelty towards their rivals in commerce ; and, like the Phoenicians, they failed to introduce a respect for their own higher civilization among the natives with whom they came in contact. The knell of Dutch supremacy was sounded by Clive, when in 1758 he attacked the Dutch at Chinsurah both by land and water, and forced them to an ignominious capitulation. In the great French war from 1781 to 1811 England wrested from Holland every one of her colonies, though Java was restored in 1816 and Sumatra in exchange for Malacca in 1824. At the present time the Dutch flag flies nowhere on the mainland of India, though the quaint houses and regular canals at Chinsurah, at Negapatam, at Jaffnapatam, and at