16 ACROSS A CONTINENT. 



as Prince Henry the Navigator, that must be assigned 

 the responsibiUty for the great movement of discovery 

 of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, 

 as a result of which, to use the words of his biographer,^ 

 " India has been conquered, America repeopled, the 

 world made clear, and the civilisation which the Roman 

 Empire left behind has conquered or utterly over- 

 shadowed every one of its old rivals and superiors — 

 Islam, India, China, Tartary." 



So it happens that it was the little kingdom of 

 Portugal that first set rolling the ball of conquest from 

 Europe to Asia, when her intrepid mariner Vasco da 

 Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope and sailed into 

 the eastern seas; and it was the same kingdom that 

 planted the first seeds of the future expansion of 

 modern Europe in the Orient, when her conquering 

 genius Albuquerque the Great laid hold of the out- 

 posts of the East and raised his standards in Hindu- 

 stan. Upwards of four centuries have rolled by since 

 Bartholomew Diaz first showed to Vasco da Gama and 

 his successors the way round the Southern Cape, and 

 with them the brilliant though transitory period of 

 Portuguese supremacy. The ever-revolving wheel of 

 fortune has played truant to her former love, and all 

 that now remain to mark the prowess of the pioneers 

 are the crippled forts which frown down from the for- 

 bidding heights of Muscat, and that "monument of 

 Chinese toleration and Portuguese tenacity," Macao, 

 which for three hundred years was for foreigners the 

 gate of the Chinese Empire, but which has been de- 

 scribed at the present time as being not even an 

 inspiring monument to the memory of a glory which 

 is gone. 



The scene is changed ; the actors are not the same ; 



1 C. R. Beazley in his ' Henry the Navigator.' 



