Xxil THE LAND OF THE LION 
far from all sources of succour and supply — surrounded 
by utter barbarism and in a land where the deadly fever 
daily sapped the strength of the strongest. Yet they made 
a bold bid for Empire. 
It would sometimes be well, if the Anglo-Saxon remem- 
bered, that others than he and his, have paid heavily 
for the rule of the sea — paid and lost. 
“Tf blood is the price of admiralty” —as Kipling 
says — the Portuguese “‘have paid it well.” 
Look at the main fort. It is larger and incomparably 
stronger than the original citadel Montcalm held for 
France. Built so solidly that even to-day its bastions 
would for a time withstand artillery. 
An old tradition has it, its mortar was mixed with human 
blood, and, indeed, the loss of life in building such a place 
must have been enormous. Forced labour was employed, 
for, from Pharaoh’s time onward, none has taken any ac- 
count of the labourer in Africa. 
They were cruel men, those Portuguese adventurers, 
as were most of the men of their time. Perhaps even 
more heedless of human life than their fellows. But 
surely they were strongest of the strong. ‘They had their 
short day, and though its sun soon set, they accomplished 
much in it. Their King Henry, the navigator, half an 
Englishman, be it remembered —for his mother was 
daughter of “‘Old John of Gaunt, time honoured Lan- 
caster,” led them in the very van of discovery. But Africa 
proved fatal to Portugal. In the northern part of that 
continent —in Morocco—she strove hard to found an 
empire; and there, far inland, worn down by thirst 
and lost in sand drift, the adventurous young King Se- 
bastian, aged but twenty-three, fell on one disastrous day, 
with the youth of his little kingdom round him, and from 
that overwhelming calamity Portugal never quite recovered. 
Then in the southeast, for many a long year after her 
