spread of their faith. Albuquerque saw, during this visit, the vast importance to Portugal of securing a firm footing in India, and he returned home to fire anew the ambition and the zeal of his king.

The king, entering warmly into his views, gave him a secret commission as Governor-in-Chief of the Indies, with powers almost absolute, and with orders to go out merely as captain of one of the ships of a fleet, and, on reaching India, to produce his commission and assume the supreme command. He set sail in 1506, in the fifty-fourth year of his age, commanding one vessel of a fleet of fourteen sail. His commission expressly stated that the king's first object was the spread of Christianity, and that to this end all others were to be strictly secondary.

On the long and eventful voyage, the genius and courage of Albuquerque were so signally displayed that he seemed much more the admiral of the fleet than its real commander. They stopped on their way to build a fort for the protection of the Nestorian Christians, and to explore the great Island of Madagascar. At Madagascar, taking under his command six ships, he left the admiral to pursue his voyage to India for cargoes of spice and fabrics, and proceeded himself on an expedition of a very different character.

From that moment his career as a conqueror begins.

Ormuz, a barren rock in the Persian Gulf, was, for centuries, the seat of the pearl fishery of those waters, and one of the chief commercial cities of Asia. "The world is a ring," said the orientals of that time, "and Ormuz is its precious stone." Guided by two skilful African pilots, Albuquerque anchored off that populous and wealthy island in 1507, and won over it a complete, though bloodless conquest. By skilful management, he gained such an ascendancy there as to place in power a rajah entirely devoted to the Portuguese, who permitted him to construct in the very heart of the city a fortress for the protection of Portuguese merchants trading or residing at Ormuz. His followers, however, still ignorant of his secret commission, clamored to be led to the rich coasts of Malabar; and two of his ships abandoned him at the moment of his triumph. He was

compelled to leave Ormuz unguarded; but not the less did he regard it as his own.

He reached India at length, and exhibited to the Portuguese viceroy the royal commission which named him his successor. The viceroy and all his court laughed him to scorn, insulted him on the highway, pretended that he was either an impostor or a madman; and, finally, Albuquerque was thrown into a dungeon and loaded with chains. Soon after, one of his kinsmen reached India, in command of a numerous fleet, who promptly espoused the cause of Albuquerque, released him from prison, and assisted him to put in force the king's commission.

Wielding now the whole power of the Portuguese in India, Albuquerque entered forthwith upon the realization of those schemes of conquest and spoliation which he had meditated for so many years. Calicut, a city which then held the rank among the cities of India now enjoyed by Calcutta, he besieged, captured, sacked, and held subject and tributary to the King of Portugal, to whom he sent an ample share of the booty. Here, for a century, Portuguese merchants grew rich, and Portuguese priests labored to convert the heathen; and here the warehouses of the former and the churches of the latter still exist. All along that wealthy coast he continued his ravages, and made the whole region tributary to the king whom he served, reducing it to a subjection almost as complete as it is now under to the Queen of England.

The city of Goa, on the coast of Malabar, was his next conquest. It was a place of vast population, immense commerce, and prodigious wealth, and it made a defence proportioned to its power and importance. After spending a year in its siege, after having once captured and lost it, Albuquerque finally remained master of the city, and drew from it the booty before alluded to, equal to about one hundred millions of dollars in our present currency.

From Goa he sailed, with a fleet of nineteen ships, to Malacca, the chief city on the large island of the same name. This city, which then contained a population of one hundred thousand inoffensive people, he attacked and carried, and held it as a possession of the King of Portugal, with all the territory apper

taining to it. The historians of this conquest mention, as a proof of the magnanimity and disinterestedness of Albuquerque, that he only took from Malacca, for his personal use, the iron lions which marked the tomb of the royal family; although he carried away a large ship loaded deep with gold and silver, for the use of the king and the needs of the public service. Not a man in that age of the world appears to have questioned the right of a strong Christian to seize the gold of a weak heathen; nor did any one see anything wrong in the robbery of a heathen king's family tomb. I am happy to inform the reader that the ship containing both the treasure and the iron lions went to the bottom of the sea a few days after leaving Malacca.

Having thus reduced the shores and cities of two of the great peninsulas of Southern Asia, he next undertook the conquest of all the vast regions watered by the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf. He bombarded the cities commanding those waters, with varying success. Meditating the conquest of Egypt, he conceived a scheme for diverting the river Nile from its course, so as to leave Egypt a desert, and destroy its whole population. He designed to extend the power of Portugal even to Constantinople, and, in short, to reduce under the power of his king all of Asia and Africa which were accessible and worth having. Such were the genius, the energy, and the administrative talent of this man, that if he had lived ten years longer he might have executed this scheme.

But death arrested him in the full tide of his career. The climate and the toils of war had undermined his constitution, and some ill-wishers at home had misrepresented him to the king, who sent out to circumscribe his power. This proved to be a mortal stroke to Albuquerque.

He died in the odor of sanctity, committing his soul to God and his son to the king. The last days of his life were spent in hearing read his favorite passages of the New Testament, during which he held in his hands and clasped to his heart a small crucifix. His last words showed, not merely that his conscience acquitted him for what he had done against the people of India, but that he regarded himself as an eminent soldier of the Cross, as well as a faithful servant of his king. Nay, more; his con

duct toward the Indians had never occurred to him as a case of conscience at all; so completely was it taken for granted that no people except Christians had any rights. The earth was the Lord's, and the fulness thereof; and did it not therefore belong to the Pope, and to Christian kings, who were the Lord's vicar and vicegerents? It is impossible to make a modern reader realize how entirely the people of that age believed this. It was not because the Africans were black, that Queen Elizabeth encouraged Sir John Hawkins to carry them away into slavery, but because they were idolaters.

Albuquerque died at Goa, in 1515, aged sixty-two years. The family of Albuquerque is, to this day, one of the most respectable in the Spanish peninsula. Members of it figured in public life as late as Napoleon's day.

HERNANDO CORTEZ.

IN the year 1502, at the small country town of Medellin, in Spain, there lived an idle, dissolute youth of seventeen, who was the torment of his parents, and the leader of all the mischief going in that neighborhood. His parents were of the highest respectability, though reduced in circumstances, and they had given their son the best education within their means. During his infancy and childhood he had been so sickly that no one expected he would live to mature age; but as he grew older he grew stronger, and at seventeen he was a man in stature, and sufficiently robust. He was then at home, having left the college of Salamanca without permission, and was passing his time in love intrigues and dissipation, regardless of the remonstrances of his father and the entreaties of his mother. When, therefore, he declared his intention of joining an expedition. about to sail for America, the good people of Medellin, especially those who had daughters, were not sorry to hear it. His father had intended him for the legal profession, which the youth disdained. No career attracted him, except one of adventure in the New World, which had been discovered ten years before.

A few days before the time appointed for the sailing of the fleet, the young man had a love affair in the true Spanish style. In those days, Spanish girls were kept almost as secluded, and guarded almost as carefully, as the ladies in the harem of a Turk. Therefore, when a young man fell in love, instead of ringing the door-bell and sending in his card, he often made a rope ladder, and surveyed the residence of the young lady, with a view to ascertain the best mode of getting upon her balcony or into her window. Our adventurer proceeded in this manner.