ernment which amid varying fortunes dominated the Malay Peninsula for a hundred years.
Albuquerque thus carried out his threefold plan by partially cutting off the Arab commerce from its western base at the mouths of the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea; by establishing a Portuguese control at Goa over the half-way marts on the Malabar coast; and by the conquest of Malacca, the most lucrative source of Moslem commerce in the Far East. The strategic design for converting the Indian Ocean from a Moslem to a Christian trade-route was complete. It only remained for his successors to fill in the details. By brilliant feats of arms and by not less skilful diplomacy they made themselves masters at dominant positions around the edge of the great Asiatic basin from the African coast to the Spice Islands. The achievement would have been a splendid one for the greatest of European powers. Accomplished by one small Christian kingdom it makes the history of Portugal read like a romance.
Albuquerque died in December, 1515, outside the Goa bar, never having been raised to the dignity of viceroy, superseded as governor, yet lifting up his hands to heaven and giving "many thanks to our Lord." "In bad repute with men because of the king," he had exclaimed when he heard of the arrival of his successor, "and in bad repute with the king because of the men, it were well that I were gone." No public statue of him exists in Lisbon, so far as I could find. Half a century elapsed after he had "finished all his troubles without seeing any satisfaction of them," before the
