Page:Further India; (IA furtherindia00clif).pdf/134

of the wreck—fifty-three souls, of whom twenty-three were Portuguese, out of a company some five hundred and thirty strong—wandered about in a condition of great distress. A Chinese vessel, however, soon put in there to water, and while her crew were ashore, de Faria suc- ceeded in surprising her, and sailed away in triumph leaving the dispossessed owners marooned upon an in- hospitable coast.

They next captured some unfortunate fisherfolk on a little island called Quintoo, to serve as pilots, and from them they learned that eighteen leagues distant there was a "good river and good Rode" called Xingrau. For this haven de Faria sailed, and thence, after touching at sev- eral islands and ports, and committing various acts of pi- racy, they made their way northward eventually reaching the Chinese port of Chinchu. How thereafter de Faria fell in with the pirate of whom he had so long been in search; how he defeated and killed him; of the rich spoil which he took, and of the splendid reception accorded to him by his enthusiastic countrymen at the port of Liam- poo, I cannot here tell in detail. De Faria, the sea-rover, it should however be remarked, was conducted in state to the church where public thanks were offered to the Al- mighty for the victorious crusade against the infidel, in the course of which this Christian hero had broken not a few of the Ten Commandments, had murdered and robbed and tortured and pillaged without scruple, and had made victims of the inoffensive natives of countries who never before had so much as seen a white man. It was a curi- ous age in which men could see virtue in the perpetrator