With Abyssinia the mission of Covilhao led to further intercourse. In April 1520 Vasco da Gama, as viceroy of the Indies, took a fleet into the Red sea, and landed an embassy consisting of Dom Rodriguez de Lima and Father Francisco Alvarez, a priest whose detailed narrative is the earliest and not the least interesting account we possess of Abyssinia. It was not until 1526 that the embassy was dismissed; and not many years afterwards the negus entreated the help of the Portuguese against Mahommedan invaders, and the viceroy sent an expeditionary force, commanded by his brother Cristoforo da Gama, with 450 musketeers. Da Gama was taken prisoner and killed, but his followers enabled the Christians of Abyssinia to regain their power, and a Jesuit mission remained in the country. The Portuguese also established a close connexion with the kingdom of Congo on the west side of Africa, and obtained much information respecting the interior of the continent. Duarte Lopez, a Portuguese settled in the country, was sent on a mission to Rome by the king of Congo, and Pope Sixtus V. caused him to recount to his chamberlain, Felipe Pigafetta, all he had learned during the nine years he had been in Africa, from 1578 to 1587. This narrative, under the title of _Description of the Kingdom of Congo_, was published at Rome by Pigafetta in 1591. A map was attached on which several great equatorial lakes are shown, and the empire of Monomwezi or Unyamwezi is laid down. The most valuable work on Africa about this time is, however, that written by the Moor Leo Africanus in the early part of the 16th century. Leo travelled extensively in the north and west of Africa, and was eventually taken by pirates and sold to a master who presented him to Pope Leo X. At the pope's desire he translated his work on Africa into Italian. In Further India and the Malay Archipelago the Portuguese acquired predominating influence at sea, establishing factories on the Malabar coast, in the Persian Gulf, at Malacca, and in the Spice Islands, and extending their commercial enterprises from the Red sea to China. Their missionaries were received at the court of Akbar, and Benedict Goes, a native of the Azores, was despatched on a journey overland from Agra to China. He started in 1603, and, after traversing the least-known parts of Central Asia, he reached the confines of China. He appears to have ascended from Kabul to the plateau of the Pamir, and thence onwards by Yarkand, Khotan and Aksu. He died on the journey in March 1607; and thus, as one of the brethren pronounced his epitaph, "seeking Cathay he found heaven." English, Dutch and French.