Page 254 - Early English Adventurers in the Middle East_Neat

254 EARLY ENGLISH ADVENTURERS IN THE EAST

children, 3,000, were shipped to Muscat and Suhar, with
the design that they should be despatched from thence,
as opportunity offered, to Goa.
Thus, appropriately on St. George’s Day, this famous
stronghold of the Portuguese fell into English hands. In
its later years, Ormuz had been under a shadow, in common
with the other Eastern possessions of Portugal, but it still
had upon it the marks of the greatness which it had borne
when it was one of the principal entrepots of Eastern trade
in the Middle Ages. Travellers who visited it at the time
make mention of its splendid churches and mosques, its
bustling streets, and its noble houses, furnished with all the
luxurious accessories of the refined Western civilization of
the age. Viewed from the sea it presented an appearance of
magnificence uncommon in an Oriental port at that period.
All this has since vanished like “ the baseless fabric of this
vision.” To-day if you go to Ormuz you will find in the
place of the spreading city, with its 40,000 population, a
miserable settlement of 500 nomads, encamped on a sterile,
rocky expanse which was once the famous seat of Portu­
guese power. A portion of the fort and a lighthouse, of
extraordinarily solid construction, are the sole mementoes
of the century-long Lusitanian occupation.
The capture of Ormuz was something more than an inci­
dent in a protracted struggle for trade supremacy. It con­
stitutes one of the signposts in the history of British influ­
ence in the East. The blow inflicted was a fatal one as far
as Portuguese ascendancy in Persia was concerned, and it
exercised an enormous effect in hastening the downfall of
the Portuguese power in the East as a whole. On our side,
as will be demonstrated, it led directly to the planting of
our flag on an unassailable basis in India. Further, it

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