The Cape Verde Islands are a very important Portuguese asset three hundred miles off the north-west coast of Africa. They have been continuously occupied and administered since their discovery in the 15th century. They possessed then no population, but are now peopled by a blackish race descended from Portuguese, Negroes and Moors. In one or two of the healthier islands are white settlers of Portuguese blood. Owing to the magnificent harbours which these islands offer to shipping, especially São Vicente, and their use as a coaling station, they may yet figure prominently in the world’s history. Both Ascension and St Helena were discovered and named by the Portuguese. The first-named was never continuously occupied until England took possession of it as an outpost of Napoleon’s prison in 1815. St Helena was taken in the early part of the 16th century by the Dutch, and passed into the hands of the English in the middle of that century. Another Portuguese discovery was the most southern of those isolated oceanic islets, Tristan d’Acunha, which bears the name of its discoverer, but which, so far as occupation goes, has always been a British possession[67]. On the East coast of Africa Portuguese colonization did not commence until the 16th century had begun, and Vasco da Gama, after rounding the Cape, had revealed the existence of old Arab trading settlements and sultanates between Sofala and Somaliland. The need of ports of call on the long voyage to India caused the Portuguese to decide soon after Vasco da Gama’s famous voyage to possess themselves of these Arab settlements, the more so because hostilities against the “Moors” were a never-ending _vendetta_ on the part of Spaniard and Portuguese, while the conquest was at that date an easy one, as the Portuguese had artillery and the East African Arabs had none.