Page:History of India Vol 6.djvu/149

ALBUQUEKQUE IN SUPREME COMMAND 103 Marshal of Portugal, put an end to these stormy pro- ceedings. On November 5, 1509, Almeida surrendered the supreme command to Albuquerque, and on his voy- age home was killed at Saldanha Bay by the assegais of a Kaffir mob whose sheep his crew had stolen. The six years of Albuquerque's governorship (1509- 1515) raised Portugal to a territorial power in India. They are made to move before us in his own letters, and in the " Commentaries " written from his papers after his death. They were years of magnificent proj- ects and of heroic accomplishment. To Albuquerque's far-reaching mind the struggle was not with a few port- rajas on, the Malabar coast, but with the combined forces of the Mussulman world. "Was the Asiatic sea- route to belong to Christendom or to Islam? Imper- fectly acquainted with the conflict for Egypt between the Ottoman dynasty of Constantinople and the Mam- luk Sultans of Cairo, it seemed to him, as it did to the Indian coast-princes, that the whole power of the Kumes, or Turks in the widest sense, would sooner or later be hurled against him. " The cry the Kumes are coming," he wrote, " menaced me at every step." The magnitude of the danger explains and justifies the vastness of his designs to meet it. Some of those designs, as narrated by his biographers, belong to the region of romance. " There were two actions," writes Machado, " suggested by the magnanimity of his heart, which he determined to perform. One was to divert the channel of the Nile to the Eed Sea and prevent it from running through Egypt, thereby to render the