Around Hormuz, however, the Portuguese always had to be on guard.  Many naturally protected sandy coves (khors in Arabic) practically invited “pirates.”  The Nakhilu, or Banu Hula, were Sunni arabic speakers on the Gulf coast of Persia whose descendants still inhabit the Gulf coast of Iran.  For decades they set up upocket ports in the many hidden bandars and byways of the mountainous shore and created an underground economy that rivaled Hormuz’s.  These “pirates” were a major drain on Portuguese revenue, regularly attacking ships that paid the feed for the cartaz, and docked at Hormuz.

That is from Allen James Fromherz, The Center of the World: A Global History of the Persian Gulf from the Stone Age to the Present.  From this same book I learned that Milton refers to the Straits in Paradise Lost, but under the name of Ormus:

High on a Throne of Royal State, which far

Outshone the wealth of Ormus and of Ind[ia],

Or where the gorgeous East with richest hand

Showrs on her Kings barbaric pearl and gold,

Satan exalted sat, by merit rais’d

To that bad eminence