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Coincident with Portugal's action Italy commandeered thirty-four German ships lying in Italian ports, and several others in her territorial waters. All Austrian craft had been seized months before, but the fiction of peace with Germany still was punctiliously observed by both nations. Despite this action Germany did not declare war upon her quondam ally.
When at last he had leisure to attend to the king of Portugal's request, and sent over an abbot with the Bull, Duarte seems to have forgotten all about the matter, and was filled with dismay. Of course his brothers were delighted and declared that the king could no longer resist!
Almeida had only 19 ships and 1300 men, but against his vigorous attack the flimsy vessels of the east were of little value. The battle was fought at close quarters in the old Mediterranean style, with saber, cutlass, and culverin; ramming, grappling, and boarding. Before nightfall Almeida had won. This victory ensured Portugal's commercial control in the eastern seas.
Skepticism may account for Portugal's failure to listen to his proposals; and her interest was already centered in the route around Africa under her exclusive control. The tale of his years of search for assistance is well known.
It was asserted that the manner in which Portugal performed her neutral obligations, demanding an absolutely impartial treatment of both belligerents, made Delagoa Bay and the port of Lorenzo Marques more valuable to the Republics than would have been the case had they actually been in their possession. The efficiency of Portugal's performance of neutral duties varied during the war.
This is related by Juan de Figueras Carpi, in his history of the order of the redemption of captives, from the manuscripts of the Trinity Convent in Lisbon, and the memoirs of the king of Portugal's library. After Xavier was landed, he went immediately to the hospital, and there took his lodging, notwithstanding the instances of the viceroy, who was desirous to have had him in his palace.
Trailing from the eastern end of Java in a twelve-hundred-mile-long chain, like the wisps of paper which form the tail of a kite, and separated by straits so narrow that artillery can fire across them, are the Lesser Sundas Bali, noted for its superb scenery and its alluring women; Lombok, the northernmost island whose flora and fauna are Australian; Sumbawa, where the sandalwood comes from; Flores, whose inhabitants consider the earth so holy that they will not desecrate it by digging wells or cultivation; Timor, the northeastern half of which, together with Goa in India and Macao in China, forms the last remnant of Portugal's once enormous Eastern empire; Rotti, Kei, and Aroo, the great chain thus formed linking New Guinea, the largest island in the world, barring Australia, with the mainland of Asia.
So on the 25th of March about ten o'clock in the morning, the tide serving, I went thither, being piloted by the superintendent there, whose business it is to carry up all the King of Portugal's ships that come hither, and to see them well moored.
He denied emphatically that any incident whatever had followed Portugal's notification to the Transvaal. When further interrogated, the Minister declared that the English troops had been granted permission to use the railway inland from Beira upon the plea of treaty rights already possessed by Great Britain. No power, he asserted, had protested except the South African Republic.
But the period of Portugal's maritime ascendancy cannot be left without recording, even if in barest outline, the circumnavigation of the globe by Fernão da Magalhães, or Magellan, who, though he made this last voyage of his under the Spanish flag, was Portuguese by birth and had proved his courage and iron resolution under Almeida and Albuquerque in Portugal's eastern campaigns.
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