The Broadway Travellers' Series still further consolidates its already high
reputation by issuing as its latest volume Commentaries of Ray Freyre de Andrade (Routledge, 15s.), which Mr. C. R. Boxer, a Fellow of the Portuguese Archaeological Association, translates (for the first time in any language) from the Portuguese, furnishing the volume with an excellent introduction and useful notes. Andrade, who did not himself write the Commentaries, was a brave, hot-headed and chivalrous Portuguese Commander who saw much service against the Persians, Arabs and English, at the beginning of the seventeenth century in the Persian Gulf at a time when his countrymen controlled those waters. The main interest of this most vivacious chronicle lies in the account it gives of the siege and capture of the island-fortress of Ormuz, which was the Portuguese Gibraltar to the Gulf and which was captured by an Anglo-Persian expedition in 1622. The capture of Ormuz marked the beginning of English ascendancy in the Gulf which survives to our day. Oddly enough, the Portuguese story is balanced and checked by a contemporary English account of the same transactions, which Mr. Boxer gives in full, and which offsets the narrative of "the proude vain-boasting Portugal]." But it is likely that misrepresentation was not all on the Portuguese side ; probably there was a good deal -of hard lying- on both, and certainly there was much hard fighting.
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