This included important strategic outposts at Mocha, Qishm, Hormuz, Damān, and Goa, but the Portuguese also established a considerable presence in Agra and other inland cities or towns in India as well. To maintain their extensive system of outposts, Holden Furber argues that the Portuguese dispatched roughly 254 ships (down from 451 in the previous century) in the first half of the seventeenth century to the Indian Ocean