2

Points of Departure: Portugal from the Fifteenth to the Nineteenth Century

In all the villages nearby and in all the parishes in the vicinity, there was the same aspiration to emigrate, to go in search of riches to far off continents. It was a powerful dream, a profound ambition which dug deep into their souls from infancy through to old age.

(Ferreira de Castro, Emigrantes)¹

The military elite of Portugal seek their fortunes overseas

When migration from Portugal began on a large scale in the fifteenth century, the peoples of western Europe had already been involved in internal colonising enterprises for centuries. The pressure of population on land resources fluctuated with changes in demography and climate, but the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in particular saw the rapid expansion of Christian Europe’s frontiers and the movement of population to colonise marginal land. At the same time the military elites became active, carving out new lordships in the eastern Mediterranean (the Crusades being the most obvious, but not the only example), on the frontiers of Germany and Poland, and in the Celtic lands bordering the kingdom of England.

One major region of expansion and internal colonisation was the Iberian peninsula where from the eleventh century to the thirteenth constant warfare led to the Christian conquest and settlement of the whole peninsula except for the southern kingdom of Granada. This reconquista involved people of all classes. If the lead was taken by the rulers and the military elites (the Military Orders), an important part was played by foreign adventurers and merchants, by the church and by farmers, herdsmen and settlers. During the fourteenth century, however, the reconquista of the Iberian peninsula stalled and the pressures of population on the land, both in the peninsula and elsewhere in Europe, were temporarily eased by the Black Death. Moreover, Portugal and the Spanish kingdoms were sucked increasingly into the wider conflict of the Hundred Years War which absorbed the energies of the military class. North Africa was also an area which lured some Iberians away from their homeland, and during the periods of peace in the Iberian peninsula soldiers originating in Portugal were to be found in many north African armies, though these do not seem to have formed a permanent community, and for the most part those who survived the fighting converted to Islam and were absorbed into the Moorish population.

There were a number of economic developments that contributed to the great expansion of emigration that took place in the fifteenth century. In the thirteenth century Venetians and Genoese, who had begun to exploit economic opportunities in north Africa and northern Europe, established a commercial entrepôt in Lisbon, where they provided captains for the new fleet of royal galleys and stimulated the growth of Portuguese maritime activity. In the wake of the Italians, Portuguese merchant communities grew up in England and the Netherlands—forming the beginnings of a trading diaspora of the kind that was becoming increasingly common in maritime Europe and which gave rise to the institution of the factory (feitoria in Portuguese), the extraterritorial commercial community which enjoyed rights and privileges negotiated with the local sovereign power. This Portuguese merchant diaspora was probably on a small scale but, in the Netherlands at least, a feitoria of some permanence was established.

Once Portugal began to recover from the effects of the Black Death and once Portugal and Castile were able to extricate themselves from involvement in the Hundred Years War, the memories and ideologies of the reconquista began to be revived, first among the Portuguese and then, in the last quarter of the fifteenth century, among the Castilians. The institutions which had been developed as instruments of conquest and settlement, notably the encomienda, were put to use once again in the early phases of Portuguese and Castilian expansion in the Atlantic basin.

During the earlier phases of the reconquista soldiers and settlers had been attracted from many parts of Europe—famously the capture of Lisbon in 1147 had been accomplished by soldiers from England, Scotland, the Low Countries and Germany as well as by Portuguese, and Muslim lands and preferment in the church were granted to men of many different nationalities and allegiances. So, in the new phase of the reconquista in the Atlantic many people joined the enterprise from France, Italy, the Low Countries, Germany and Scandinavia while men from Portugal joined the expeditions and armies of the Castilians in the New World. The people who formed this first phase of the Portuguese diaspora, therefore, came from many different parts of Europe and were not all Portuguese. Their Portuguese identity came from their involvement in what was an enterprise, directed in its earliest phases by the Portuguese Crown and nobility.

The small size and poverty of Portugal had had a profound influence on the way its social structure had evolved ever since Afonso Henriques had declared Portugal to be an independent kingdom in 1139. As the reconquista had progressed, the lands newly conquered from the Moors had passed into the possession of the church, the Crown or the Military Orders of knights. To maintain their status the Portuguese nobility had become very dependent on grants of lands or commands which they obtained as members of the Military Orders or on retainers paid by the Crown, the most important of which were the contias or financial payments made for those serving the Crown in a military capacity.² Others sought to benefit from preferment within the church. Only a few of the noble families had landholdings large enough to be independent, and many of these had family ties outside Portugal with the Castilian nobility. From the late fourteenth century the Portuguese Crown systematically sought to control the wealth and patronage of the Military Orders by securing the masterships for close relatives; by the mid sixteenth century the Crown had taken control of all the Orders, and their wealth, including lands, towns and fortresses, had become part of the Crown’s patrimony. The knights, fidalgos and lesser nobility were now even more dependent on the Crown and on the few large noble families and entered their service in various roles, as soldiers, as ship’s captains and, as expansion in the Atlantic gathered pace, as the organisers of colonising expeditions. The prospect of obtaining land or lordships in the newly discovered Atlantic islands proved especially attractive to elements of the Portuguese upper classes who found patrons in the Infantes Dom Henrique (Henry the Navigator), who was governor of the Order of Christ, one of the two major Military Orders in Portugal, and Dom Pedro his brother, the second son of D. João I. It has been estimated that up to the death of the Infante Dom Henrique in 1460, 80 per cent of the captains of ships that traded to Africa were members of the prince’s household.³

Dom Henrique was also an enthusiastic advocate of campaigning in Morocco, where the prospect of making fresh conquests attracted members of the nobility who had family and class memories of the rewards that had followed the conquest of Muslim territory in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The first campaign in Morocco was mounted in 1415 and led to the capture of the port-city of Ceuta. For the next hundred years the Portuguese extended their conquests, eventually securing control of ten Moroccan coastal towns and considerable swathes of their rural hinterland, providing in the process careers for the military class and opportunities for its enrichment. The captaincies of the Moroccan fortresses tended to become monopolised by individual noble families who made their tenure quasi-hereditary.⁴

Understanding the extent to which the military elite and the noble families of Portugal (the fidalgos and ricos homens) depended on service to the Crown is fundamental to any interpretation of Portuguese overseas expansion. In no other country of Europe were the nobility so dependent on enterprise overseas and so willing to uproot themselves to take part in what was soon to become a global migration. The assumption that status and advancement were to be sought in the service of the Crown overseas became deeply rooted in the cultural outlook of the Portuguese upper class. By the end of the fifteenth century a pattern had emerged of leading servants of the Crown moving from one overseas posting to another, a trend illustrated by the careers of Diogo de Azambuja and Duarte Pacheco Pereira. Azambuja was a knight of the Order of Avis and a member of the household of the Infante Dom Pedro. Having fought in the campaign that captured the Moroccan town of Alcacer Sequer in 1458 and in the war against Castile in 1476, he was selected in 1481 by Dom João II to command the armada that built the castle of São Jorge da Mina (Elmina) on the coast of modern Ghana. He was later to serve as captain of Mogador and Safi in Morocco, dying in 1518. Duarte Pacheco Pereira was a member of the king’s household and his personal squire. Sent on a voyage to West Africa, he returned with Bartolomeu Dias in 1489. As a geographical expert he was part of the Portuguese delegation which negotiated the treaty of Tordesillas. He may have made a voyage to the coast of Brazil in 1498 and in 1503 commanded a ship in Afonso de Albuquerque’s fleet bound for India. He commanded Portuguese forces at the siege of Cochin in 1504 and on his return to Portugal wrote the famous Esmeraldo de Situ Orbis, the first major Portuguese account of the discoveries in West Africa. In 1509 he was sent to track down and capture the French corsair Mondragon and in 1518 he was made governor of Elmina.

Military commanders expected to be rewarded by the Crown either with further commands or with the grant of lands in the possession of the Military Orders or with pensions paid by the Crown from its own revenues. It is well known that Fernão de Magalhães (Magellan) left Portugal and entered the service of Castile because he felt he had not been adequately rewarded by Dom Manuel. This pattern of service and reward continued throughout the history of Portuguese expansion. On the one hand it proved to be a way in which the aristocracy could live off the patrimony of the Crown and survive as a service nobility in the empire, while at the same time it provided a means for the Crown to control the aristocratic families and keep them subservient to its purposes.

With the members of the military aristocracy willing to take up commands and positions in Morocco and in the African fortresses, it was only natural that their squires, clients and retainers would accompany them. There was competition for the most prestigious commands between the members of the rival Military Orders (especially the Orders of Christ and Santiago), but for the most part these military clients of the Crown and the royal princes were not permanent migrants and always had the intention of returning to Portugal. This is made clear in a letter from the governor of the fortress town of Azamour in 1514. Writing to the king about the knights serving in the city, he says,

They all now openly say that they do not have to stay here to begin the war all over again … and that Your Highness should send others who can be here for the same amount of time. And now Your Highness can recall how many times I begged and advised him that he would not engage any more fidalgos for the war except those who are satisfied to have some posting here.⁵

The Moroccan fortresses were close to Portugal, and the society that grew up behind their walls closely reflected that of Portugal itself. The Portuguese populations in Morocco, apart from the soldiers and convicts serving in the garrisons, were made up of family units and formed a fixed population. In 1500 a count of the Portuguese population in Alcacer Sequer revealed that women and children made up 39 per cent of the population.⁶ All the men who resided in these towns were liable for military service, an obligation which characterised the early days of Portuguese overseas settlement and was repeated in the fortress towns established in the Indian Ocean. However, almost from the start this military elite took a major part in trade, at first principally the trade in slaves and captured cattle, which could be seen as the spoils of war, but soon commercial activity of all kinds so that the historian Vitorino Magalhães Godinho could describe the ‘noble merchant’ as the most dynamic element in Portuguese society.⁷

The Portuguese settlements in Morocco grew and to some extent prospered during the period 1470 to 1530, but permanent Portuguese populations never established themselves there. The fortresses became too expensive for the Crown to defend and one by one they were abandoned, beginning in 1541 with Santa Cruz de Guer (Agadir) until only Ceuta, Tangier and Mazagão remained. Ceuta remained in Spanish hands when Portugal declared its independence from Spain in 1640 and Tangier was surrendered to the English as part of the dowry of Catherine of Braganza. Mazagão was finally abandoned in 1769, the Portuguese population being evacuated to a new settlement in Brazil.

While the campaigns in Morocco and the settlement of the islands was under way, the Crown took the lead in exploiting the commercial potential of western Africa. This involved a system for licensing trading ships, and eventually the leasing of the trade on sectors of the coast to syndicates of merchants, wealthy individuals who paid for the privilege, or to foreign banks in return for loans. From the 1440s the trade with the Sahara was organised in this way from a feitoria at Arguim; the Guinea coast trade was leased between 1469 and 1474 to a Lisbon merchant, Fernão Gomes; and the trade of the Niger region went to the Florentine Marchioni Bank. The Crown meanwhile exploited, directly through it own factors, the trade of the Gold Coast and the Congo region and organised a number of exploratory voyages in search of a sea route to India. The feitorias, an extension of a practice that had been familiar to Mediterranean traders in the Middle Ages, became the focus for small communities of merchants whose settlements, although they were located within African territory, enjoyed a privileged and protected status.

As well as sending expeditions to the Canary Islands from around 1420, the Portuguese princes organised the occupation and settlement of the archipelagos of Madeira and the Azores, partly to pre-empt activity by the Castilians in these waters. The islands were to be granted to clients of the Infantes as quasi-feudal ‘donatary captaincies’, institutions which were to be hereditary and which laid an obligation on the captains to recruit settlers, undertake the distribution of land and organise the defence of their captaincies. In return for these services the captains had extensive fiscal and manorial rights and were allowed to acquire limited amounts of land for themselves. When the Cape Verde Islands were discovered in the 1450s and the Gulf of Guinea islands in the 1470s, captaincies were again granted as a means of securing their settlement and economic exploitation. The system of ‘donatary captaincies’ was as near as the fifteenth-century Portuguese monarchy came to organising overseas emigration.

With the setting up of the Estado da Índia in 1505, the opportunities provided by Crown service enormously expanded. To the command of ships and fortresses were added posts in the royal administration, diplomatic missions and church appointments, all of which carried with them opportunities for enrichment for oneself and one’s followers. Captaincies of the royal trading ships and the fortresses were specially sought after and long waiting lists developed of men who had been promised the position of captain of one of the great fortresses like Mozambique or Ormuz. Throughout the period from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, making grants of land and appointments to military commands and administrative offices in Portugal’s overseas possessions provided the Crown with a substantial part of its patronage. Except during the period of the Union of the Crowns of Portugal and Spain (1580–1640), when the noble families of Portugal had access to high office in the Spanish kingdoms, the opportunities for wealth and advancement in Portugal itself were always limited. It was in the empire that the real opportunities lay, and it was the offices and commands that were in the king’s power to grant that guaranteed the loyalty of the needy noble class. As the Frenchman François Pyrard observed, the short tenure of office in the fortresses in the Indian Ocean, which was normally only for three years, was intended by the king to ‘enrich and satisfy his subjects’.⁸ Debates among historians as to whether Portugal profited from its empire are often debates about entirely the wrong issue. Whatever the defence of this vast empire might cost, neither the Crown nor the class of fidalgos in general could dispense with the patronage on which the Crown depended to maintain its authority and on which the upper classes of Portugal depended to supplement their income and maintain their status.

Mainland Portugal as the source of mass emigration

Although the early emigrants who settled in the islands came from all districts of Portugal, the majority came from the populations north of the Tagus, and this was to remain true of Portuguese emigration throughout. With the exception of the river valleys, much of northern Portugal is mountainous and barren, and the tradition of smallholdings and partible inheritance made it difficult for families to survive through agriculture alone. In the centre and south of Portugal, which was less mountainous, the process of the reconquista had led to large estates accumulating in the hands of the church, the Military Orders and the aristocracy. The granting of lands as morgadios (entailed estates) secured the position of these elites but stifled access to the land for peasant farmers and hindered the process of internal recolonisation. Much land in this region lay uncultivated, and wasteland expanded as a result of the depopulation caused by the Black Death. Internal migration, therefore, was not an option for the overcrowded populations of the north, except for seasonal work during harvest time. In an attempt to remedy this, in 1375 the Lei das Sesmarias (the Law of the Wastelands) sought to bring abandoned land back into cultivation. Wasteland was to be granted to farmers on condition that it would be brought into full production within five years on pain of forfeiture. This law had only limited impact within Portugal itself, but was to provide the legislative framework for settling people on virgin land overseas.

In the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the population of Portugal barely exceeded one million, and throughout the first three centuries of overseas expansion it never rose above a million and a half. It was not, therefore, a buoyant and expanding population as such that was the cause of migration, but a landholding system and an economy that did not provide a subsistence for even the small population that existed. Unable to make a living directly from the land, men left their communities to work as seasonal labourers in the vineyards, wheatfields and olive groves of Leon and Castile, and there was an accelerated movement of population to the coastal regions where agriculture could be supplemented by various maritime activities. Coastal communities made their living through working salt pans (salinas), collecting seaweed as fertiliser, building boats and fishing, while in the south piracy, slave raiding and seal hunting in Moroccan waters offered tempting alternative opportunities. These maritime occupations fostered a mentality by which many individuals looked to make their living outside their immediate community and led to the expectation that they might be away at sea for months at a time.

The basic structure of the rural economy and society of northern Portugal remained remarkably unchanged. Many of the characteristics that describe fifteenth-century rural society could still be used to describe Portugal in the early twentieth century, and the structural causes of migration remained the same. In the twentieth century, as in the fifteenth, much of the rural population of Portugal lived by subsistence farming, supplemented by migrant labour or fishing. Alan Villiers, writing of the 1950s, described with deep admiration the hard life of the seasonal fishermen who went to Newfoundland and Greenland,⁹ while Caroline Brettell, also writing of the twentieth century, explained how the household economy of the peasant community proved so long-lasting:

the peasants of northern Portugal survived by means of a rather efficient division of labour, whereby women, as producers of food and nurturers of offspring, reproduced a household to which male migrants contributed capital [in the form of remittances]—capital that was necessary for the continuation of a local economic unit.¹⁰

In the twentieth century the rural economy of Portugal continued to be based on the production of wine, olive oil, citrus, fish, cork and salt, which had been the staples five hundred years earlier. In 1937 wine, fish and cork still made up 55 per cent of all Portugal’s exports.¹¹ Moreover, much of the rural population remained, as it had always been, illiterate and cut off from the developments taking place elsewhere in Europe. To a remarkable extent the economic, social and cultural development of Portugal in the five centuries after 1400, and the contribution made by Portuguese to European and world civilisation, would come from the overseas diasporic community, not from the relatively stagnant and unchanging society of Portugal itself.

In the fifteenth century, to the economic pressures which pushed men in the north to leave the land and to take up maritime occupations was now added the fact that the Portuguese Crown began actively to encourage emigration to the Atlantic islands. As the Crown and the military elite began to organise their settlement, the networks of communication encouraged migration, especially from the maritime communities, to the islands where fertile land was waiting to be exploited. It is likely that chain migration was a factor from the start as maritime activity was often organised on the basis of the extended family and it was from the coastal cities, where boats were built and seamen were recruited, that emigrants and merchants set out to the islands.

It was the northern ports with their rural hinterlands which came to dominate the story of Portuguese overseas expansion. By the seventeenth century Lisbon, Setúbal, Porto, Aveiro and Vianna do Castelo, the dominant ports of the north and centre, had become the principal points of departure for overseas. Lagos and the southern ports, important in the early days because of their proximity to Morocco, dwindled in significance. Instead the great Spanish port-city of Seville with its monopoly of trade with the New World dominated the regional economy and provided a magnetic pull for merchants, seamen and migrants from the southern regions of Portugal.

The Portuguese economy: a long view

Since the traditional economy of Portugal, based on fishing and the production of a limited range of ‘Mediterranean’ products, never supported the population beyond subsistence level, the development of industries might have provided a more profitable alternative, as it did, for example, in the Low Countries. In the sixteenth century there was some indication that this might happen. There was a range of artisan crafts, notably ceramics, which had produced a reservoir of skills, and overseas expansion had created a market for shipbuilding and the production of cannon. After the Union of the Crowns of Portugal and Spain in 1580, Lisbon became the principal port and naval arsenal for the Atlantic war fleet maintained by the Habsburgs.

However, the development of the Portuguese economy took a turn—familiar enough to economic historians—which placed a premium on emigration. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the wealth generated by Portuguese overseas enterprise (the trade in gold, silver, diamonds, pepper, spices, slaves, sugar, tobacco and silk) enabled Portugal to buy abroad the goods to satisfy the consumer market. Increasingly armaments, ceramics, foodstuffs, textiles and consumer goods generally were bought more cheaply abroad than they could be produced in Portugal. The persecution of the New Christians by the Inquisition also created a flight of mercantile capital abroad, so that some of the most productive Portuguese enterprises were to be found not in Portugal itself but among the diasporic communities in Amsterdam, Hamburg and London.

Some attempt was made to reverse this trend between 1670 and 1690 when the Conde de Ericeira tried to promote import substitution and industrial development in imitation of the policy pursued by Colbert in France. Ericeira’s experiments, however, failed partly through the opposition of the Inquisition but more significantly because in the late 1690s Portugal discovered a great new source of wealth overseas in Brazilian gold and diamonds.¹² The flow of wealth into Lisbon after 1700 once again enabled the Portuguese to import all that they needed from the industrialised countries of northern Europe. The change of direction was sealed by the Methuen Treaties of 1704 which tied Portugal economically and politically to Britain—exporting Portuguese wines in exchange for British woollens, and increasingly relying on the Royal Navy, which established a base for its operations in Lisbon, to look after the defence of Portugal and its empire. During much of the eighteenth century the flow of gold meant that the Portuguese currency was exceptionally strong—a strong currency usually having the effect of boosting imports at the expense of exports. The result was that Portugal almost always ran a deficit on the balance of trade, a deficit that was met by payments in gold. The historian A. H. de Oliveira Marques has estimated that remittances of bullion from Brazil during this period constituted around 9 per cent of royal income, a figure comparable to the benefits that Portugal was later to derive from the remittances of its emigrants in Brazil.¹³

During the ascendancy of the Marquês de Pombal (c.1750–77), Portugal once again embarked on an attempt to industrialise, securing for itself its colonial markets and protecting its industries from British competition. This policy had some success and by the early nineteenth century a cotton textile industry had become established in northern Portugal. However, this burgeoning industrialisation was held back by the turmoil of the Napoleonic Wars, especially the devastation of northern Portugal by the French and British armies between 1808 and 1811, by the relocation of the centre of the monarchy to Rio de Janeiro (1807–21) and then by the civil wars. Once peace had been restored to Portugal after 1851, Portuguese manufacturers pressed for protection for their textiles and provided a powerful lobby advocating imperial expansion in Africa where they could enjoy a captive market.

So, from the sixteenth century onwards Portugal became dependent on the wealth that flowed from overseas, supporting the Crown, the aristocracy and the mercantile classes, and enabling the country year after year to finance a large deficit in its balance of trade. This wealth took a variety of forms: the profits of trade, the rewards of office-holding in the empire repatriated in the form of the personal wealth of noble families, the profits from landownership in Brazil, and the remittances of gold from Brazilian mines to the Crown. When these sources all dried up in the nineteenth century, the remittances of emigrant workers came to take their place.

Portuguese emigration, therefore, cannot be understood solely in terms of rural poverty but has to be seen as embedded in the long-term structure of the Portuguese economy. The remittances of emigrants from Brazil at the end of the nineteenth century replaced the remittances of gold that had come in the form of the royal fifth to the Crown in the heyday of the Brazilian gold rush, which, in turn, had replaced the fabulous wealth that the viceroys and others had brought back from the East during the golden years of the Estado da Índia.

The social structure of Portugal

The history of the Portuguese diaspora brings into sharp relief the fact that Portugal has lacked an active and influential middle class. Looking at the story of the diaspora there is no class of person, except perhaps the Sephardic Jews and New Christians, who obviously bridge the gulf between the elite nobles and estrangeirados and the poor and frequently illiterate peasants and workers who filled the emigrant ships. While in the twenty-first century the international community can easily recognise and acknowledge high-profile figures like José Manuel Barroso or José Mourinho, and while the cultural and financial moguls who run the Gulbenkian Foundation, the Fundação Oriente or the Espirito Santo Bank can move freely in elite international circles, the mass of working people who make up the Portuguese diaspora can still be described as largely ‘invisible’, or as having a ‘low profile’ and existing ‘beneath the radar’. The Portuguese diaspora lacks a middle, any discernible group who can bridge a gap that is not only one of wealth and social status but also one of communication.

There is no single explanation for this absence of a ‘middle’. For much of the early modern period (sixteenth to eighteenth centuries) there was deep suspicion in Portugal of the New Christians who were prominent in commerce and finance. What can best be described as an alliance of the aristocracy and the povo (the common people) allowed the Inquisition to persecute the New Christians and in doing so to prevent the emergence of a dynamic indigenous middle class. It was in exile in Amsterdam, London and Hamburg that the Portuguese middle class of bankers, merchants and entrepreneurs became established—not in Lisbon or Porto. In Portugal the place of the New Christians was increasingly taken by the English who, by the mid eighteenth century, had come to dominate Portuguese commerce and much of the business sector of the Portuguese economy. The English were an unpopular and very much a foreign group which, it has often been maintained, treated Portugal as a colony, even as a conquered country, and maintained its influence well into the nineteenth century.

Portugal is a small and in many ways an intimate society, almost like a village, in which ‘everyone knows everyone else’. The Portuguese elites have networks through which banking and business are linked with universities and politics—during the Salazar dictatorship 40 per cent of all ministerial appointments were of academics from the university sector.¹⁴ It is comparatively easy for wealthy or successful people of the ‘middle’ to gain acceptance within this elite circle, but very difficult for anyone from lower in society. Whereas the Portuguese elites have a long tradition of establishing networks and careers for themselves outside Portugal—a tradition that goes back to the days of the close ties with Castile and the Castilian monarchy—the networks that ordinary people establish, the community solidarity that is so apparent in the story of the diaspora, are also factors that isolate them not only from the Portuguese upper classes but also to some extent from the societies of the host nations.

Emigration has had another consequence for Portuguese society. Exile and emigration have always been seen as a way of relieving social tensions and preventing political upheaval—and also of avoiding the necessity for social and economic reform. The expulsion of Jews and the persecution of the New Christians helped to externalise social tensions in the early modern period; and in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries mass emigration was seen by many as a way of defusing potential social conflict, and even of preventing revolution in Portugal—just as, in the Atlantic islands, it was seen as a solution to the problems of drought, famine and overcrowding. And at the beginning of the twenty-first century Portuguese of all classes are once again taking advantage of free movement within the European Union to escape the consequences of indebtedness and austerity at home through emigration rather than political action.

Finding manpower for the empire

In the first three centuries of Portuguese expansion the supply of voluntary migrants was never adequate and the Portuguese Crown, and the military and landowning elites to whom was entrusted the administration of the empire, had to resort to many expedients to meet the empire’s manpower needs. Captains of ships and ‘donatary captains’ who were entrusted with the peopling of the islands, and later the Brazilian and Angolan mainlands, had to seek emigrants where they could find them: Italians and Germans were licensed to trade in Portuguese possessions, Flemings were encouraged to settle in the Azores, Germans were recruited as gunners and mercenaries, Jews, expelled from Portugal itself, were allowed to settle as colonists in the African fortresses and island settlements.¹⁵ Slaves were also used to supplement manpower, being employed in every capacity—as crews of ships, builders, soldiers, labourers on plantations and sexual partners—so that in many parts of the Portuguese world they came to form a substantial part of the Portuguese community. In this way the ‘Portuguese’ diaspora became a diaspora of people of many different ethnic and religious origins.

The Portuguese Crown adopted other various expedients to obtain sufficient numbers of people to man ships, to garrison fortresses and to people overseas settlements. The full complement of soldiers and sailors to man the ships of the carreira da Índia were obtained by forced levies in the towns of Portugal, though, as Pyrard pointed out, ‘when they are in the Indies all are free’.¹⁶ Another solution was to rid Portugal of people considered to be undesirable, and this kind of forced emigration was to remain a reality in some parts of the Portuguese world until nearly the end of Portugal’s empire. Among the earliest ‘forced migrants’ were convicts, known in the Portuguese world as degredados. As early as the fifteenth century the Portuguese Crown was remitting the capital sentences of the courts to exile.¹⁷ Timothy Coates, in his study of the Portuguese convict system, listed the serious crimes that might be punished by exile or deportation as ‘blasphemy, murder, committing an injury, kidnapping, rape, witchcraft, attacking jailers, entering a convent with dishonourable intentions, committing damage for money, injuring someone in a procession, or harming a judge’.¹⁸ Convicts were sent to people the Guinea islands and later Brazil and to help man the fortresses in Africa and the East. They were also chosen for dangerous missions overseas. Some were landed on remote coastlines with the idea that they would learn the languages spoken by the native inhabitants, explore the interior and familiarise themselves with local conditions. Others would be despatched from the fortresses on dangerous missions, men like António Fernandes who was sent between 1511 and 1513 from the fortress of Sofala in eastern Africa to undertake two exploratory journeys into the African interior.¹⁹ Some degredados earned their freedom, others fled, either disappearing without trace or surviving as renegades, adding to the numbers of lançados, as those who settled away from authorised Portuguese settlements were sometimes called.

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries convicts continued to be enrolled as crews on ships, or sent as soldiers to garrison forts or as settlers to help populate difficult and dangerous frontier regions. Prisoners condemned either by the royal courts or by the Inquisition would be assembled in the Limoeiro prison in Lisbon to be sent aboard fleets bound for Brazil or India. On arrival they were free to move about within the district to which they had been sent and could take up any occupation, though they were debarred from holding official positions. The number of these exiles was never great—possibly 100 a year on average from Portugal and another 150 sentenced by the courts in Goa and Brazil. This would give a total of around 20,500 from Portugal over the period 1550–1755 and 50,000 for the whole empire.²⁰ These numbers constitute a very small percentage of those who left Portugal. Although convicts seldom proved satisfactory colonists, Portugal continued to send them to the colonies until 1934.

Forced emigration was not just a means of ridding Portugal itself of ‘undesirable’ elements. It was also employed to remove such people from one Portuguese settlement to another. Convicts might be sent from Portugal to Goa, while those convicted in the Goa high court might be sent to Mozambique, or from Brazil to Angola, or within Brazil from the coastal cities to the Amazon. Portuguese emigration was never a linear affair as both voluntary and involuntary migrants moved in many different directions within the Portuguese world, weaving in a way that was totally unplanned a dense network of contact and dependency.

To those convicted of serious crimes should be added whole groups such as gypsies, and those sentenced by the Inquisition for crimes against orthodox Catholic belief. The persecution of gypsies was sporadic but the law provided for sentencing men to the galleys and women to exile. Eventually so many gypsies were sent into exile in Brazil that a considerable gypsy community grew up there.²¹ Victims of the Inquisition were also frequently sentenced to exile for a specific number of years or for life. Additionally among those sent into exile were political prisoners, and this category grew considerably as a result of the civil wars in Portugal between 1827 and 1851. During the early years of the Estado Novo political prisoners were deported to the notorious concentration camp at Tarrafal on Santiago island, and there were some notable individual cases of banishment as late as the 1960s—Mário Soares, the future president of Portugal, being exiled to São Tomé in 1968.

From time to time the Portuguese state tried its hand at organising settlement schemes, offering incentives to migrants as well as some pressure to obtain enough recruits. The ‘donatary captaincy’ system tried out in the Atlantic islands was employed with mixed success to mobilise private capital for the settlement of Brazil and Angola. This system had its drawbacks as the few captains who were successful in planting settlements frequently acted very independently as over mighty subjects whose freedom threatened the Crown’s purposes. So the São Tomé captaincy was abolished in 1522 and that of Angola after the death of the first captain, Paulo Dias de Novais, in 1589. The Castilian Crown found the same problem with the conquistadores who were granted encomiendas in the New World and in the end had to fight a full-scale war to reduce the encomenderos of Peru to obedience. It is significant that the system of hereditary ‘donatary captaincies’ was never used in the Estado da Índia where Crown appointments, including the office of viceroy, were not hereditary and were almost never made for longer than three years.

There were two officially sponsored settlement schemes attempted in eastern Africa in the seventeenth century and some in Brazil in the eighteenth century: for example the attempt to move the Portuguese population of Mazagão in Morocco to Amazonia in 1769, when 340 families were resettled in an area called Nova Mazagan. The nineteenth century saw further settlement schemes attempted in both East and West Africa as well as a continuation of the policy of establishing convict settlements. These schemes are usually represented as failures, but the settlements on the coast at Mossamedes and in the Huila highlands in southern Angola were ultimately successful in establishing permanent Portuguese communities.

Emigration might also be used as the solution to pressing social problems. It was the solution offered to victims of famine, particularly in the Cape Verde Islands when periodic droughts reduced the population to the edge of starvation. Even in the twentieth century the Portuguese government’s official attitude to famine and over-population was to encourage emigration, even if that was to the hostile environment of the São Tomé cocoa plantations.

In the seventeenth century reformed prostitutes were sometimes sent to the colonies, though their numbers were never great. Orphans might also be put on ships and sent to overseas Portuguese communities. Orphan boys would be enrolled in ship’s crews or in the retinues of noblemen. François Pyrard describes ‘the little boys brought out of Portugal, not grown enough to bear arms… their service only is to attend their masters, and to carry messages’.²² Girls would be given dowries either by the Crown or by some charitable institution and sent overseas to find husbands. In Lisbon there was an orphanage, the Recolhimento do Castelo, which was intended especially to provide a refuge for orphans from respectable and even noble families who would be destined to be sent overseas. Some, known as Orfãs do Rei (Crown Orphans), were given the reversion of important offices and commands as their dowries, so that anyone marrying them would have a lucrative Crown appointment or some allocation of land or revenue along with his bride. The orphans were to be sent either to Brazil or to India. In Goa a special institution, the refuge of Nossa Senhora da Serra, was created at the end of the sixteenth century for the reception of orphan girls. It seems that this policy had little to do with any desire to boost emigration and has to be understood largely in the context of its charitable objectives. The numbers of orphan girls sent to the colonies was never great and contributed very little to the establishment of Portuguese communities overseas. The evidence suggests that Portuguese in the East were reluctant to marry these unfortunate girls, even with their dowries, and preferred to marry Indian women or cohabit with their African slaves. Many of the orphans, unable to find Portuguese husbands, were married locally to Indian men.²³

In spite of its unsatisfied need for manpower, the Portuguese government was always ambivalent about voluntary emigration. Already in the sixteenth century voices were raised warning that emigration was depopulating the kingdom and pointing to the large import of black slaves needed to supplement the workforce. From time to time in the seventeenth century, when population numbers in Portugal probably went into decline, there were sporadic attempts to curb emigration. This was especially the case in the eighteenth century when regulations for the granting of passports were introduced to control the large numbers who departed for Brazil following the discoveries of gold and diamonds. However, the Portuguese Crown did not have the administrative capacity to control emigration either then or subsequently, and there were always voices raised in favour of the emigrant, pointing to the riches derived from the developing colonies and the success with which emigration relieved social tensions and extremes of poverty.

How many left Portugal?

For centuries no one tried to count in any systematic way the numbers who left Portugal; and, given the disorganised nature of the emigration, it would have been impossible to arrive at any figure that had much meaning. So many migrants were seasonal or temporary migrants and so many of those who left for the overseas territories, even the degredados condemned to exile, found opportunities to return that the numbers who left Portugal in any year and the net loss of population are quite different calculations.

The historian Vitorino Magalhães Godinho made an estimate for the numbers who left, which is probably as near to being accurate as any calculation, though it is not clear if he was including departures from the islands or only those who left from mainland Portugal.

During the sixteenth century the average emigration to all destinations was around 3,500 a year, with 2,000 of those sailing to the East. This he reckoned was about 2.5 per thousand of the population, which numbered 1.4 million. The rate per thousand then fluctuated between 3.5 per thousand in the early seventeenth century and 1.5 per thousand in the eighteenth century, when Portugal’s population reached 2,600,000. Even given all the uncertainties about the numbers, and the fact that some areas of the country were more affected by emigration than others, these figures do not suggest that Portugal was suffering an insupportable loss of population. Moreover, since the large majority of these emigrants were men, the demographic effect on Portugal was much less than it would have been had large numbers of women emigrated. Nor was the loss of manpower as serious for the economy as the numbers might suggest, since it is probable that in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the loss through emigration was partly compensated by the importation of African slaves, whose numbers may have amounted to as much as half the number of those who emigrated.

Table 1: Emigration from Portugal

Source: Vitorino Magalhães Godinho, ‘L’Emigration portugaise (XV^e-XX^e Siècles), une constante structurale et les réponses aux changements du monde’, Revista de História Económica e Social, 1, Jan–June (1978), 8–10.