, but portable and exchangeable commodities.
But the situation they found out there compelled them to wage war in
unknown seas, divided from supports, and magazines, and docks by
nearly half the globe. They made no attempt on the interior, for the
Malabar coast was shut off by a range of lofty mountains. Their main
object was the trade of the Far East, which was concentrated at
Calicut, and was then carried by the Persian Gulf to Scanderoon and
Constantinople, or by Jeddah to Suez and Alexandria. There the
Venetians shipped the products of Asia to the markets of Europe.
But on the other side of the isthmus the carrying trade, all the
way to the Pacific, was in the hands of Moors from Arabia and Egypt.
The Chinese had disappeared before them from Indian waters, and the
Hindoos were no mariners. They possessed the monopoly of that which
the Portuguese had come to take, and they were enemies of the
Christian name. The Portuguese required not their share in the trade,
but the monopoly itself. A deadly conflict could not be avoided. By
the natives, they were received at first as friends; and Vasco da
Gama, who took the figures of the Hindoo Pantheon for saints of the
Catholic Calendar, reported that the people of India were
Christians. When this illusion was dispelled, it was a consolation to
find the Nestorians settled at Cochin, which thus became a Portuguese
stronghold, which their best soldier, Duarte Pacheco, held against a
multitude. Calicut, where they began operations, has disappeared like
Earl Godwin's estate. Forbes, who was there in 1772, writes: "At very
low water I have occasionally seen the waves breaking over the tops of
the highest temples and minarets." It was an international city, where
1500 vessels cleared in a season, where trade was open and property
secure, and where the propagation of foreign religion was not
resented.

The Zamorin, as they called the Rajah of Calicut, ended by taking part
with the old friends from the Arabian Seas, who supplied his country
with grain, against the visitors who came in questionable shape. The
Portuguese lacked the diplomatic graces, and disregarded the art of
making friends and acquiring ascendency by the virtues of humanity and
good faith. When it came to blows, they acquitted themselves like men
conscious that they were the pioneers of History, that their footsteps
were in the van of the onward march, that they were moulding the
future, and making the w