This last part of his navigation was not long.  After having crossed the sea of Arabia, and part of that which belongs to India, the fleet arrived at the port of Goa, on the 6th of May, in the year 1542, being the thirteenth month since their setting out from the port of Lisbon.

The town of Goa is situated on this side of the Ganges, in an island bearing the same name.  It is the capital city of the Indies, the seat of the bishop and the viceroy, and the most considerable place of all the East for traffic.  It had been built by the Moors forty years before the Europeans had passed into the Indies; and in the year 1510, Don Alphonso de Albuquerque, surnamed the Great, took it from the infidels, and subjected it to the crown of Portugal.

At that time was verified the famous prophecy of St Thomas the apostle, that the Christian faith, which he had planted in divers kingdoms of the East, should one day flourish there again; which very prediction he left graven on a pillar of living stone, for the memory of future ages.  The pillar was not far distant from the walls of Meliapore, the metropolis of the kingdom of Coromandel; and it was to be read in the characters of the country, that when the sea, which was forty miles distant from the pillar, should come up to the foot of it, there should arrive in the Indies white men and foreigners, who should there restore the true religion.

The infidels had laughed at this prediction for a long time, not believing that it would ever be accomplished, and indeed looking on it as a kind of impossibility that it should; yet it was accomplished, and that so justly, that when Don Vasco de Gama set foot on the Indies, the sea, which sometimes usurps upon the continent, and gains by little and little on the dry land, was by that time risen to the pillar, so as to bathe its lower parts.

Yet it may be truly said, that the prophecy of St Thomas had not its full effect, till after the coming of Father Xavier; according to another prediction of that holy man Peter de Couillan, a religious of the Trinity, who, going to the Indies with Vasco de Gama, in quality of his ghostly father, was martyred by the Indians on the seventh of July 1497, forty-three years before the beginning of the Society of Jesus, who being pierced through with arrows, while he was shedding his blood for Christ, distinctly pronounced these following words:  “In few years there shall be born in the church of God, a new religious order of clergymen, which shall bear the name of Jesus:  and one of its first fathers, conducted by the Spirit of God, shall pass into the most remote countries of the East Indies, the greatest part of which shall embrace the orthodox faith, through the ministry of this evangelical preacher.”

This is related by Juan de Figueras Carpi, in his history of the order of the redemption of captives, from the manuscripts of the Trinity Convent in Lisbon, and the memoirs of the king of Portugal’s library.