The encounter was one of mutual astonishment. Nunes found himself addressed in a language of his own continent: “The Devil take you! What brought you here?” It was almost anticlimactic, a moment in which the world must have shrunk. The Portuguese had girdled the earth only to be spoken to almost in their own tongue. The commonwealth of Islamic trade, from the gates of Gibraltar to the China Sea, was far more extensive than the Portuguese could yet grasp.
