Of the great assault that Captain Balthezar de Chaves made upon the Enemy's Camp, and of a miraculous Occurence that two Persians came to relate in the Fort, and of what passed therein.

When the Captain of Ormuz had received the message of the Captain-Major Ruy Freyre, he responded by sending him 300 Portuguese and 500 Ormuzians, 200 barrels of powder, and 4,000 powder-pots ¹ already filled. On the arrival of this relief, the Captain-Major resolved to make an attack upon the Enemy, for which purpose he ordered 400 Portuguese to be armed with bacamartes, ² and as many Lascarins with swords and bucklers; a bacamarte is a sort of firearm much used all over India, having a barrel 3 spans in length, a flint-gunlock, and firing bullets of 2 or 3 ounces, 50 of them being rammed down in a single charge; so that one shot from it wreaks as much havoc amongst a crowd of people in a street as would a swivel-gun.