Page:History of India Vol 6.djvu/197

 NAVAL POWER OF PORTUGAL 145 ing her supremacy on the Asiatic trade-route was due to her fleet. Between 1497 and 1612 no fewer than 806 ships were employed in the Indian trade; of which 425 returned to Europe, 285 remained permanently on the Asiatic stations, and ninety-six were lost. Their ordi- nary size varied from 100 to 550 tons, armed with cannon and fitted out for purposes both of freight and war. The ambition of the naval constructors of Portugal outran their technical skill and ended in float- ing castles which could not stand the Indian voyage. Twenty-two of these unseaworthy monsters were lost between 1579 and 1591, partly due to overlading and partly to their unwieldy size. The Madre de Deos, a huge erection with " three close decks, seven stories, a main orlop, a forecastle, and a spar deck of two floors," measured 165 feet from beak to stern, and nearly forty-seven feet across the second " close deck." Besides the ships from Europe, vessels of the hardest teak were built in the dockyards of Goa and Daman. One of them, the Constantino,, constructed about 1550, doubled the Cape of Good Hope seventeen times and lasted twenty-five years. I have said that the Portuguese had a coast-line of over fifteen thousand miles to hold in Asiatic waters. But their fleet enabled them to choose any point along that line for attack, and to concentrate on it their whole force. They could deliver their blow at their own time; if successful they left a garrison; if unsuccessful they disappeared below the horizon, having struck terror, or sometimes compelled submission, by the atrocities