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empire, established on the delta of the Irawadi, was in the sixteenth century possessed of a might, a wealth, a splendour and an importance which have never since. been approached in these regions. Even at that time, however, constant wars were in progress between Pegu and Siam, Tungu, Ava, and Arakan, in many of which Portuguese adventurers took an active part. During the campaign against Siam in 1548, a hundred and eighty Portuguese under James Suarez de Melo fought on the side of Pegu, while James Pereyra led a party of his countrymen under the flag of Siam. During the con- cluding years of the sixteenth century, however, the Kings of Arakan and Tungu overran Pegu and destroyed its power forever, and in 1600, Boves, a Jesuit priest, thus describes the destruction that had been wrought in the once prosperous kingdom.

"It is a lamentable spectacle to see the banks of the rivers, set with infinite fruit-bearing trees, now over- whelmed with ruins of gilded temples and noble edifices; the ways and fields full of skulls and bones of wretched Peguans, killed or famished and cast into the river in such numbers that the multitude of carcases prohibiteth the way and passage of any ships; to omit the burnings and massacres committed by this, the cruellest tyrant that ever breathed."

The King of Arakan is the tyrant here referred to, and once again Portuguese mercenaries took their share of the fighting. Their leader, Philip de Brito, received from the King of Arakan the port of Sirian as a reward for his services immediately after the fall of Pegu, and