In João de Barros and others we read attractive details of beautiful gardens, lofty towers, a harbour full of ships; of handsome men and of honourable women habited in silk robes and adorned with gold and jewels; of the ‘knights of Mombasah,’ which now can hardly show a head of horse, and of the ‘ladies of Melinde,’ where the plundering Gallas have left only heaps of ruins. The King, ‘for years full many famed,’ received his first Portuguese visitors with peculiar empressement, and with the kindly purpose of cutting Vasco da Gama’s throat, enticed him to land by promises to furnish wax, wheat, ambergris, ivory, and precious metals,[4] and by sending samples of spicery—pepper, ginger, and cloves—apparently all imports, as Calicut Banyans and Christians of St Thomas were upon the spot. But when the great Captain’s ship weighed anchor to enter the port, she struck upon a shoal probably at the southern end of the channel formed by ‘Leven Reef Head’ and the mainland: the ‘Moors’ tumbled into their canoes, the Mozambique pilot took a header from the stern, and an ugly plot stood forth in its nakedness. To make certain, Da Gama of the ‘awful eyes’ extracted the truth from his Moslem captives by ‘heating lard and dropping it upon their flesh:’ unable, however, to revenge himself, he set sail for Melinde. And here we may explain how arose the contempt and hatred which the coast has attached to the word Faranj, or Feringhee. The Orient became acquainted with Europe at a time when the Portuguese were slavers and robbers in the Lord’s name, when the Dutch were second-rate traders, and when the English were rank ‘saltwater thieves.’ Vasco da Gama did not hesitate to massacre all his prisoners, or to decorate his yard-arms with wretches suspended like the captives of ‘Sallie rovers.’ Albuquerque’s soldiers hewed off the hands and feet of women and children, the quicker to secure their rings and armlets. Torture and cruel death, especially wholesale burning, fell to the lot of Moslems and Pagans. In the seventeenth century even the commanders of the Hon. East India Company’s ships, according to Della Valle, committed robberies ashore and on the high seas: The ‘Grand Mogul’ regarded our people as a race ‘of dissolute morals and degraded religion’—tetræ belluæ, suis molossis ferociores.