Page:History of India Vol 6.djvu/182

 134 THE PORTUGUESE POLICY IN THE EAST set up a coast kingdom of Ms own and proved a troublesome neighbour to the Portuguese. But here again fortune favoured the Christians. This Timoja enjoyed his new accession of power only for a year, and died in 1511. As Diu was the Portuguese outpost which controlled the passage into Indian waters on the north, so Goa became their central place of arms and commerce half- way down the coast. Its nucleus, the Island of Goa proper, was defended by rivers or creeks on both sides from the mainland, and by capes on the north and south from the extreme fury of the monsoons. The silting of the channels which now impedes the approach was then in an earlier stage, and the Goa anchorage, with twenty-one feet at high water and eighteen at low, sufficed for the largest shipping of that time. In 1641 - 1648 Tavernier regarded it as one of the best harbours in the world. It was, in fact, an earlier Bombay, guarded yet not cut off from the mainland by marine backwaters or river-arms, and nearer than Bombay to the ancient ports of Indo-European commerce. Al- though Goa Island was but nine miles long by three broad, the trade of the western coast was gradually concentrated at its quays. Its natural advantages were developed by a skilful system of treaty restrictions and exemptions at the expense of the old Malabar ports; and even the silting up of the channels was for a time overcome by moving the town nearer to the sea. The old Goa which Albuquerque captured is now a city of empty convents and monasteries; mounds of