the sixteenth century
it was not of colonization, nor even so much of conquest, that monarchs,
governors, and navigators thought, but of gold. Portugal had no surplus
population to spare for settling her new territories, and--not to speak
of Brazil--she had a far richer trade to develop in western India than
anything which Africa could offer. It may now excite surprise that she
should have taken no step to claim the long stretch of country whose
shores her sailors had explored, from the mouth of the Orange River on
the west to that of the Limpopo on the east. But there was no gold to be
had there, and a chance skirmish with the Hottentots in Table Bay, in
which the viceroy D'Almeida, returning from India, was killed in 1510,
gave them a false notion of the danger to be feared from that people,
who were in reality one of the weakest and least formidable among
African races.

Accordingly, the Portuguese, who might have possessed themselves of the
temperate and healthy regions which we now call Cape Colony and Natal,
confined their settlements to the malarious country north of the tropic
of Capricorn. Here they made two or three attempts, chiefly by moving up
the valley of the Zambesi, to conquer the native tribes, or to support
against his neighbours some chieftain who was to become their vassal.
Their numbers were, however, too small, and they were too feebly
supported from home, to enable them to secure success. When they
desisted from these attempts, their missionaries, chiefly Dominican
friars, though some Jesuits were also engaged in the work, maintained an
active propaganda among the tribes, and at one time counted their
converts by thousands. Not only missionaries, but small trading parties,
penetrated the mysterious interior; and one or two light cannons, as
well as articles which must have come to Africa from India, such as
fragments of Indian and Chinese pottery, have been found many hundred
miles from the sea.[17]

But on the whole the Portuguese exerted very little permanent influence
on the country and its inhabitants. The missions died out, most of the
forts crumbled away or were abandoned, and all idea of further conquest
had been dropped before the end of last century. There were, indeed, two
fatal obstacles to conquering or civilising work. One was the extreme
unhealthiness both of the flat country which lies between the sea and
the edge of the great interior plateau, and of the whole Zambesi Valley,
up