Page:History of merchant shipping and ancient commerce (Volume 2).djvu/60

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Coulam," sending the queen a handsome mirror and corals, and a large bottle of orange-water, with scarlet barret-caps for her ministers and household, and thirty dozen of knives with sheaths for her people. Soon afterwards he established a factory in her kingdom.

While Dom Gama was employed loading his ships with the produce of India for Portugal, the king of Calicut had prepared a fleet which he hoped would capture and destroy the fleet of the Christian monarch who had done his people such grievous wrongs. It consisted of "several large ships, and sambacks, and rowing barges, with much artillery and fighting men, and two captain-majors." But the king of Calicut, either anxious to avoid war, or to obtain information of the condition and power of the vessels then under Dom Gama, sent a confidential Brahmin to Cochym, with a letter to the captain-major, in which, after stating the force now at his command, he expressed a wish that there should be "no more wars nor disputes" between them, and that he would make compensation for the injury his people had sustained on the previous voyage; but the Brahmin received no better reception than his predecessor had done. He was tied to the bits, or framework that surrounds the main-mast; an iron shovel, full of embers, was put "close to his shins, until large blisters rose upon them, whilst the interpreter shouted to him to tell the truth," as to whether the king his master meant what he said in the letter he had addressed by him to Dom Gama; but as he would not speak, "the fire was brought closer by degrees, until he could not bear