which most of the attempts at an advance had been made. Fever not
only decimated the expeditions and the garrisons of the forts, but
enervated the main body of settlers who remained on the coast, soon
reducing whatever enterprise or vigour they had brought from Europe. The
other was the tendency of the Portuguese to mingle their blood with that
of the natives. Very few women were brought out from home, so that a
mixed race soon sprang up, calling themselves Portuguese, but much
inferior to the natives of Portugal. The Portuguese, even more than the
Spaniards, have shown both in Brazil and in Africa comparatively little
of that racial contempt for the blacks, and that aversion to intimate
social relations with them, which have been so characteristic of the
Dutch and the English. There have, of course, been a good many mulattos
born of Dutch fathers in Africa, as of Anglo-American fathers in the
West Indies and in the former slave States of North America. But the
Dutch or English mulatto was almost always treated as belonging to the
black race, and entirely below the level of the meanest white, whereas
among the Portuguese a strong infusion of black blood did not
necessarily carry with it social disparity.[18]

In the beginning of the seventeenth century the Dutch, prosecuting their
war against the Spanish monarchy, which had acquired the crown of
Portugal in 1581 and held it till 1640, attacked the Portuguese forts on
the East African coast, but after a few years abandoned an enterprise in
which there was little to gain, and devoted their efforts to the more
profitable field of the East Indies. With this exception, no European
power troubled the Portuguese in Africa. They had, however, frequent
conflicts with the natives, and in 1834 were driven from their fort at
Inhambane, between Sofala and Delagoa Bay, and in 1836 from Sofala
itself, which, however, they subsequently recovered. It was not till the
progress of inland discovery, and especially the establishment of a Boer
republic in the Transvaal had made the coast seem valuable, that two new
and formidable rivals appeared on the scene.

Under the combined operation of these causes such power as Portugal
possessed on this coast declined during the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries. Except on the deadly banks of the Zambesi, she never had a
permanent settlement more than fifty miles from the sea, and very few so
far inland. The population that spoke Portuguese and p