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"winter," viz., the period during which the prevalence of the northeast monsoon rendered the China Sea difficult and dangerous to navigation. This commercial and un- official intercourse seems to have continued unchecked until 1633, and in 1620 the King of Siam actually sent to Goa and invited the Portuguese Government to take possession of a port upon his coast. At that time, how- ever, the position of Portugal in the East was becoming critical, and she was too busy defending what she had al- ready won to be able to devote her energies to the acqui- sition of new responsibilities. Nothing, therefore, re- sulted from this mission, and ten years later the Siamese quarrelled with the Portuguese colony, though the differ- ence was patched up in 1633, and in 1636 the King of Siam sent an embassy to the Governor of the Philippines. Intercourse between Siam and the Dutch East India Company, however, had begun as early as 1604, and from that time the influence of the Portuguese in Siam began to wane, just as it waned in India and in Malaya when other white nations appeared upon the scene whose past held no such record of wrong as that which embittered the relations between the peoples of the East and the earliest of the western invaders.

The first exploration of the coasts to Indo-China by the Portuguese would appear to have been undertaken, in somewhat peculiar circumstances in 1540-41. Its story is related by Ferdinand Mendez Pinto, and from him we learn, what is to be derived also from numerous other sources, that the seas of southeastern Asia were by this time teeming with Portuguese merchants and adven-