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author of the Commentaries, "many of our men were wounded, and some of those who were wounded with poison died, but all the others were cured, because Alfonso Dalboquerque took very good care to give orders for their cure, and of the Moors, women and children, there died by the sword an infinite number, for no quarter was given to any of them."

The city having now fallen into his hands, and being, as Dalboquerque rightly foresaw, the beginning of yet another empire in the East, he next set himself, with all his accustomed energy, ruthlessness, shrewdness and wisdom, to the task of consolidating the power of Portugal in the newly won possession.

Order was also taken for the organisation of the gov- ernment of Malacca; a coinage was instituted; a gov- ernor was appointed; and the Javanese headman, Utemutaraja, a man of ninety years of age, and his sons, being suspected of a conspiracy against the conquerors, were publicly executed by way of a salutary example to all malcontents. It was their sheer ruthless- ness, and their complete freedom from the trammels of a too exacting sense of justice that alone enabled the Portuguese to hold what they had gotten, and to rule teeming native populations, bound to them by no con- sciousness of benefits received, who were simply cowed into submission. But it is to these qualities and to the methods whose adoption followed from them that the eventual loss by Portugal of the bulk of her colonial empire is to be traced. She made no friends in Asiatic lands, and when in the fulness of time her European