xiii] EARLY EUROPEAN SETTLEIEENTS 449
than the Muhammadans whom he had expelled or subdued.
The justice and magnanimity of his rule did as much to
extend and confirm the power of the Portuguese in the East,
as his courage and the success of his military achievements.
In such veneration was his memory held, that the Hindus of
Goa, and even the Muhammadans, were wont to repair to his
tomb, and there utter their complaints, as if in the presence
of his shade, and call upon God to deliver them from the
tyranny of his successors.
Yet these successors were not all tyrants. Some of them
were great statesmen; many were gallant soldiers. The names
of four of them stand out brightly in the history of the
Portuguese in India. Nuno da Cunha, Viceroy from 1529 to Nuno da
I538, first opened up direct and regular trade with Bengal. Cunha,
After ISI8 one ship had annually visited Chittagong to purchase 1529-38
merchandise for Portugal; but Da Cunha, hearing of the wealth
of the province, and the peaceful, industrious character of its
inhabitants, resolved to make a settlement there. He sent
400 Portuguese soldiers to assist the Muhammadan king of
Bengal against Sher Shah in 1534, and was intending to follow
in person, when important events on the other side of India
detained him. His intervention had the effect of causing The Portu-
many Portuguese to settle in Bengal. They were never formed guese in
into a regular governorship, but remained in loose dependence Bengal.
on the Captain of Ceylon. Yet they became very prosperous,
and their head-quarters, Hooghly, grew into a wealthy city.
After the capture of Hooghly by Shah Jahan in i632, the
bravest of the Portuguese in Bengal became outlaws and
pirates, and in conjunction with the Arakanese and the Maghs
preyed upon the sea-borne commerce of the Bengal coast.
The event which prevented Nuno da Cunha from establishing
the Portuguese power in Bengal was the approach of a great
Turkish and Egyptian fleet. Sulaiman the Magnificent, having
consolidated the Turkish power by his conquest of Egypt,
prepared to accomplish the task which the Sultan of Egypt
had attempted thirty years before. But the Portuguese were
now in a better position to resist than they had been in the
days of Almeida. Nuno da Cunha had obtained possession
of the island of Diu, a place much coveted by Albuquerque
from the Sultan of Gujarat in I535, and it was there that the
storm broke. Encompassed by the armies of Gujarat on land Defence
and by the vast Turkish and Egyptian fleet, Diu stood a terrible of Diii;
siege in I 538 ; and the defenders at last beat off the assailants. 53
Nuno da. Cunha did not live to see this glorious result, for. he
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