The little vessel, however, ran aground, but the crew got to land, and were sheltered by the people with whom they had been trading. The pirates then took everything of value out of the prize, and set fire to the empty hull, which was useless to them.
Sofala was the farthest station south permanently occupied by the Portuguese, but occasionally a trading vessel was sent from Mozambique to Inhambane, where she remained five or six months. Some Mohamedans of mixed Arab and Bantu blood who had their home at that place then went about the country collecting ivory and wax, and occasionally travelled for that purpose as far south as the Tembe river. Whatever they could procure in exchange for the merchandise they took with them was carried by their black attendants to Inhambane, to be conveyed by sea to Mozambique; but the whole quantity was trifling.
In 1720 the directors of the Dutch East India Company, incited by a vague belief that had by some means arisen of the existence of valuable gold mines in the neighbourhood of Delagoa Bay, and ignoring the right of the Portuguese to a place where they had never exercised any kind of jurisdiction, that had never been occupied by them except as a temporary trading station, and was no longer frequented even for that purpose, resolved to form a commercial establishment there, for which purpose an expedition was at once fitted out.[1] It was intended that the station should be a dependency of the Cape government, just as Mauritius had been. Thus important cases were to be sent for trial to the Cape, and in all cases except the most trivial there was
- ↑ The manuscript records of the Dutch settlement at Delagoa Bay are much more complete in the archives at the Hague than in those at Capetown. At the Hague they are bound in seven large volumes, and comprise letters, reports, instructions, judicial proceedings, a continuous journal with daily entries of occurrences, etc. There are also several plans of the fort Lagoa and of Fort Lydzaamheid, which was built at a later date.
