Page:History of merchant shipping and ancient commerce (Volume 2).djvu/56

 some measure account for the unsatisfactory condition into which that once great nation has now fallen. Supposing, however, the exquisite barbarism of sending to the king the hands, ears, and nose of his ambassador, ''to whom Dom Gama had granted a safe conduct'', not enough to convey to the ruler of Calicut a sufficiently strong impression of the greatness, and grandeur, and power, and wisdom, and civilisation of the Christian monarch, whose subjects he had offended, the captain-major ordered the feet of these poor innocent wretches, whom he had already so fearfully mutilated, "to be tied together, as they had no hands with which to untie them; and in order that they should not untie them with their teeth, he ordered them" (his crew) "to strike upon their teeth with staves, and they knocked them down their throats, and they were thus put on board, heaped up upon the top of each other, mixed up with the blood which streamed from them; and he ordered mats and dry leaves to be spread over them, and the sails to be set for the shore, and the vessel set on fire."

In this floating funeral pile eight hundred Moors, who had been captured in peaceful commerce, were driven on shore as a warning to the people of Calicut, who flocked in great numbers to the beach to extinguish the fire, and draw out from the burning mass those whom they found alive, over whom "they made great lamentations." When the friar reached the king with his revolting message, and deprived of his hands, ears, and nose, an object of the deepest humiliation, he found himself in the midst of