Page:History of India Vol 6.djvu/174

 126 THE PORTUGUESE POLICY IN THE EAST pitality which Mussulmans everywhere show to the sick of their religion. The ruler of Aden received them generously, was gratefully invited on board the Turk- ish fleet, and then treacherously hanged. For a time Solyman the Magnificent dominated the whole Arabian coast from Aden, strengthened by one hundred guns and a garrison of five hundred Turks. But before the middle of the century the Arab population rose and handed over the fort in despair to the Portuguese. Aden was finally retaken by the Pasha of Egypt in 1551, and remained amid varying fortunes a Turkish outpost until 1630, when it passed again to the Arabs of the Yemen province. From Albuquerque's attack in 1513 on, it stood defiant just outside the limits of the Indo-Portuguese power. While Aden thus prevented the complete execution of Albuquerque's scheme for cutting off the Moslem trade from its Egyptian base, his designs on the sources of that trade in the Far East were more fully carried out. The cheaper spices of the Indian coast, pepper and ginger, he secured by his command of the Malabar ports. The Moslem monopoly of the cinnamon of Cey- lon and of the precious cloves and mace of the Archi- pelago, was broken by Albuquerque's seizure of Ma- lacca (1511), with subsequent captures and treaties by his successors. My business, however, is with India, and I dare not follow the brilliant track of Portuguese achievement in eastern Asia. The Moluccas, or Spice Islands, the richest jewels in the Portuguese crown when formally made over by Spain in 1529, became not