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Chapter 4 – The Portuguese Policy in the East

1500–1600

The actual achievement of Portugal in Asia was not a land-empire, but the overlordship of the sea. Her sphere of influence stretched eastwards across the vast basin six thousand miles from the African coast to the Moluccas, and northward four thousand miles from the Cape of Good Hope to the Persian Gulf. Her political frontier, that is the line which she had more or less continuously to hold, was not defended by rivers or mountains. It was the open edge of the ocean following, at the height of the Portuguese power, a sinuous route from Natal northeast to Ormuz, from Ormuz southeast to Cape Comorin, from Comorin northeast again to Bengal, then southeast to Malacca, Java, and the Spice Islands – a jagged semicircle of over fifteen thousand miles. That a small European nation, then numbering perhaps not more than a million of souls, should continue to hold this frontier was impossible when stronger European rivals came upon the scene. That Portugal should have held it for a century against the Mussulman world is an enduring glory to herself and to Christendom.

How to make the most of her slender resources in

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this stupendous task was, from the arrival of her first viceroy, Almeida, the supreme problem of Portugal in India Almeida (1505–1509) believed, as we have seen, that the solution lay in an exclusively sea policy, supported by as few forts as possible at dominant positions on the Indian coast. Albuquerque took a wider view. He realized that the command of the sea, separated by a fourth of the globe from his European base, must depend upon a line of shore supports whence he could draw both revenues and supplies. “My will and determination is, as long as I am governor,” runs his famous speech to his captains at Malacca in 1511, “neither to fight nor to hazard men on land, except in those parts wherein I must build a fortress to maintain them.”

“If it be the wish of our Lord,” he wrote to the king in 1512, “to dispose the commerce of India in such a manner that the goods and wealth contained in her should be forwarded to you year by year in your squadrons, I do not believe that in all Christendom there will be so rich a king as your Highness. And therefore do I urge you, Senhor, to work up warmly this affair of India with men and arms and strengthen your hold in her and securely establish your dealings and your factories. And that you wrest the wealth of India and business from the hands of the Moors, and this by good fortresses gaining the principal places of business of the Moors.” The Moslem opposition “will subsist in India so long as they do not see in your power the principal forces of the country, and good strongholds

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Moslem Women

or a power of men to keep them at peace.” Albuquerque thus sums up his demand – either a great fleet and an army, or the seizure and fortification of the principal towns “on the shores of the sea.”

Again in 1513, as regards attacks from the Rumes, or Turkish Empire, “I hold it to be free from doubt that if fortresses be built in Diu and Calicut (as I trust in our Lord they will be), when once they have been well fortified, if a thousand of the Sultan’s ships were to make their way to India, not one of those places could be brought again under his dominion.” “I would strongly point out,” he had written to King Emmanuel in 1510, “the uselessness of sending any more ships to these waters, as the supply of vessels here is ample. What we require is a large supply of arms, ammunition, and materials of war.”

In carrying out this policy, says Machado, “he erected with an expense equal to their magnificence the fortresses of Malacca, Ormuz, Calicut, Cochin, and Cannanore, inscribed on whose stones his name is handed down to posterity under the glorious title of Founder of the Portuguese Empire in the East.”

Albuquerque’s plan of seizing strongholds, wherever

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convenient on the coast, might easily degenerate into a system of piratical descents. As a matter of fact, Goa, by far the largest acquisition of the Portuguese in India, was captured with the aid of a famous corsair, Timoja, during the absence of its lawful prince. But however we may stigmatize such attacks, they merely extended to Asia the state of war then chronic between Christendom and Islam in Europe. The Papal Bulls seemed to the sixteenth century the literal fulfilment of the Scriptural promise and command: “Ask of me, and I shall give thee the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession. Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron; thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel.” The Portuguese historian De Barros denied to unbelievers the international rights pertaining to states within the comity of Christendom. A similar sentiment may be cited from our own Coke, and although Coke’s view was afterward condemned by Lord Mansfield, it is not the less representative of the age to which it belonged.

The Holy See distinguished, indeed, between negative unbelievers who had never heard of the faith, and positive unbelievers who, having knowledge of the faith, received it not, or subsequently renounced it, and, in judging the Inquisition, we should not forget that it seemed at first a defence of Christian Spain against Islam. King Emmanuel of Portugal met the difficulty from the outset, by embarking in 1500 A.D. a band of friars as mentioned in the preceding chapter, with his expedition of 1200 fighting men, and instructing Cabral

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as follows: “Before he attacked the Moors and idol-aters of those parts with the material and secular sword, he was to allow the priests and monks to use their spiritual sword which was to declare to them the Gospel ... and convert them to the faith of Christ. ... And should they be so contumacious as not to accept this law of faith ... and should they forbid commerce and exchange ... in that case they should put them to fire and sword, and carry on fierce war against them.” The Portuguese king thus regularized his position from the theological point of view. The same sentiment of no common faith, no common rights, still influences the European attitude toward the African races; but for the words Christianity and paganism we now use the terms civilization and barbarism.

In carrying out the doctrine of lawful war against all unbelievers, with whom no express compact existed to the contrary, the Portuguese were led into cruelties, in part common to that time, but in part arising from their peculiar position in Asia. Their force was so small that they thought it needful to punish without mercy any resistance or revolt. This necessity for terrorizing the superior numbers of their enemies may explain, though it can never excuse, the atrocities which stained their history in the East. Such severities became a fixed principle of their policy from the second voyage of Vasco da Gama in 1502. The Bishop Osorio blames Almeida (1505–1509) for torturing and executing the prisoners after the battle of Diu, and reprobates the conduct of a captain who in 1507 threw the crew of an Arab ship

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sewed up in sails into the sea, although they had not defended themselves and held a Portuguese passport. Almeida “blew his prisoners from guns before Cannanore, saluting the town with their fragments.” On the capture of Brava, the Portuguese soldiers “barbarously cut off the hands and ears of women, to take off their bracelets and earrings, to save time in taking them off.”

These were not exceptional barbarities. The permanent attitude of the Portuguese to all Asiatics who resisted was void of compunction.

To quote a few examples from contemporary manuscripts: a letter from João de Lima to the King of Portugal in 1518 speaks of the people of Daibul as “dogs” who “do not want but the sword in hand.” In 1535, at the capture of the petty island of Mete near Diu, “all were killed, without allowing a single one to live, and for this reason it was henceforward called the Island of the Dead.” In 1540 the Zamorin was compelled to agree to cast out of his dominions all who would not accept the terms imposed, “and if they should not wish to go, he will order them to be killed.” In 1546, says the official report of the siege of Diu, “we spared no life whether of women or children.”

I cut short the list of horrors. The Portuguese cruelties were deliberate rather than vindictive. Even a high-minded soldier and devout cavalier of the Cross like Albuquerque believed a reign of terror to be a necessity of his position, and that, in giving no quarter, he best rendered service to Christ and acted with the truest humanity in the long run to the heathen. So

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inherently noble was he felt to be, that in after years both Hindus and Mohammedans were wont to repair to his tomb, and there, as in the presence of his shade, to call upon God to deliver them from the tyranny of his successors. Yet even his lofty soul stooped to the atrocities of cutting off the ears and noses of his prisoners, of hunting in rowboats after despairing wretches who had thrown themselves overboard and hacking them to pieces in the water, and of slaying the women and children of captured. towns. Terrorism had to take the place of strength. It was a device to which the Portuguese were compelled by plans of conquest beyond their national resources.

Cannanore in 1574

The main object of the Portuguese in Asia was a monopoly of the Indo-European trade. I propose, without dwelling on individual feats of arms, to show briefly how that monopoly was secured, partly by treaties and

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partly by war; how it was maintained by a combined naval and military force; what the monopoly consisted of, and the mercantile methods by which it was worked.

The more important treaties of Portugal in the East followed a common type, and Albuquerque’s first agreement with Ormuz may be taken as an illustration of the whole. In that instrument the “King of Ormuz” (1) acknowledges himself a vassal to the Portuguese sovereign, (2) grants a site for a factory and fortress, (3) submits to a yearly tribute and agrees to a payment toward the expenses of the troops which had coerced him. These three main heads of political dependence, a fortified factory, and a tribute or money payment, supplied the model for subsequent treaties, wherever the Portuguese found themselves strong enough to enforce them. They were the standard of subjection which the Portuguese sought to impose on the coast-powers from the Red Sea to the Moluccas. The system developed into an endeavour to exempt Portuguese vessels from dues at the Indian ports and to extract a revenue for Portugal from the local customs tariff. But the length of the coast-line to be coerced, and the unequal forces employed for the task, render generalizations unsafe. The treaty-history of Portugal in the East may be best understood. from some characteristic examples.

Calicut, being defiant and one of the strongest positions on the Indian coast, for a time treated on advantageous terms. The compact of 1513 provided for the exchange of pepper and ginger at fair rates for the

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The Zamorin of Calicut giving an audience.

Portuguese imports, allowed the Calicut Zamorin to send two trading-ships under Portuguese passes to Ormuz during the current year, and agreed that Portuguese merchandise should pay dues. A fortified factory was then built and the bond was soon drawn tighter.

By the treaty of 1515 the Zamorin of Calicut expresses a desire to serve Portugal; will allow no enemies of Portugal to enter his harbour; gives exemptions to Christians, even to Christian converts; and is to pay half the shipping-dues to the Portuguese. The process of coercion went on till in 1540 the Calicut Zamorin agreed to sell “all the pepper” and “all the ginger

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there may be on his lands to the King our Lord,” to harbour no enemies of Portugal nor to make war on its friends, to give up his trade with the Arabian coast, to allow none of his subjects to sail thither, and to keep no war-vessels or even armed rowboats. By this time Calicut, her chief, and her commerce were in the grip of the Portuguese fort.

Other towns on the Indian seaboard must be dealt with more briefly. The Portuguese in their struggle with Calicut entered into engagements with rival coast-chiefs which they could not always fulfil. In 1500–1501 Cabral, having signed a treaty with the friendly Cochin raja, promised some day to make him Zamorin of Calicut. After wars and distresses suffered by the little State in the Portuguese cause, the Cochin raja thus pours out his sorrows in a letter to King Emmanuel in 1513.” Your Highness sent me a golden crown, as a sign that I was crowned the chief king of the whole of India. ... And your governor especially crowned me as king, and he declared on oath that he would make me the chief king of all India, and assist me against anyone who should come upon me And I also promised to assist him against whoever should come upon them and to stand to the defence of your fortress until death, and in this manner they swore to it by oath in the church.” Yet after twelve years these fine promises remained empty words, and here was Albuquerque in 1513 making treaties with Calicut to the detriment of Cochin.

Quilon, with its Portuguese factory and fort since

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1503, being still weaker than Cochin, fared worse. Certain disturbances having taken place at Quilon during the absence of the queen, the church of the old St. Thomas Christians is in 1516 to be rebuilt, according to the terms of a treaty dated September 25, 1516, and the Christians favoured as formerly, and treated “even better, if that can be.” It was further agreed, four years later, that if any native “whether Gentile or Moor or any other description whatever should wish to become a Christian, that he be free to do so without any one preventing him, or any obstacle offered whatever.” The death of the Portuguese factor at Quilon, for which the disclaimers of guilt by the queen and her chiefs were accepted, was punished by a fine of two hundred thousand pounds of pepper. By the treaty of 1520 the St. Thomas Christians were further protected, and received a site under the guns of the Portuguese fortress; the monopoly of all pepper grown in Quilon was secured to the Portuguese king; and all Portuguese ships were to pay their dues to him. Finally, in 1548, it was conceded that the Portuguese were to be exempt from dues “in the quays of the sea, where the embarkation takes place for Cochin.”

The Portuguese hold on the Persian Gulf was in like manner tightened. In 1515 Albuquerque completed the fortress at Ormuz. By the treaty of 1523, the Portuguese are to pay no dues at Ormuz except on exports, and the whole kingdom of Ormuz is to be delivered up on demand to the King of Portugal. Meanwhile in each year Ormuz shall pay in lieu of giving

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over the custom house, “in tributes and vassalage to the King our Lord in silver, gold, and seed pearls, to the value of the land sixty thousand xerafins.” All Christian renegades are to be handed over to the captain of the Portuguese fortress, and no Moslems shall carry arms in Ormuz save the attendants on the king and town magistrate. Any other Moor wearing arms “shall on the second offence be flogged, and on the third be put to death.” Moslems are to pay duty on all merchandise, Portuguese are to be exempt. The Moslems are to maintain a chief of police who should be a Christian and “twenty Christian men who walked with him.” Six years later a heavy fine was laid on Orrauz for the death of the Portuguese magistrate, and the customs revenue was allotted until payment should be realized. In 1540 a custom house and certain revenues were formally made over to the Portuguese, subject to allowances to the Ormuz court – “in payment of tributes,” says the King of Ormuz not without pathos, “which I am obliged to pay.”

While the entrance to the Persian Gulf thus passed completely under the Portuguese, it also marked the western limits of their shore-power on the Indo-Egyptian route. Their attempts to seize the mouth of the Red Sea failed. In 1513 Albuquerque, after a bloody siege of Aden, was repulsed with slaughter, and could only cannonade the tow-n and burn the ships in the harbour. The brave Arabs had no intention of yielding their stronghold, from which they could swoop down on the Red Sea passage, to Christian, Egyptian, or

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Affonzo De Albuquerque

After an old print.

Turk. In 1516 the Sultan of Cairo failed, as Albuquerque had failed, to capture Aden. Soon after there came an overwhelming fleet of forty Portuguese ships and three thousand soldiers, and the battered fortress offered to surrender. But the fleet sailed on to attack the Moslem navy in the Red Sea, and by the time it got back to Aden the defences were repaired and the offer was withdrawn. The Turks, when they wrested Egypt from the Mamluk Sultans in 1517, perceived that Aden was necessary to complete their conquest. During the struggle which followed, the Aden ruler submitted at moments to the Portuguese. In 1524 and again in 1530 he “rendered himself a vassal to Dom João of Portugal” and agreed to pay a yearly tribute, with the gift of “a crown of gold” as first-fruits to his Majesty.

Such submissions, however, were merely Arab merely feints to gain a breathing-space. In 1538 Solyman the Magnificent closed the struggle by an expedition which captured Aden. But even the forces of the Ottoman empire at its zenith only won the place by stratagem. The Turkish sailors were carried ashore on beds pleading for the hospitality

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which Mussulmans everywhere show to the sick of their religion. The ruler of Aden received them generously, was gratefully invited on board the Turkish fleet, and then treacherously hanged. For a time Solyman the Magnificent dominated the whole Arabian coast from Aden, strengthened by one hundred guns and a garrison of five hundred Turks. But before the middle of the century the Arab population rose and handed over the fort in despair to the Portuguese. Aden was finally retaken by the Pasha of Egypt in 1551, and remained amid varying fortunes a Turkish outpost until 1630, when it passed again to the Arabs of the Yemen province. From Albuquerque’s attack in 1513 on, it stood defiant just outside the limits of the Indo-Portuguese power.

While Aden thus prevented the complete execution of Albuquerque’s scheme for cutting off the Moslem trade from its Egyptian base, his designs on the sources of that trade in the Far East were more fully carried out. The cheaper spices of the Indian coast, pepper and ginger, he secured by his command of the Malabar ports. The Moslem monopoly of the cinnamon of Ceylon and of the precious cloves and mace of the Archipelago, was broken by Albuquerque’s seizure of Malacca (1511), with subsequent captures and treaties by his successors. My business, however, is with India, and I dare not follow the brilliant track of Portuguese achievement in eastern Asia. The Moluccas, or Spice Islands, the richest jewels in the Portuguese crown when formally made over by Spain in 1529, became not

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only a source of trade but of tribute; Tidore, for example, paying in cloves. In 1564 the king of the Moluccas yielded to Portugal the dominion and lordship of the whole of his territories.

The Portuguese sovereign, indeed, gave full powers to his captain in Malacca “to take possession or part possession, as the case may be, of any lands, places, and islands” which that officer or his subordinates should “discover or arrive at,” and “to acquire in my name the lordship of the said places, lands, and islands,” as stated in the preamble to the treaty with the Island of Sunda, dated January 27, 1532. Under these powers the royal arms of Portugal were fixed up on many a remote shore, a flag with the cross of Christ being handed to the inhabitants and a green bough delivered by way of ratification.

“Having come to the island Amene” (a poor little islet a mile and a half in diameter in the Laccadives), runs one treaty, signed February 4, 1560, which may serve as an example of how the system practically worked, the Portuguese commodore “went on land and destroyed it and slew many people and took a great number, and coming to a convention of peace” – it was agreed that the rulers should make over the group of islands to the King of Portugal and pay a tribute of cocoanut fibre, with the pledge of a green branch “in sign of peace and obedience,” “for as much as they did not wish to be vassals of any other king or lord.”

If this was Portugal’s short way with the naked islanders of the Laccadives, she had an ascending scale

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of refinement in dealing with the more powerful rajas of the Indian coast and Eastern Archipelago. The treaties leave more or less to the native rulers the jurisdiction over their own. subjects. While insisting strongly on the privileges of native Christians, and placing them under the jurisdiction of the Portuguese fort, they generally respect the rights of the professors of other faiths. The treaty with the warlike King of Gujarat, in 1534, guaranteed the revenues of the Bassein mosques, “and what preaching should take place in them,” from “any innovation whatever.” In the Moluccas the viceroy agreed, in 1539, that “no Portuguese should enter into the mosques of the Moors; and on his entering and doing evil things, he shall be apprehended by the Moors or by the Christians and delivered up at the fortress, for me to punish according to his fault. Forasmuch as I think it to the service of the King my Lord that the mosques be guarded against the Portuguese and be as honoured as are our own churches.” In at least one case, according to a contract with the King of Gujarat, October 25, 1535, conversions were forbidden on either side, but were often provided for on the side of the Christians. Some protection was even attempted for the pagodas or temples of the Hindus, as is shown by a contract with Mealecao Malik Khan), dated April 24, 1555; and the contract of 1520 provided against the killing of cows in the Quilon State.

I have dwelt on the treaty-aspects of the Portuguese policy in the East, not merely because they illustrate the actual dealings of Portugal with Asiatic states, but

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The Present Palace at Baroda in Gujarat

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Blank page

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because such engagements became in the next century a factor in European diplomacy. One of the initial difficulties which the English East India Company had to face was the Portuguese claim that the princes of the Indian coast and Spice Archipelago were, under these treaties, subjects of the Portuguese crown, and that their territories formed part of the Portuguese dominions.

The Portuguese clearly understood that their power depended on their fleet, and showed a wise jealousy of sea rivals. But the shipbuilding of the Atlantic so greatly excelled that of the Indian Ocean, that only two states of Western India could seriously imperil the Christian squadrons. The navies of Calicut and Gujarat, aided by the Egyptian admiral, had matched themselves against the Viceroy Almeida, and their defeat at Diu was followed up by treaties to prevent their reconstruction. Calicut in the south was not allowed to keep war-vessels or even armed rowing-boats. Gujarat on the north had, in 1534, to agree that no warship should be built in any of her ports, a condition reinforced by subsequent treaties. The same unsparing policy which flogged and sentenced to death the Arabs of Ormuz who ventured to carry arms, also put an end to naval construction at alien Indian harbours.

Portugal further coerced the naval states of Western India by a chain of settlements at strategic points up the coast. Besides the fortress factories already mentioned on the southern Malabar seaboard, the four

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important positions of Goa, Bassein close to Bombay, Daman on the Gujarat shore, and Diu at the point of the Kathiawar peninsula, were turned by conquest or treaty into Portuguese strongholds. The island fortress of Diu commanded the approach to India from the Persian Gulf just where ships rounded into the Gulf of Cambay, and formed a bulwark against the Arab, Egyptian, or Turkish line of attack. Its conquest and retention cost the Portuguese more blood and treasure than any other of their Indian possessions.

Goa, their principal settlement, dominated the south Indian ports, as Diu controlled the coast-route on the north. The pirate chief Timoja proposed to Albuquerque that as the lord of Goa was dead (in reality absent) they should seize the place. This they easily did in March, 1510. But the rightful sovereign, a son of the Ottoman Sultan Amurad II, whose romantic adventures had ended with his carving for himself the kingdom of Bijapur in southern India, hurried back to Goa and drove out the Portuguese in May. During three months of terrible sufferings and heroic endurance, the Portuguese were wind-bound in the estuary within the Goa bar and exposed to a superior force on shore. But eventually they got to sea, and when the king was again called away by disturbances in the interior, they recaptured Goa with the help of the pirate Timoja in November, 1510. Its rightful sovereign, Yusuf Adil Shah, the king of Bijapur, died in the following month (December 5th). His son was a minor, and during the first years of his reign it was all his

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A Mohammdean mosque at Bijapur

ministers could do to hold together the most important inland provinces of the Bijapur kingdom. The outlying island of Goa and its region of creeks and estuaries remained with the Portuguese.

The pirate Timoja, who first urged Albuquerque to seize it, and whose forces bore an important part in its capture and recapture, received a substantial share of the spoils. He obtained the revenues of a district in free gift, was appointed chief Aguazil, or administrator, of the lands of Goa, and captain of the native population. The revenues of the whole annexed territories, Goa Island excepted, were made over to him in return for a fixed rental, together with the responsibility for their defence. That daring and unscrupulous corsair was exactly the sort of adventurer then founding dynasties in India. Had he lived he might have

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set up a coast kingdom of his own and proved a troublesome neighbour to the Portuguese. But here again fortune favoured the Christians. This Timoja enjoyed his new accession of power only for a year, and died in 1511.

As Diu was the Portuguese outpost which controlled the passage into Indian waters on the north, so Goa became their central place of arms and commerce half-way down the coast. Its nucleus, the Island of Goa proper, was defended by rivers or creeks on both sides from the mainland, and by capes on the north and south from the extreme fury of the monsoons. The silting of the channels which now impedes the approach was then in an earlier stage, and the Goa anchorage, with twenty-one feet at high water and eighteen at low, sufficed for the largest shipping of that time. In 1641–1648 Tavernier regarded it as one of the best harbours in the world. It was, in fact, an earlier Bombay, guarded yet not cut off from the mainland by marine backwaters or river-arms, and nearer than Bombay to the ancient ports of Indo-European commerce. Al-though Goa Island was but nine miles long by three broad, the trade of the western coast was gradually concentrated at its quays. Its natural advantages were developed by a skilful system of treaty restrictions and exemptions at the expense of the old Malabar ports; and even the silting up of the channels was for a time overcome by moving the town nearer to the sea.

The old Goa which Albuquerque captured is now a city of empty convents and monasteries; mounds of

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broken bricks, once palaces, buried under rank grass; and streets overgrown with cocoanut-trees and jungle. The churches rise mournfully amid the desolation. “Il ne reste plus de cette ville que le sacré,” said the superior of the Augustinian convent in 1827: “le profane en est entierement banni.” “The river washes the remains of a great city,” wrote Sir William Howard Russell fifty years later, in 1877, “an arsenal in ruins, palaces in ruins, quay walls in ruins – all in ruins.” The still older Goa, built by the native kings, I could only trace by little square rice-fields which marked the ground plan of fortress courts and palace quadrangles. Panjim and New Goa, which became the residence of the viceroy in 1759, are threatened with a like deterioration. But a railway, built by British enterprise, now connects Marmagao with the southern Maratha line, and holds out hopes of a return to commercial importance.

Yet before its decay, Goa had a carnival of prosperity which proves what a commercial war-policy can for a time effect. “Goa Dourado,” or Golden Goa, was a place of fabulous wealth to the plain London merchants who were struggling into an East India Company under Elizabeth. “Whoever hath seen Goa need not see Lisbon,” ran the Portuguese proverb. The accounts of the city given by Linschoten, Pyrard de Laval, Fitch, Della Valle, and other European travellers who visited Goa in the sixteenth or early in the seventeenth century show that it combined the riches of commerce with the splendours of ecclesiastical pomp and

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The Italian Traveller Pietro della Valle

a powerful military court. The work of the community was done by slaves, whose toil chiefly supplied the in-comes of the Portuguese inhabitants; for in Goa no Portuguese of decent birth could follow a trade without disgrace, nor could his wife busy herself in domestic labours without losing her social position. The only respectable livelihoods were the Church, the army, and government employ – with buccaneering and seagoing commerce in a few vigorous hands.

The intensely military spirit, and its contempt for peaceful industry, ended in a reaction of profligacy and sloth. Portuguese society in Goa divided itself into two idle populations – an idle population of men in the streets and gaming-saloons, and an idle population of women in the seclusion of their own homes. The gambling-houses, sumptuously furnished and paying a heavy license-tax to the Government, were the resort of dancing girls, jugglers, native actors, and buffoons – haunts of iniquity, in which the more determined players stayed sometimes for days together and were provided with board and lodging. The ladies of Goa soon obtained an equally unenviable name. Shut up as much as possible from

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male society, they lounged half-dressed through the tropical day, singing, playing, quarrelling, gossiping with their flattering slaves, “and especially devising means to elude the vigilance of their husbands.” Such is the statement of Da Fonseca on the authority of Linschoten and Pyrard in the sixteenth century. A European zantina life grew up and produced ugly consequences. A lady valued herself in her female coterie upon the number and daring of her intrigues. The travellers who visited Goa during its prime tell strange tales of the hardihood with which the Portuguese mashtrons pursued their amours – not scrupling to stupefy the husband with drugs, and then admitting the paramour to his chamber. The perils of such interviews gave zest to jaded appetite, and the Goanese became a byword as the type of an Orientalized community, idle, haughty, and corrupt.

But the Portuguese of Goa, although clad much like natives in their own houses, save for the large rosaries round their necks, and with their children running “up and down the house naked till they begin to be old enough to be ashamed,” made a splendid appearance when they stirred abroad. The ladies in gorgeous apparel were carried in not less gorgeous litters, guarded by domestics, to the great functions of the Church – their “dress mostly of gold and silver brocade adorned with pearls, precious stones, and with jewels on the head, arms, hands, and round the waist; and they put on a veil of the finest crepe in the world, which extends from head to foot.” They wore no stockings, but slippers

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A Goanese Woman

studded with gems, and raised on cork soles nearly half a foot in height.” “They do not wear any mask, but paint their cheeks to a shameful degree.” “These ladies, when they enter the church, are taken by the hand by one or two men, since they cannot walk by themselves on account of the height of the slippers.” Each is thus helped “to her seat some forty or fifty paces off, taking at least a good quarter of an hour to walk that distance, so slowly and majestically does she move” – after the fashion of the high-born Venetian ladies of that time. For these and the following statements we may look again to Pyrard and other early authorities.

When a gentleman rode forth he was attended by a throng of slaves in gay and fanciful liveries, some holding painted umbrellas, others displaying richly inlaid arms; while his horse glittered with gold and silver trappings, jingling silver bells, reins studded with precious stones, and gilt stirrups wrought into artistic patterns. The poor aped the rich and resorted to amusing makeshifts to exhibit an air of grandeur. Gentlemen who lived together had a few silk suits between them in common. “These they used by turns when

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they went out, and hired the services of a man to hold an umbrella over them as they strutted through the streets.”

As Goa declined, its pride and poverty increased. Tavernier (1648) relates how once wealthy families were reduced to seeking alms, yet they did not put aside their vanity. The Portuguese matrons, like the Roman lady in Juvenal, went forth on their round of beggary in palanquins, attended by servants who delivered their petitions to those whose charity they implored.

I have dwelt on the interior life of Goa, for it represented, on a more magnificent scale, the social types and standards of the other Portuguese settlements in India. The European force by which those settlements were maintained was a comparatively small one; probably never exceeding eight thousand men; although I have failed to obtain conclusive evidence on this point. For the projected expedition against Diu in 1522, on which the Portuguese desired to concentrate their whole power, six thousand men were requested. In 1524 the king was bluntly told that “if your Highness had in India four thousand of such men as “a certain captain,” they would perform greater feats than what is now done by the seven thousand or eight thousand who are walking about here.” In 1535 the viceroy in Goa prepared to meet the great Turkish armament with seven thousand men and 120 ships. These numbers refer to supreme efforts of Portugal in the East, and they were only in part made up of Europeans. Albuquerque’s

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plan submitted to the king in 1512 involved a force of three thousand men for three years. Manuscript letters in the India Office are our authority for the various statements here made.

The practice of enlisting native soldiers commenced with the first foothold obtained by the Portuguese in India. In 1504 Pacheco defended Cochin with a garrison of three hundred Malabar soldiers and one hundred to one hundred and fifty Portuguese – besides the levies under the native king. Albuquerque employed two hundred native soldiers in taking Goa (1510), and one thousand of them at a single position during its subsequent defence. His Indian troops consisted partly of Nairs, partly of the ancient native Christians of Malabar, and it was a native Christian soldier who first forced his way through the arsenal door into the city. After its final recapture, Albuquerque advanced with a mixed force of one thousand Portuguese and two thousand native troops. How far the. native soldiers in these early operations were drilled, it is difficult to say, but the contemporary records disclose bodies of Asiatics as a regular part of the trained Portuguese forces, both on shore and in distant sea expeditions. To quote only a few examples: Albuquerque employed a mixed force of 1700 Portuguese and 830 Indians against Aden in 1513; and 1500 Portuguese with 700 Indians against Ormuz in 1515; while Soarez in 1516 sailed for the Red Sea with 1200 Portuguese, 800 Indian soldiers, and 800 Indian seamen.

The last instance exhibits a high proportion of

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An old p[icture of the Governor of Bantam and his attendants

natives for that early period, but the Portuguese employed Asiatic troops in increasing numbers. The cavalry remained for the most part European; the infantry consisted largely if not chiefly of Indians. In 1520 the commandant of Goa seized part of the adjacent mainland with 250 horse and eight hundred Canarese foot-soldiers. Even in the distant Archipelago, the attacking force at Bantam in 1525 was made up of six hundred Portuguese and four hundred Malays.

As the slave population increased in the Portuguese settlements by capture, purchase, and traffic, it was employed in military service. Human beings were cheap in India in those times of wars, raids, and famines: a slave was valued in Bengal at fourteen shillings, “and a young woman of good appearance at about as much again.” For the great expedition against Aden in 1530 Nuno da Cunha got together a fleet of four hundred vessels, most of them small craft fitted out by natives, with a force of 3600 Portuguese soldiers, 1460 Portuguese sailors, 2000 Indian soldiers, 5000 Indian seamen, and

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A Hindu Silversmith

The traveller in India is struck by the skill shown by the native silversmiths in working the precious white metal. It is often surprising to see the artistic results of their labour produced with the simplest of tools:

8000 slaves. In 1542 Fort Sangaga was relieved by a force of 160 Portuguese, 20 horse, and 2000 natives. In 1567 the Malacca garrison consisted of 1500 men, of whom only 200 were Portuguese. In 1570 a thou-sand slaves were joined to the regular troops for the defence of Goa.

The truth is that the Portuguese settler soon became an unmanageable and a reluctant foot-soldier. Albuquerque, following the example of Alexander the Great in his Asiatic conquests, and of Hamilcar in Spain, encouraged his troops to marry native wives. The Lisbon court supplied dowries for these unions which at once created the nucleus of a female Catholic population and yearly added infants to the Faith. It soon appeared, however, that such nuptials had another aspect. In 1513 Duarte Barbosa raised his voice against

paying more for marriages to men who afterwards became Moors, than the worth of what Goa has produced up to the present, or ever will produce.” But the priests defended the system, the Government provided posts for the husbands, and the records show a frequent desire that “the married people “should be greatly favoured. A languid population of half-breeds sprang up, and employment had to be found for them. In 1569 the attacking force on Parnel included 100 Portuguese, 50 Moorish horse, and 650 half-caste soldiers. Three years previously, in 1566, a militia, chiefly natives and half-breeds, had been organized for Goa – divided in 1630 into a body of regulars 2500 strong, and a defensive reserve of 5000 men.

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As the flow of pay from the treasury dried up, the Portuguese soldiers and their half-caste descendants degenerated into a military mob, selling their muskets to native princes and stooping to every disgrace to fill their stomachs. In 1548 the King of Portugal was implored to allow war-service grants to the soldiers, “for they walk day and night at the doors, begging for the love of God. And if it would but end here it would be a lesser evil. But they go over to the Moors because they give them wages and allow them to live at their own liberty.” What stipends they received they gambled away.

The native infantry were disciplined and directed by Portuguese officers, but sometimes led by their own. Antonio Fernandes Chale, for example, a Malabar native Christian, held important command under Portuguese generals, and was raised to the dignity of a Knight of the military Order of Christ. Slain in action in 1571, he received a state funeral at Goa. In the previous year, 1570, the viceroy manned the defensive works of Goa against Adil Khan . with 1500 native troops under Portuguese officers, holding his little force of seven hundred Portuguese as a reserve to support whatever position might be hardest pressed. “I certify to your Highness,” wrote Pedro de Faria to the king as early as 1522 about the Calicut troops, “that they are as good as ours” and are practised in shooting three times a week. The differences in drill and weapons were not so decisively in favour of the European system in the sixteenth century as they afterwards became:

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The chivalrous confidence of the first Portuguese adventurers in their Christian saints degenerated among their half-caste successors into a vague hope of supernatural succour, a habit’ of “always awaiting the benefits of our Lord working miracles on our behalf – which is a trying thing.”

I have confined my survey to the period preceding the union of Portugal with the Spanish crown in 1580. After that event the necessities of Spain in Europe did not give the Portuguese a fair chance in India. But even before it, the resources of Portugal were being exhausted. The African slave-trade which had supplied forced labour for the tillage of Portugal and set free the coast peasantry especially in the south for enterprise beyond the seas, had eaten like a canker into the nation. In the sixteenth century whole districts of Portugal were partitioned into great estates cultivated by slaves and denuded of their free population, who flocked to the capital. The Portuguese in India in like manner depended more and more for their subsistence on slave labour, and for their defence on Indian troops. The officers of the Indian Department at Lisbon and at Goa embezzled pay for seventeen thousand soldiers, while only four thousand were actually kept up. The native troops became masters of the situation. After many troubles they had to be disbanded, and, when re-established on a different footing, commenced in our own day a fresh course of mutiny and revolt.

That Portugal succeeded even for a time in imposing

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her supremacy on the Asiatic trade-route was due to her fleet. Between 1497 and 1612 no fewer than 806 ships were employed in the Indian trade; of which 425 returned to Europe, 285 remained permanently on the Asiatic stations, and ninety-six were lost. Their ordinary size varied from 100 to 550 tons, armed with cannon and fitted out for purposes both of freight and war. The ambition of the naval constructors of Portugal outran their technical skill and ended in floating castles which could not stand the Indian voyage. Twenty-two of these unseaworthy monsters were lost between 1579 and 1591, partly due to overlading and partly to their unwieldy size. The Madre de Deos, a huge erection with “three close decks, seven stories, a main orlop, a forecastle, and a spar deck of two floors,” measured 165 feet from beak to stern, and nearly forty-seven feet across the second “close deck.” Besides the ships from Europe, vessels of the hardest teak were built in the dockyards of Goa and Daman. One of them, the Constantina, constructed about 1550, doubled the Cape of Good Hope seventeen times and lasted twenty-five years.

I have said that the Portuguese had a coast-line of over fifteen thousand miles to hold in Asiatic waters. But their fleet enabled them to choose any point along that line for attack, and to concentrate on it their whole force. They could deliver their blow at their own time; if successful they left a garrison; if unsuccessful they disappeared below the horizon, having struck terror, or sometimes compelled submission, by the atrocities

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inflicted for resistance. The whole coast of Asia from the Red Sea to the Eastern Archipelago was thus menaced by an invisible foe from the ocean, whose movements defied calculation, whose attack was often irresistible, and whose vengeance always cruel. No such fleets had ever been seen in Asia, and the Portuguese treaties took care that none should grow up. As Portugal never acquired inland territories in India proper, and as her possessions were mainly confined to patches on the seaboard, this system sufficed for their defence long after her military vigour had declined. But its effectiveness depended on the absence of any other naval force; and when the maritime nations of northern Europe broke in upon the Indian Ocean, the Portuguese power collapsed.

It would be wrong, however, to underrate either the skill or the heroism with which their sea-power was built up. Thom the orders of King Emmanuel in 1514 for an examination of the ports, anchorages, and distances in the Red Sea and Persian Gulf, marine surveying dates in Asia. In spite of discrepancies in the results, a mass of material was collected during the next century, and geographical names attest the exploring activity of Portugal from the coast of Africa to China and Japan. The knowledge thus acquired was put to good use for purposes of strategy. The Portuguese found they could command the whole Asiatic trade-route by squadrons at three points on its course – the outlet of the Red Sea, the passage round Ceylon, and the Straits of Malacca. When Aden, which would be

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A java junk

as a “key in the hands of Your Highness,” could not be captured, the fortress island of Diu became to the Portuguese, from 1535 onwards, an Aden nearer to their Indian base. Its naval station caught the Red Sea and Persian Gulf ships as they rounded the peninsula of Kathiawar toward the Indian coast. Portugal thus held the three angles, at Diu, Ceylon, and Malacca, of the great triangle whose two southern sides formed the route of the spice trade.

The naval advantages won by Portuguese strategy were maintained by Portuguese valour. Whether the native powers covered the sea with their small craft, or strengthened their fleet with a huge junk carrying one thousand fighters – “the most monstrous thing that was ever seen by man, and took three years to make” – they went down before the galleons and caravels. The bare official narratives of such encounters read like epics in epitome. A captain whose coat of mail caught in the pegs as he leapt on an enemy’s ship, there remained till he was hewn to pieces through his armour. Another Portuguese vessel “they made a

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porcupine of” with fiery darts and “assegais” heroic self-sacrifices, and deaths worthy of Sir Philip Sidney.

But the Portuguese did not trust alone to strategy or valour to secure their supremacy along the Asiatic trade-route. They boldly struck into the wars and intrigues of the native princes from Africa to the Moluccas, securing substantial returns for their support, and finding in each dynastic claimant a steppingstone to power. In 1505 Almeida drove out the ruler of Quiloa on the African coast and set up his own nominee. In the same year the Portuguese killed the King of Sofala on that coast and controlled the succession. In 1510 Cochin on the Malabar coast became the arena of intrigues between Albuquerque on the one hand and the Zamorin of Calicut on the other; Albuquerque expelling the Zamorin’s candidate and re-establishing the titular raja of Cochin. In that year also, Albuquerque successfully supported one brother against another for the chiefdom of Onor, the price being submission to the King of Portugal. In 1511 he agreed to aid the King of Pacem in Sumatra against a rebellious governor, on the king’s offering to become a vassal of Portugal. Albuquerque not only entered into the family intrigues of native states, but he adopted their methods. In 1513 the Zamorin of Calicut was hostile, his brother friendly, to Portugal. Albuquerque offered, if the brother would poison the Zamorin, to secure for him the throne; and the compact was duly carried out.

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An eloquent essayist has ascribed to Dupleix the original idea of building up a European power in Asia by taking advantage of the rivalries of native princes, and by the employment of disciplined native troops. Such a statement merely shows that India, while within the ample range of Macaulay’s genius, lay outside the area of his exact knowledge. More than two centuries before the Frenchman reached India, the design had been deliberately formed and successfully carried out. Affonso de Albuquerque claimed no credit for the discovery; he merely extended the policy of his more commonplace predecessors, and handed it on to successors who worked out its natural development. Almost any one of their intrigues might, with a change of geographical names, stand for an intrigue of Dupleix. To cite but a single example: in 1521 the Portuguese having agreed to reinstate a Sumatra king who had been expelled, overthrew and killed his rival, and secured their own nominee on the throne in return for his submission to Portugal.

The idea of employing disciplined Indian troops and of using Indian succession contests, as engines for European aggrandizement, was not struck out by the wit of any one man. It was the necessity of the European position in Asia, and it was recognized as such by the Portuguese from the moment they secured a footing on. the Malabar coast. The Indian anarchy from 1500 to 1550, which preceded the firm establishment of the Moghul empire, gave them half a century to carry out their design. The grasp of the Moghul empire after

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1550 held such schemes in abeyance during nearly two hundred years. The fall of the Moghul empire rendered possible a revival of the old Portuguese policy, and from the struggle which ensued, England emerged the sovereign power in India.

The drain upon Portugal for her armies and fleets in Asia, although far beyond her normal resources, was for a time richly repaid by the monopoly of the Indo-European trade. The volume of that trade may be inferred from the statements that 806 Portuguese ships were employed in it between 1497 and 1612, and that the ordinary cost of construction and equipment of a single vessel intended for India, with the pay of the captain and crew for one voyage, was calculated at £4076. Such returns do not include ships captured in Asiatic seas or built in Indian dockyards, and, assuming their accuracy, the total number of vessels engaged in the trade can scarcely have been less than one thousand during the century of the Portuguese monopoly. The annual fleet which brought home the Indian cargoes numbered, in the palmy days of the Portuguese commerce, twenty sail. Regarding the value of the trade it is more difficult to form an estimate. . To the Portuguese cavaliers and chroniclers the achievement of their nation in India was a romance of military prowess and of missionary zeal. The commercial aspects they kept as much as possible in the background. Indeed, Faria y Sousa apologizes for referring to the expeditions of certain years, as “what they did was in relation to trade, a subject unbecoming a grave history.” We have

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to trust to accidental notices rather than to continuous statements.

I have mentioned that the first cargo brought home by Vasco da Gama was reckoned to have repaid the whole cost of the expedition sixty-fold. Cabral returned to Lisbon in 1501 with a freight of precious spices, perfumes, porcelain, pearls, rubies, and diamonds. In 1504 Albuquerque followed with “forty pound of pearls and four hundred of the small, a diamond of wonderful bigness,” and other costly articles. The gains of trade were augmented by the profits of piracy – for every Moslem or heathen ship was a fair prize. A single Cali-cut vessel in 1501 yielded, among other treasure, 1500 costly pearls. In 1503 another capture contained “an idol of gold weighing thirty pound,” with emeralds for eyes, a huge ruby on his breast, “and part of him covered with a cloak of gold set with jewels.” In return for gems and for the pepper, ginger, cinnamon, mace, nutmegs, cloves, drugs, dyes, porcelains, . perfumes, carved work, art products, and textile marvels of the East, the main commodity sent from Portugal, as from the old Roman empire, was silver. But she also exported woollen fabrics, to a large extent woven from English fleeces on Flanders looms, linens, red cloth of state, Genoa velvets, cutlery, metal work, hardware, corals, glass, mirrors, and chemicals.

Besides the direct commerce with Portugal, the port-to-port trade from the Malabar coast to the Persian Gulf on the one side, and to Malacca and the Far East on the other, yielded large returns. One of its most

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Malacca

profitable commodities was opium, obtained from Arabia and Egypt. Opium had been known in China from at least the eighth century A.D., and Duarte Barbosa found the Chinese junks taking it in the time of Albuquerque as a return freight from Malacca.

It soon appeared that opium could be grown in India, and Francisco de Albuquerque proposed in 1513 that its importation from Arabia should be prohibited or should be made a monopoly of the Portuguese sovereign, as is shown by letters still preserved among the manuscripts of the India Office. When the supply was cut off in reprisal for the Portuguese attempt on Aden, Affonso de Albuquerque recommended “the poppies of the Azores to be sown in all the fields of Portugal,” “because a shipload would be used yearly in India, and the cultivators would gain much, and the people of

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India are lost without it if they do not have it to eat.” It was not on the soil of Portugal, however, that the wealth of Asia was to be reaped. Nor did the attempts to reach the inland gold-fields of Africa, although led by a captain-general bearing the lofty title of “Conqueror of the Mines,” yield permanent results. The plunder of the Moslem ships, tributes and ransoms from the coast-chiefs, and above all sea trade, formed from first to last the revenue of Portugal in the East.

As regards the home trade, one Portuguese ship brought back a freight worth, at a moderate computation, £150,000, besides jewels not reckoned in the account. As regards the port-to-port trade in Asiatic waters, the voyage from Goa to China or Japan yielded to the captain for freight alone £22,500, and from Goa to Mozambique £5400; besides the gains from his private trade, which were equally great. As regards the profits of piracy, or the seizure of non-Christian ships, a single captain sold prizes during the space of two years aggregating about £110,000. The tributes from coast-princes and the customs dues of Goa, Diu, and Malacca alone were estimated at about £120,000. The king’s share in the tributes, customs, and prizes taken by his own ships was reckoned at 1,000,000 crowns a year, say £225,000, and would have been double that amount, but for the frauds of the officials. His actual clear revenue from India was given at £154,913.

The trade profits to the royal treasury should have been enormous, but were reduced by the many hands

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through which they passed. The Portuguese sovereigns were willing to allow their subjects to benefit by Eastern commerce. Prince Henry the Navigator had, in the first half of the fifteenth century, encouraged a company formed for trading with his discoveries on the African coast. It soon became evident that the fifteenth-century world could not be opened up by private enterprise. The African and Canaries trade became a monopoly of the royal family, and merchants engaging in it had to take out a license and render a part of their profits to the sovereign or his representative. A charter of June 29, 1500, shows that on the finding of the Cape route Ring Emmanuel in like manner offered to share the Indian trade with his subjects, on condition that one-fourth of the returns should be paid to his Majesty. Again, however, private enterprise proved unequal to the task, and for the next eighty-seven years the trade of India was conducted at the risk and for the behoof of the sovereign. The royal monopoly of spices alone was estimated at £45,000 a year, and his Majesty’s profit from the general trade at £150,000. Adding this to the £225,000 from prizes, customs, etc., the king’s share should have amounted to £420,000 a year. But the profits were eaten up by the expense of the armaments.

The king, however, still desired to interest his subjects in the enterprise. In the second voyage of Vasco da Gama (1502), each mariner and officer of the Indian fleets was allowed to bring home for himself a certain quantity of spices, paying as freight one-twentieth of

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Vasco Da Gama

After a Ms. portrait in the British Museum

their value. A similar policy of permitting their crews “to load some small thing in their cabins,” and a modest percentage on the profits of the voyage, was afterwards advocated for the port-to-port trade in Asiatic waters. Such a system could perhaps be kept under check in the return fleets to Lisbon. At the distant Indian harbours it defied control, and quickly grew into a competing private trade on a great scale. The sweets of sudden and surreptitious wealth turned the Portuguese officials into unscrupulous adventurers, careless of their master’s interest in their own haste to be rich.

The abuses incident to such a system fill many pages of the letters home, as a search through the records of the India Office proves. As early as 1513 a cavalier was charged with fraudulent dealing in the rice required for the Portuguese Government. Of two galleons allowed for the king’s trade, one was lost through overloading, while the captain freighted the other with his private

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cargo. Certain of the ships sent “to guard the mouth of the Strait” will, the king was informed, “after selling their rice depart full of gold, and will not care a straw for our service.” A practice arose of coercing the coast rajas into vending their spices to the officials engaged in private trade, while the king’s ships could obtain freights only at enhanced rates. Pressure was put on the native merchants, and several ports were almost deserted by them, as they had to pay heavy dues, which the Portuguese captains corruptly evaded. “The whole [royal] trade is being lost which afforded the revenues of your factory. Your Highness has not nor will have from Malacca any profit as long as the trade is being done by the captains” – who would not pay the customs levied from the Gentiles and the Moors. Such is the statement in a letter for the king from Affonso ‘Alexia, dated January 15, 1530. Many other letters tell the same story. It was felt to be irregular, however, to employ as ambassador an officer who had bought up all the merchandise in the town,

and who seems to be going rather to do his own trading.” Native vessels, on arriving at a port, were not allowed to sell their cargoes until the factory had bought what it wanted to make up the king’s shipment, and this royal privilege the Portuguese officials converted into a device for buying on their own terms the commodities for their private trade. The result was thus pithily summed up in a communication from Fernando Nunes, September 7, 1527: “The native merchants neither will give to, nor have any trade with,

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your factory, from which proceeds great loss to your Highness.”

These were acknowledged abuses. But apart from such abuses, the system led to a perpetual conflict of interest between the royal trade and the officials as private traders. The commanders in charge of the king’s ships sold their private cargo first, and secured a return freight for themselves, before disturbing the market by transactions on his Majesty’s account. In 1530 the Bengal voyage from Malabar yielded the captain £2450 and only £78 to the king – a flagrant case reported to Lisbon. The royal trade to Ormuz on the west and to Malacca on the east suffered from the same cause, as “the captains buy and sell their own goods and not for the king.” The “gift of a voyage” became a recognized quittance for pay withheld or embezzled by the treasury officers, and with good luck in prizes might mean a fortune. It also formed a provision for a clamorous kinsman or a cast-off mistress, and one governor was reported to have appointed forty of his relatives to charges and voyages.

This system, from the first disastrous to the royal trade, soon proved also a source of political weakness. As early as 1524 complaints arose that the captains “do not want war, as it is too expensive and bad to endure, and of small gain and little advantage.” In 1542 a new governor found the royal service in great straits, owing to the number of officers who had left it to turn merchants – a business which “offered greater chance of profit and less danger to life and limb.”

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After three years’ experience he was anxious to resign, “as he saw around him only corruption and dishonesty.” In 1549 a confidential report thus summed up the position: “Each one considers only himself.”

The Portuguese sovereigns did not see the wealth of Asia thus slip through their fingers without efforts to check the malpractices in the East. At one period, indeed, they attempted to exclude not only their own servants but also the native merchants from any share in the trade. This close system, when strictly enforced, drove the Asiatic ships from the Portuguese harbours. For a time it threatened ruin to the lucrative horse trade of Goa, which imported the fine breed of the desert in Arab vessels and resold the animals at a great profit to dealers from the inland courts of India. During the cold season of 1521–1522, the usual supply of about a thousand horses had dropped to under a hundred in the Goa market. “How can your Highness expect the merchants of Ormuz to bring us horses,” says a plain-speaking correspondent, “if they cannot trade in supplies or in any other commodity?” “Your Highness, by wanting to take all to yourself, nevertheless derives no advantage.”

While so strict a monopoly kept away the native merchants, it merely shifted the private trade of the Portuguese officials to harbours which were less closely watched. “Your factory at Cochin,” adds the same writer, “is always in debt;’ the captains of the said vessels that come here making themselves very rich.” The native merchants “will lose what pleasure they

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A palace in the Gwalior state.

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Blank page

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had in trading.” “Let your Highness order your ships to be laden and command the ports to be opened” to native vessels. “There are none now, because your Highness wills to close the ports” – except to your own trade.

An attempt to remedy this state of things by granting passes to native ships, and by forbidding trade to officials, proved unavailing. The pass-system opened up a wider scope for private trading, by allowing the Portuguese servants of the crown to employ native craft to carry their own ventures. By a proclamation of 1524, the penalty to a native captain found in Indian waters without a Portuguese license was death and seizure of his ship and property. The officials took care, before granting the permit, to secure a lion’s share in the profits of the voyage. Every one, sometimes the governor himself, was in the conspiracy, and prosecutions merely strengthened it by the judicial sanction of acquittals. “Which thing did not astonish me,” wrote a candid observer, Limao Botelho, in 1548, “because the procurator of your Highness is one to get his salary.”

The Portuguese sovereigns were, in fact, unable to check the corruption even of the Indian Department at Lisbon, and proved powerless to control their distant servants in the East. After the union of Portugal with the Spanish crown in 1580, the drain of the Netherlands war crippled the public funds required for the Indian commerce, and in 1587 the royal monopoly of the spice trade was sold to a body of capitalists under

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the name of the Companhia Portugueza das Indias Orientaes. The officials in Asia, fearing the loss of their illicit gains, threw every obstacle in the way, and the speculation did not yield the hoped-for profits. In 1697 a new syndicate, called the Companhia do Coramercio da India, received a charter in return for a yearly subvention of £2763 to the crown. After a four years’ struggle with the officials in the East this undertaking also collapsed. The attempts of Portugal to found an East Indian Company failed, but they gave a hint to Europe as to the possibility of corporate private enterprise in Asia – a hint of which the Dutch and English availed themselves.

The Portuguese officials in India defended their clandestine commerce on the ground of the insufficiency of their salaries. Da Gama’s and Albuquerque’s companions had gone forth as crusaders and cavaliers, with little thoughts as to the wages of their service. Their aim was glory or death in a holy war. But the love of fighting spent itself, and the “martyrs” soon wanted pay for their “blood.” At first they looked chiefly to prizes at sea, to the plunder of captured towns on shore, and to the gifts of native princes, voluntary or enforced, at every port from the African coast to the Moluccas. These gifts, originally intended for the king, were diverted to his servants, and soon grew into bribes. In 1522 his Majesty was urged to substitute fair salaries for such gratifications, which already interfered with the course of justice. But the Lisbon government could never make up its mind to this course. The

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European “soldiers were miserably paid and miserably fed, the captains receiving each a salary of twelve shillings per month, and living only on rice and fish.” A commander of a ship of war, rejoicing in the lofty title of Capita.° de Mar e Guerra, was paid “less than a Dutch sergeant.” The sea-captains did not suffer, however, as they exercised some control over the local treasuries. They paid their own claims, whether there was much or little left in the coffer, and seized the best part of the goods of patients who died in the hospitals. In 1530 the Malacca coast was left without a sufficient guard, “because in it there are no fifths and perquisites, nor what to claw, as there is in other voyages.”

Some of the Portuguese exploits form a very romance of robbery. One free-lance, Nicote, having taken service under the sovereign of Pegu, rebelled against his master, was proclaimed king, and was finally impaled in front of his own fort in order, as the Burmese sarcastically remarked, “that he might the better look to it.” The island which Sancho Panza hoped for, and received, as a reward for his services, has been cited as an invention out of keeping with the realism of “Don Quixote.” But more than one incident in the Asia Portugueza of the sixteenth century may have supplied the idea for Sancho’s Barataria. In the middle of that century Jordao de Freitas, having “converted” the King of Amboyna, obtained the island as a gift to himself. Islands were cheap in the boyhood of Cervantes. Indeed, John Cabot, when exploring the Atlantic for England in 1497, had set the example by

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A view of Lisbon in 1574.

giving away an island to his Genoese barber – who ever afterwards regarded himself as a count.

If the system produced bitter fruits in Asia, it had its roots in Portugal itself. Not only could the Lis-bon court never screw up its courage to give fair commercial salaries for fair commercial work, but it used India as a refuge for depraved or destitute hangers-on upon its bounty.

As the slave-tillage of Portugal concentrated large tracts among a small body of great proprietors, the lesser nobility and gentry sank into-indigence. Their blood disdained the degradation of trade at home, and the antechambers of the grandees were besieged by poor relations clamouring for employ-ment or bread. India seemed to offer, if not a fortune, at any rate a grave. In either case the suitor was got rid of. It became the asylum for those who had claims that could not be satisfied, or who had rendered services that could not be acknowledged, or had received promises that could not be fulfilled. Young women were

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shipped off from Lisbon with the dowry of an appointment in India for the man who would marry them. One favoured damsel carried in her trunk the governorship of Cranganore. The multiplication of offices was pushed to an extent which would have been ludicrous, if it had not proved fatal, in Portuguese India. But even nominal posts could not be invented to keep pace with the demand. Each of the four outward ships of a single year “brought sixty persons, more or less, without pay.”

The ravenous hordes thus let loose on India made the race-name of Christian (Firingi2) a word of terror – until the strong rule of the Moghul empire turned it into one of contempt. Their buccaneering in the narrow seas, their pirate nests on the Bay of Bengal, their plunder of the coast and island princes, lie beyond the scope of this sketch, which merely attempts to indicate the policy, without narrating the transactions, of the Portuguese in the East. Wherever they went they snatched at riches; and even in remote China, in the presence of a power which might have crushed them like nutshells, they could not abstain from pillage. In 1527 Diogo Calvo reported that “no land is so rich

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as China,” or could more cheaply supply the royal arsenals in India. The ports were open, but his brother is kept as a hostage at Canton on account of the Portuguese “slaying and robbing.” The Indian settlements, which were the first destination of the adventurers from Portugal, perhaps suffered most. In 1549 things were going “from bad to worse” at Cochin – to use the phrase of a letter from Cosme Annes to the crown – and in 1552 the civic authorities of Goa at length laid their miseries before the king. “In India there is no justice, either in your viceroy, or in those who are to mete it out.” The one object is “the gathering together of money by every means.” “There is no Moor who will trust a Portuguese.” “Senhor, we beg for mercy, mercy, mercy. Help us, Senhor, help us,. Senhor, for we are sinking.”

Footnotes

2. Firingi represents, through Arabic and Persian, the “Francos, quo nomine omnes passim Christiani ... dicuntur.” Jarric, Thesaurus, iii. 217. The Portugals which they call by the name of Fringes.” W. Burton in Hakluyt, v. 32. “Nom qu’ils donnèrent aux Portugais, lorsque ceux-ci abordèrent dana leur pays, et c’est un terme qui marque le souverain mépris qu’ils ont pour toutes les nations de l’Europe.” Sonnerat, i. 58 (1782). In India it is a positive affront to call an Englishman a Feringhee.” Elphinstone, quoted in Sir T. E. Colebrooke’s Life of the Honourable Mountstuart Elphinstone, ii. 207 (1884). See, for a fuller history of the word, Yule and Burnell’s Hobson-Jobson, pp. 352–354 (1903).

This collection transcribed by Chris Gage
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