Page:Further India; (IA furtherindia00clif).pdf/125

Red Karins was the only part of Burma which escaped its domination. The Portuguese, it will be noted, had never during all this time acquired any territory in Burma, adventurers like the miserable de Brito having fought, not for their king and country, but for their own hands. The opening of factories in Burmese territory was the work of the British and Dutch East India Com- panies, and with that we shall have to deal in a later chapter.

The establishment of the Portuguese in Malaya has already been recorded, and we can now glance rapidly at the history of their relations with Siam. The embassy sent to that country by Dalboquerque after the fall of Malacca has already been mentioned, and in 1516 Manoel Falcao established a factory in Pětâni, a Malayan king- dom on the eastern coast of the Peninsula which was subject to Siamese influence, as indeed at that time were most of the Malay States. This trading-station quickly assumed considerable proportions, and when it was visited by Fernandez Pinto about 1540 there were, he states, some three hundred Portuguese living in the place, and Antonio de Faria was able to recruit a sufficiently numer- ous band of adventurers from among them when he set out, as will presently be related, to harry the coasts of Indo-China. In Siam itself the Portuguese, though they neither sought nor obtained any territorial possessions, settled in considerable numbers, and fought as mercena- ries against the Peguan invaders in 1548. Pinto also speaks of Siam as a place in which Portuguese traders were in the habit of seeking refuge and passing the