Page:History of merchant shipping and ancient commerce (Volume 2).djvu/55

 *

private property, and the sacrifice of the lives of many of the inhabitants of the city; while thus engaged "there came in from the offing two large ships, and twenty-two sambacks and Malabar vessels from Coromandel, laden with rice for the Moors of Calicut:" these he seized and plundered, with the exception of six of the smaller vessels belonging to Cananore. Had the acts of this representative of a civilised monarch been confined to plunder, and the destruction of private property at sea and on shore, they might have been passed over without comment as acts of too frequent occurrence; but besides this, they were deeply dyed with the blood of his innocent victims. The prayers he had offered to God with so much solemnity on the banks of the Tagus proved, indeed, a solemn farce; his own historian adding the shameful statement, that after the capture of these peaceable vessels, "the captain-major commanded them" (his soldiers) "to cut off the hands, and ears, and noses of all the crews of the captured vessels, and put them into one of the small vessels, in which he also placed the friar, without ears, or nose, or hands, which he ordered to be strung round his neck with a palm-leaf for the king, on which he told him to have a curry made to eat of what his friar brought him."

Perhaps no more refined acts of barbarity are to be found recorded in the page of history than those which Correa relates with so much simplicity of his countryman; they would seem, indeed, to have been almost matters of course in the early days of the maritime supremacy of the Portuguese, and may in