They have great pride of race, and they
like the fact that they possess and govern a colony. So, up to the
present time, in spite of many temptations to dispose of it, they
have made the ownership of Delagoa Bay an article of their national
religion. But their national religion does not require of them to
improve their property. And to-day it is much as it was when the
sails of Da Gama's fleet first stirred its poisonous vapors.
The harbor itself is an excellent one and the bay is twenty-two
miles along, but there is only one landing-pier, and that such a
pier as would be considered inconsistent with the dignity of the
Larchmont Yacht Club. To the town itself Portugal has been content
to contribute as her share the gatherers of taxes, collectors of
customs and dispensers of official seals. She is indifferent to the
fact that the bulk of general merchandise, wine, and machinery that
enter her port is brought there by foreigners. She only demands that
they buy her stamps. Her importance in her own colony is that of a
toll-gate at the entrance of a great city.
Lorenco Marquez is not a spot which one would select for a home.
When I was first there, the deaths from fever were averaging fifteen
a day, and men who dined at the club one evening were buried
hurriedly before midnight, and when I returned in the winter months,
the fever had abated, but on the night we arrived twenty men were
robbed. The fact that we complained to the police about one of the
twenty robberies struck the commandant as an act of surprising and
unusual interest.
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