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That the descendants of Gamas, Cunhas, Magalhaes and Albuquerques men whose names were indelibly written upon the very face of the world should be passed over, whilst alien officers lead been brought in to train and command the Portuguese legions, was an affront to Portugal which Minas could never forgive.
The king made him afterwards a knight, and gave him and his heirs permission to bear the royal arms of Portugal, as also to set at the foot of the escutcheon two does, which are called gamas in the Portuguese language.
In support of this strong assertion he cites the still-extant "Rutters," or "Routiers," of the period the ocean guide-books showing the distances from place to place, marking convenient stations for watering and refitting, and describing the entrances to rivers and to harbors "from which we learn," he declares, "that the Rio de Gamas, the name then regularly applied to the Hudson on the charts of the time, was one of these stages between New Foundland and the colonies of Central America."
The mouth of this branch runs into the sea in lat. 18° 25' S. In his passage from the Terra de Natal, or Christmas Land, so named from having been discovered on Christmas day, and named, in this account of De Gamas voyage, the Land of Good People, De Gama missed Cape Corientes, forming the S.W. point of the channel of Mozambique, or Inner Passage, as it is now called, and overshot Sofala, the southern extremity of Covilhams discoveries, at which he was probably directed to touch, as Covilhams chart might have been of some use to direct his farther progress to Aden, and thence to Calicut or Cananor, on the Malabar coast.
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