scendants of the great Persian and Tartar conquerors, and Mahomedans in faith, or of their own race and religion, were disposed enough to resist any foreign aggression. At sea, indeed, swarmed the Moorish fleets, which had long enjoyed the monopoly of the trade of these rich and inexhaustible regions; but these they soon subdued. Their conquests and cruelties were therefore necessarily confined chiefly to the coasts and to the paradisiacal islands which stud the Indian seas, and, as Milton has beautifully expressed it, cast their spicy odours abroad, till
Many a league
Cheered with the grateful smell, old Ocean smiles.
We must take a rapid view of the Portuguese in India,—for our object is not a history of European conquests, but of European treatment of the natives of the countries they have entered; and the atrocities of the Portuguese in the East are too notorious to require tracing minutely, and step by step in their progress. Every reader is familiar with the transactions between Gama and the Zamorin of Calicut, through the splendid poem of Camoens. Alvarez Cabral, the discoverer of Peru, who succeeded him, was by no means particular in his policy. On the slightest suspicion of evil intention, he fell upon the people and made havoc amongst them. The inhabitants of Calicut, between the intrigues of the Moorish merchants and those of the Portuguese adventurers, were always the dupes and the sufferers. They attempted to drive out the Portuguese, and Cabral, in revenge, burnt all the Arabian vessels in the harbour, cannonaded the town, and then sailed, first to Cochin, and then to Cananor. These and other places being tributary to
