Monte Fort

This guide to Monte Fort in Macau sets the scene in June sixteen twenty-two, when a Dutch fleet of thirteen warships and eight hundred musketeers arrived to seize the city. The fortress on this hill was still half-built, its walls unfinished, and fewer than two hundred defenders - soldiers, armed citizens, and African slaves - faced an assault force four times their size. Among them was an Italian Jesuit priest and mathematician, an unlikely figure to find at the cannons. Stand at the battlements and look out over the same ground the Dutch column advanced across that day.