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of numbers. They were always a tiny band of aliens battering upon the face of the ancient East, severed by countless miles from their base in Europe, often, in individual cases, cut off entirely from the support of their countrymen. The unshaken conviction in the innate superiority of the white man over the bulk of mankind, which gives to our people to-day so immense a moral force, was at that time a thing of very recent growth, a belief founded upon a barely proved experience, a theory that was still in the testing. Yet in the face of all disadvantages, numerical, physical, moral, the Portuguese by the end of the year 1515—the date which saw the passing away of the strenuous soul of the great Alfonso Dalboquerque—had made good their footing in Asia, not only as a new, but in some sense as a dominant power.

"At the time of the death of Alfonso Dalboquerque," writes the author of the Commentaries, "peace was universal from Ormuz to Ceylon; and all the kingdoms of Cambay, Chaul, Dabul, Goa, Onor, Baticalá to Mount de Deli, Cananor, Ciacoulao and the Cape of Comorin—all the kings and lords and marine merchants—and the interior lands he left so quiet and well-ordered that there was never a nation left so completely conquered and subdued by force of arms as this was. And the land had by this time become so pacified that the Portuguese used to carry on their merchant business in every place, without being robbed of anything or being taken captive; and they used to navigate the whole of the Indian Sea in their ships, vessels, small or large sambucos, and used to cross the sea in safety from one part to the other; and the natives, on