Vasco da Gama had married and stayed home to enjoy his estates and fortunes.

King John III called India's pathfinder from his 21 years' retirement to reestablish Portuguese power in its overseas dominions.

It was a white-bearded, irascible, fat old man who marched pompously down to his fourteen ships one crisp day of April, 1524.

He seemed more a Sybarite than a sailor. A corps of men bearing silver maces was assigned to serve him; his retinue included a major-domo, pages wearing golden necklaces, and an array of equerries and body servants.

"They brought to him at table large dishes, as if to the King," so Correa proudly relates, "with his napkin-bearers bringing him the ewer, and all the forms of precedence of a king."

Out of sight of land he quickly proved himself the fiery, dictatorial leader of a quarter of a century past. One day while his ships were becalmed they suddenly began to toss about and his crew became terror-stricken.

The figure who had quelled mutiny in perilous storms arose to proclaim, "Have courage! The very sea trembles at us. This is an earthquake!"

At Calicut he arrested the Portuguese

governor for irregularities in his accounts, and that official's influential brother besought clemency, pointing out that the accused had not sold any of the king's forts, as others had done. The viceroy retorted, "Sir, if your brother had sold fortresses, he would not have his head where it is now, for I should have ordered it cut off."

He dealt out harsh and wholesale penalties to all offenders. When some implored for Christian mercy, he gruffly replied that if the miscreants were guiltless and Christians, doubtless they would receive Christian mercy in the world to come. "Never," he added, "shall they meet with anything from me except all severity and punishment."

At various ports he amazed everyone by refusing presents from Arab, Hindu. or Portuguese. Many men had come to India to make their own fortunes, he explained, but he had come to make his king's fortune.

He introduced a crude civil service system and personally examined the handwriting of applicants for clerical posts. He registered all the government's overseas employees. He stopped the adulteration of spices with sand and grit. He licensed navigators; he abolished pay and rations which had been distributed among colonists for no other reason than that they had married native women; he prescribed a shore uniform for sailors, and he gathered in many pieces of stolen artillery. In modern police parlance, he "cleaned up" India.

Then he cast about for a means of patrolling the rivers and shores, which were infested by the swift pirate craft of the Arabs. A Genoa boat builder he brought along promised him, "Sir, I will build you brigantines which would catch a mosquito."

A MALABAR "REVENUE CUTTER"

In 20 days the builder had ready two rowboats, fashioned after Levantine models, which were manned in the following

manner:

"Each of the rowers had under his bench a breastplate and helmet of steel, and a lance and shield, and two pots of powder; because, on seeing the prize,

they armed themselves, and put on the helmets, which glittered afar off, and on coming up with the prize they let go the oars, and took their spears and bucklers and powder pots, which they cast on coming alongside, and there remained 30 armed men, who fought and could do much; so nothing escaped them either with oars, or sail, or fighting."

Vasco da Gama's death was not dramatic, like that of Diaz, who was lost in a storm at sea, or like that of Almeida, who was slain by Hottentots. He succumbed, on Christmas Eve of 1524, at Cochin, to an attack of boils on his neck.

But Gama's death, like Lincoln's, was timed at the climax of his career.

His first voyage marked out the path to India, his second put fear into the hearts of the natives, his third exhibited a loyalty and honesty which were marvels of his time.

A TOMB AND A POEM

Had he gone back to Portugal he might have been discredited by his enemies, as was Alboquerque. Instead, he was buried at Cochin, and when his remains, some years later, were transferred to Portugal, he was acclaimed a national hero.

To-day his supposed remains appropriately rest at Belem beside those of the poet Camoëns, in one of the world's most beautiful tombs, the Convento dos Jeronymos, the Westminster Abbey of Portugal. It is to be regretted that there is no first-hand narrative of Gama's voyages. Neither Columbus nor Cook, however, had a Camoëns, such as the one-eyed soldier-poet who wrote the epic of Gama's voyages, known as "The Lusiad" (see, also, text, page 531).

Half of that latter-day Iliad was composed at Macao, Portuguese China, and tradition has it that Camoëns was shipwrecked on his way home to Lisbon and swam ashore clutching some five or six dripping cantos.

This masterpiece of Camoëns, one of the world's greatest epic poems, is the finest monument to Vasco da Gama's genius; and a fuller realization of the effects of his voyages has added historical confirmation to the poet's intuitive perception of his mighty achievement.