Vasco da Gama during his short stay at Melinda had little time for inquiring into the condition of the cotton trade of the country on whose shores he had landed, and it does not seem to have been forced upon his attention as it was on that of Columbus. But when Odoardo Barbosa, of Lisbon, visited South Africa eighteen years afterwards (in 1516), he found the natives wearing clothes of cotton. In 1590, cotton cloth woven on the coast of Guinea was imported into London from the Bight of Benin, and modern travellers in the interior of Africa concur in the opinion that cotton is indigenous there, and in stating that it is spun and woven into cloth in every region of that continent. From the beauty of the dye and the designs in some of the cotton dresses, it is justly inferred to be a manufacture of very ancient standing. We have evidence, therefore, that in Africa, as well as in Asia and America, the cotton plant had a separate centre of indigenous growth, and that from a very remote period its vegetable wool was manufactured into useful and ornamental articles of clothing.[43] [43] The cotton plant was also found indigenous in the Sandwich Islands, the Galapagos, etc. It is doubtful whether the cotton found in the Bornean Archipelago had not been carried eastward from India. The Portuguese took every possible precaution to secure the prize which by the courage and perseverance of their admiral they had been enabled to grasp, and to maintain the rights which priority of discovery was, in those days, supposed to confer. A chain of forts or factories was established for the protection of their trade; whilst for the extension of it they took possession of Malacca, and their ships visited every port from the Cape to Canton. The Venetians saw with alarm the ruin that impended over them through the successful rivalry in trade of the Portuguese, but were powerless to prevent a competition against which their merchants were unable to contend. They therefore formed an alliance with the Turks under the Sultans Selim and his successor, Solyman the Magnificent, and incited them to send a fleet against the prosperous Portuguese. They even allowed the Turks to cut timber in the forests of Dalmatia with which to build their ships; and when twelve of these were finished, Solyman manned them with his Janissaries, and sent them to harass the Indian trade. The Portuguese met them with undaunted bravery, and, after several conflicts, vanquished the Ottoman squadron, and remained masters of the Indian Ocean.