5
The spread of the formal empire and the carreira da Índia
Between 1497 and 1499 Vasco da Gama, a knight of the Military Order of Santiago, made the first successful return voyage by sea from Europe to India. After three follow-up voyages the Portuguese Crown decided to create a new kingdom for the Crown of Portugal in the East. Dom Manuel declared himself to be sovereign over the sea, a new and audacious claim which had no precedent in any existing legal system. The new kingdom of the sea was to be called the Estado da Índia (the State of India) and was to entitle, or at least enable, the king to control the people and commodities which crossed his domain. The principal objective was to enforce the Portuguese Crown’s monopoly over certain branches of international commerce—notably gold, ivory, pepper, cinnamon and horses—and to control strategic materials that might aid hostile Muslim powers. To make this ambitious policy successful all shipping in the Indian Ocean was to be licensed through the issue of passes (called cartazes) and the levying of customs duties on commercial cargoes. To enforce this, a fleet and an army were to be stationed in Indian Ocean waters. The boundaries of the Estado da Índia were never clearly defined but in practice the Portuguese were only ever able to enforce their rule in any consistent way in the western Indian Ocean.
The Estado da Índia needed a seat of government and bases from which its fleets could operate. After a number of false starts a structure emerged based on four heavily fortified strongholds: Goa on the west coast of India; Ormuz controlling the access to the Gulf; Mozambique which acted as a way station for fleets coming from Europe; and to the east of India, the island port of Malacca which controlled the straits of Malacca, providing access to eastern Asia. As Portuguese pretensions met with strong opposition from many African and Asian rulers, aided by the Ottoman Turks, the Portuguese eventually extended their system until they had around fifty fortified settlements. The most important of these were Muscat and Bahrein which supported the base of Ormuz; Diu on the coast of Gujerat; Sofala and Mombasa on the East African coast, which supplemented the fortress of Mozambique; and Colombo in Sri Lanka. Along the coast of western India the Portuguese gradually took control of all the major ports except for Calicut: Damão, Bassein, Chaul and Bombay which constituted the so-called Província do Norte; Barcelor, Mangalor, Onor on the Kanara coast; and Cannanore, Quilon and Cochin which became the centre of their operations on the Malabar coast. In the distant archipelago of the Moluccas the Portuguese also maintained a fort at Ternate, from which they tried to control the trade in cloves. In many cases the Portuguese garrisons in these ports acquired extensive areas of the hinterland, especially Bardes and Salsette, the provinces surrounding Goa, the land inland of the ports of the Provincia do Norte, the Zambesi valley and the hinterland of Sofala in eastern Africa and the lowlands of Sri Lanka. Contrary to what is often asserted, the Estado da Índia was not exclusively a maritime empire but included very extensive mainland territories in Africa and India.
In addition to these fortified towns, which were under direct Portuguese control, there was a network of alliances with local rulers who allowed Portuguese to settle and trade in their dominions and who played an important role in maintaining the Portuguese commercial system. Prominent among these allies were the Sultan of Melinde and the rulers of Ethiopia in north-east Africa, while the Shah of Ormuz, the Sultan of Diu, the rulers of Cochin and Kotte (in Sri Lanka) and the Sultan of Ternate in the Moluccas became, in effect, Portuguese satellites.
The Estado da Índia was constantly at war with those Asian rulers who never accepted Portugal’s claims to control the sea and the commerce between Asia and Europe. The most formidable enemies of the Portuguese were the Ottoman Turks, and when Portuguese naval power had finally disposed of the Ottoman threat in the 1550s, the Portuguese faced challenges from the rulers of Aceh in Sumatra, Kandy in the highlands of Sri Lanka and Calicut in south-western India. The cost of these wars and of maintaining the fleets and fortresses was prohibitive, so the Portuguese Crown gradually leased out its monopolies to its fortress captains or to the captains of the trading fleets, retaining only the pepper monopoly in its own hands (though even this was at times leased to syndicates of financiers in Europe).
Meanwhile new bases from which to carry on the very lucrative trade in silk between China and Japan had been established at Macao on the coast of China in 1556 and at Nagasaki in Japan in 1570, though these communities were largely outside the control of the authorities in Goa.
Each of the fortified port-towns of the Estado da Índia became the focus for a settlement of Portuguese. The population in these settlements was made up primarily of the soldiers and sailors who manned the fleets, the officials who administered the Crown’s trade monopolies and the clerics who served the church. In addition there were some degredados, particularly in the early days of exploration, and some orfãs do rei—girls sent out to the east with dowries in the form of Crown appointments. As far as can be calculated, between 1497 and 1630 around 275,540 people left Portugal for the Estado da Índia, an average of 2,072 a year, twice the rate for departures from Castile for the New World.1 However, the return fleets of the carreira da Índia were also fully manned, so that the net emigration to the East was only 1,024 per annum. Over the whole period from 1497 to 1700 the average net emigration was only 815 persons per annum, almost all of whom were men.2 Europeans travelling to the Estado da Índia experienced very high rates of mortality both on board ship and at their destinations, and Charles Boxer considered that ‘there were never as many as 10,000 able bodied Europeans and Eurasians available for military and naval service between Moçambique and Macao’. He went on to observe that although muster rolls showed 15,000 men ‘entitled to draw service-pay… not more than 3,000 of these really existed’.3 The number of European-born Portuguese in the East was never very large.
What sort of society did the Portuguese create in the various ports where they settled? The Portuguese in the Estado da Índia were essentially governed by the ethos and the needs of the military. Each fort had a captain and a permanent garrison (usually under strength). The captains of the major forts (Ormuz, Goa, Diu, Malacca, Mozambique) were often fidalgos or members of the nobility who held office usually for three years. The Estado da Índia as a whole had a fleet and an army which, during the half year when the monsoon was favourable, would take to the sea to pursue the Crown’s military objectives. In between campaigns the soldiers were unemployed and left to their own devices, though some were supported as retainers by the captains ahead of the next campaigning season. After some years’ service the soldiers could apply to become casados (married men)—that is, they ceased to be full-time soldiers and could embark on civilian occupations, though they were still liable to serve as soldiers in times of emergency. In Malacca, for example, the number of casados at the end of the sixteenth century stood at around 300.4 The Portuguese residents in the settlements were sometimes referred to simply as moradores (inhabitants). They could also apply for leave to return to Portugal but it seems that very few did, largely because Portugal offered few if any opportunities for a good life comparable to those available in Asia.
The officers of the garrison and the officials of the royal factories lived in hope of reward from the Crown for their services, rewards that would take the form of promotion, transfer to more lucrative posts or grants of rents or land in the occupied territories. From the earliest days of the Estado da Índia, almost all Portuguese from the viceroy downwards were engaged in trade. Trade was legal for the casados provided they did not infringe the royal monopolies; the captains of the fortresses, in particular, took full advantage of their control of military force to carve out for themselves lucrative commercial opportunities.
Few Portuguese women ever made the journey to the East, so Portuguese men formed liaisons with African and Asian women, or with the mixed race women born of earlier unions. These wives, according to the Florentine merchant Francesco Carletti, were ‘mostly those born there of Portuguese fathers and Chinese, Japanese, Javanese, Moluccan, and Bengali mothers… most of the women turn out to be very beautiful, and in particular well-formed as to person’.5 The Portuguese usually recognised their illegitimate offspring, who thus became members of the Portuguese diasporic communities. By the mid sixteenth century, although the senior military and civil posts were still occupied by European Portuguese sent from Lisbon, the people who manned the forts and fleets were increasingly the Afro-Portuguese and Luso-Asiatics. The Portuguese communities in the East were on the way to becoming indigenised.
The larger Portuguese settlements, in particular Goa, Malacca and Macao, were formally incorporated into the Lusitanian world by the creation of a Senado da Câmara, established by royal charter, which governed their everyday lives. These cities, and many of the smaller settlements as well, had a Misericórdia which provided a large range of charitable and welfare activities and also acted as a bank for the Portuguese communities. Being a brother of the Misericórdia conferred a social prestige that was recognised throughout the Portuguese world. The church with its ecclesiastical organisation, its brotherhoods and religious houses provided further institutional cement for society. Portuguese settlements also had a militia in which all casados and moradores were expected to serve.
The Portuguese in the East spread their wings
By the end of the sixteenth century the creative, outward looking, culturally alive Portugal of the Renaissance, which had produced the great navigators who had explored the world, the richly inventive Manueline architecture and a generation of poets, scholars and humanists, seemed to have died. The union with Spain had meant an end to the patronage which had been provided by the Portuguese Court in Lisbon and men of talent sought to make a career for themselves in the Spanish dominions. Although the Portuguese re-established their independence in 1640, and installed on the throne the musically gifted Duke of Braganza, it was only in the last decades of the seventeenth century that Portugal began to regain something of the cultural vibrancy of the Renaissance. The seventeenth century, the century of the ‘little ice age’ when the economy of Portugal stagnated and its population declined, was a century of warfare against the Dutch and the Spanish, and a period of introspection and barely repressed social tensions that found expression in the activities of the Inquisition. The mood is reflected in the paintings of Josefa of Óbidos (1630–84), an artist with a unique aesthetic vision unlike that of any other European artist of the period, but whose work was of a stilted, icon-like piety.
It was in the East that Portuguese, old Christians and New Christians alike, felt able to escape from the straitjacket of social hierarchy and religious orthodoxy. In the eyes of many sixteenth- and seventeenth-century travellers, the Portuguese settlements in Asia had already strayed far beyond the moral boundaries of European society and had acquired an exotic character wholly their own. Writers who attempted to describe Portuguese society in Asia were uncertain how to react to what they saw. Were they witnessing a European society hopelessly corrupted by Asian practices, or were they describing something new and different which had to be understood within its own terms of reference?
One of the most vivid descriptions of the Portuguese in Asia was given by the Dutchman Jan Huyghen van Linschoten, who served in the entourage of the archbishop of Goa in the 1580s and in 1596 published an account of Asia as he had seen it. Linschoten famously described how poor Portuguese emigrants, many of them, as we have seen, the sweepings of the jails, arrived in the East travelling alongside noblemen and their entourages. Once in the East all Portuguese acquired social status and assumed the manners of high social rank. The very poorest lived together in communal households sharing a suit of fine clothes in which to appear in public, but all had Indian servants and most found ways of rising up the social scale. Service to the Crown in the fleets and armies was one way, but many Portuguese preferred to become involved in trade, while others, according to Linschoten, made a living by becoming the lovers of Indian women and being rewarded for their services.6
This picture is confirmed by the Frenchman François Pyrard, who wrote in the 1620s. Pyrard borrowed a lot from Linschoten while adding to it his own observations: ‘The Portuguese out there [India] engage in no mechanical arts, in whatever necessity they may be, but call themselves all gentlemen, and live like noblemen.’7 All the Portuguese assumed the manners and style of nobility with the exaggerated codes of honour common in the sixteenth century, but ‘these honours and titles, given by the soldiers to each other, are not used until they have passed the Cape of Good Hope, for then they abandon almost all their former manners and customs, and throw their spoons into the sea.’8 ‘The Indians’, he says, ‘were all amazed when we told them that these fellows were sons of porters, cobblers, drawers of water, and other vile craftsmen.’9 A hundred years after Linschoten, when the Estado da Índia was already in steep decline, the Frenchman Jean Baptiste Tavernier recognised the same pretence:
The Portuguese who go to India have no sooner passed the Cape of Good Hope than they all become fidalgos or gentlemen, and add Dom to the simple name of Pedro or Jeronimo which they carried when they embarked: this is the reason why they are commonly called in derision “fidalgos of the Cape of Good Hope”.10
The lifestyle of the Portuguese had moved a long way from that of the poorer classes of Europe from which most Portuguese seamen, soldiers and degredados were drawn. Linschoten describes the way of life of well-off Portuguese surrounded by slaves who not only supported their life of ease but earned a living for their masters by trading or prostitution. It was a world dominated by the people of mixed race, the children of Portuguese men and Indian women who in the next generation were physically indistinguishable from the Indians themselves but were recognised as members of the Portuguese community. Tavernier also noted that ‘as they change in their status so also they change in their nature and it may be said that the Portuguese dwelling in India are the most vindictive and the most jealous of their women of all the people in the world.’11 The women were closely guarded, leaving their houses only to go to church. In their houses they wore Indian clothes and ate Indian food and the houses themselves were described as having gardens for relaxation.
Linschoten, fascinated as well as shocked by the sexual license he witnessed, was describing a society which in his eyes had lost its martial vigour and whose wealth was ripe for the plucking. His judgment on the Portuguese became the stock in trade for many northern Europeans who subsequently tried to adjust to life in India. Famously the historian R. S. Whiteway, influenced no doubt by the pseudo-scientific ideas about race current at the time, could write as late as 1899 that among the causes of the decline of the Portuguese in the East was ‘the deterioration of the Portuguese race caused by intermarriage with native races’.12
However, Pyrard, although also commenting on the sexual licence, found Portuguese society had many attractive qualities. He admired the hospital for the care of the sick and commented on the cultured society of the Portuguese for whom music was an essential pastime in their houses and during their parties held on the water or in the gardens of their country houses. Although they were addicted to gambling, he approved of the custom whereby those who were fortunate distributed largesse to the losers and even to onlookers. Linschoten and Pyrard were seeing characteristics which describe so many of the diasporic settlements of the Portuguese—their willingness to adopt local customs and practices, their relaxed sexual mores and their devotion to the saints and to the church—and also their love of gardens around their homes.
Another portrait of the Portuguese in the East comes from Francesco Carletti, who reached Japan in 1598 after crossing the Pacific from Mexico. He arrived just as the persecution of Christians was beginning, but found the trade between Japan and China carried on by the Portuguese still flourishing. Carletti witnessed a stand-off between Portuguese and Japanese on board the ship in which he was travelling. The ship’s captain was ‘Portuguese by nationality, though born in Nagasaki of a Japanese mother’.13 The confrontation resulted from an insult given by a Portuguese to a Japanese sailor and Carletti witnessed both groups arming themselves and preparing for a fight which he realised would have led to the foundering of the ship. The exaggerated pride and a sensitivity to real or assumed slights on one’s honour were traits that accompanied the high social status which Portuguese, often low-born, assumed in the East.
Carletti, ever attentive to the tastes of his patron, the Grand Duke of Tuscany, describes the sexual freedom enjoyed by the Portuguese—how visiting Portuguese merchants were able to obtain women very cheaply for the duration of their stay in Nagasaki—and he comments that ‘many of the Portuguese find this Land of Cockaigne much to their liking—and, what is better, it costs them but little’.14 The sexual licence of the Portuguese, he asserts, was in some measure the result of the monsoons:
the lubricity and idleness of those soldiers, most of whom are unmarried gentlemen with no belongings but cloak and sword, and those along with youth, which they use up in the pastime [sexual promiscuity], especially as during four months of the year they cannot sally forth in their ships because of the rains….15
There is in his account, as there is in that of Linschoten, a tacit juxtaposition of the extreme luxury and self-indulgence of the life-style of the Portuguese community in Goa and the perceived weakness of their commercial empire now under attack by the Dutch.
The missions, the padroado real and the founding of Asian Christian communities
The Portuguese presence in Asia was shaped not only by the Estado da Índia but also by the padroado real, the royal patronage over the church which had originally been conferred on the Order of Christ by successive papal bulls in the 1450s. With the accession of Dom Manuel to the throne in 1495, the mastership of the Order of Christ became vested in the Crown and the resources of the Order became in effect part of the royal patrimony.
The padroado real allowed the Portuguese Crown to collect tithes and other ecclesiastical revenues, appoint priests and bishops, summon church councils and issue decrees. It also laid on the Order of Christ the responsibility to establish parishes and episcopal sees, promote missionary activity and provide the funds needed by the Church generally. The king interpreted the padroado real as conferring jurisdiction over the church exclusively on the Portuguese Crown to the exclusion of interference from any other body, the papacy itself included. The rights and responsibilities of the padroado real were not confined to the territories of the Portuguese Crown but covered all Christian communities wherever they might be east of the Tordesillas line—the notional division of the world between Portugal and Castile agreed at the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494. As a result, all Christians in Asia and Africa in ecclesiastic matters came under the jurisdiction of the king of Portugal—a vast extension of Portuguese power and influence, which was not bounded by any territorial sovereignty.
The early Portuguese voyages to the Indian Ocean were accompanied by priests, but they were there to administer the sacraments to the Portuguese themselves, not to act as missionaries. The Christian community therefore was limited to the Portuguese who arrived in the fleets and the women they married on the condition that they would embrace Christianity. The native Christian communities, the St Thomas Christians of Malabar and the Ethiopian Christians, refused to accept the authority of Rome.
There was little if any attempt at converting the heathen until the 1530s, when Goa became a See and the Franciscans, following their dramatic successes in Mexico, became active in Sri Lanka and South India. From the 1530s missionary activity grew rapidly and the Goan authorities began to take an authoritarian line with the Indians living under Portuguese jurisdiction in the Goan provinces. In 1541 Francis Xavier arrived in the East with the first Jesuit mission; over the next ten years he established Christian communities, served by Jesuit priests, in south India, Indonesia and Japan. Jesuit missions were also sent to Ethiopia in 1556 and East Africa in 1560. Meanwhile a policy of forced conversion was being pursued in Goa, where Hindu temples were destroyed and orphans and paupers were forcibly baptised. In 1560 the Inquisition was established, putting a final end to a period of relatively peaceful religious co-existence. Renewed efforts were now made to bring the St Thomas Christians into communion with the Roman Church and hence under the jurisdiction of the padroado real. Meanwhile, stimulated by the activity of the Jesuits, the Dominicans had stepped up their missionary effort, establishing themselves in Indonesia and, after the failure of the Jesuit mission there, in East Africa. Franciscans and Augustinians were also increasingly active.
By the end of the sixteenth century there may have been a million Christians in Asia—the highest concentrations being among the Goans, among the pearl fishers of South India, and in the eastern Indonesian Islands and Japan, where it has been estimated that there were 300,000 Christians. Early in the seventeenth century the Portuguese conquest of the lowlands of Sri Lanka resulted in still more conversions.
In one sense the padroado real made all Christians part of a worldwide community under Portugal’s patronage, though many would have hesitated to think of themselves as Portuguese. However, conversion made it easy for many people in Asia and Africa to enter the Portuguese community, serving as soldiers or generally as clients of the Portuguese, marrying ‘Portuguese’ women and founding Christian Portuguese families. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Portuguese followed a deliberate policy of trying to convert the elite ruling families of Asia to Christianity. If they failed, not unsurprisingly, in the case of the Mughal emperors, they had some success among the daimyos of Japan and among those involved in the endlessly contested successions to Asian kingdoms, principalities and sultanates. Members of the ruling families would often undergo conversion to secure Portuguese aid, and if many of these converts eventually deserted the church, others assumed a distinctive Asian Portuguese identity, marrying Christian ‘Portuguese’ wives, taking Portuguese names and dressing in the Portuguese manner. Some of the members of elite families served the Portuguese in important positions as interpreters, ambassadors, commercial agents or military captains. Some even found their way to Europe, like the ‘two Sinhalese princes who settled down in Portugal and lived the life of another “Don Juan” in the city of Lisbon’.16 This made them part of a worldwide Portuguese community, helping to spread the new faith and with it the network of Portuguese influence.
Although the Catholic mission priests were expelled from Ethiopia and Japan in the 1630s, and in the latter Christianity was virtually wiped out, in other parts of Asia it was priests who, after official Portuguese rule went into terminal decline, consolidated the survival of Portuguese communities—notably in Sri Lanka under the Dutch and in the Indonesian islands of Flores, Solor and Timor where a Lusitanised Catholic community survived and, in a limited way, prospered.
The informal empire and the spread of Portuguese settlements beyond the control of Goa
Most of the missionary work in Asia had been undertaken in communities that were not under the control of the Estado da Índia, and it is clear that the missionary orders preferred to work without the direct interference of the civil authority. In this they were following the example of large numbers of lay Portuguese who had left the official settlements of the Estado da Índia to establish their independence or to seek their fortunes in other Asian states. The growth of these independent Portuguese communities, often referred to as the ‘informal empire’, was as marked as the expansion of the Estado da Índia itself.
The reasons behind this dispersal of the Portuguese in the East are many: life on board ships or in the Portuguese forts was hard and the pay was little or non-existent; the royal regimentos laid down rules that strictly controlled the daily lives of the soldiers and sailors who were subject to the whims of often tyrannical captains; and the administration of the royal monopolies placed barriers to commercial activity while the ecclesiastical authorities continually searched for religious heterodoxy. Portuguese residents in the towns of the Estado da Índia were not free to trade, or to marry, to make their fortunes or to worship as they pleased.
Many soon realised that they had skills that were highly marketable. In particular Portuguese soldiers, skilled in the use of firearms, were much in demand and large numbers of them deserted with their weapons to serve as soldiers in Indian or African armies, where they were well paid and treated as a privileged elite. Once settled outside the Estado da Índia, individual Portuguese were free to trade and to adopt aspects of Asian culture more to their taste. Many kept slave women and lived free from the prying eyes of the religious authorities. Others adopted the life of the freebooter, establishing their own pirate settlements in protected river estuaries, notably in the Bay of Bengal.
These were lawless communities, given to unpredictable and excessive violence, as the Venetian merchant Cesar Fedrici found when he visited Martaban (modern Mottama) in 1566: ‘We found in the Citie of Martavan ninetie Portugales of Merchants and other base men, which had fallen at difference with the Retor or Governour of the citie, and all for this cause, that certain vagbondes of the Portugales had slaine five falchines [porters] of the king of Pegu.’ The caravan accompanied by the falchines had camped overnight at Martavan and a quarrel had broken out with the Portuguese. ‘The night following, when the Falchines were a sleepe with their companie the Portugales went and cut off five of their heads.’ Events then spiralled out of control. War elephants were brought up which broke into the Portuguese warehouses where goods to the value of 16,000 ducats were taken in reparation. The Portuguese fled on board their ships but returned the following day bringing cannon with which they tried to bombard the city. Fedrici, not surprisingly, ‘thought it a strange thing to see the Portugales use such insolencie in another mans Citie’.17
The pirate settlements in the Bay of Bengal are vividly described by the Augustinian friar Sebastião Manrique, who was sent to the mission at Hugli in 1628 and from there was appointed priest to the pirate community of Dianga near Chittagong. This settlement had originally been established in the sixteenth century by traders bringing goods to Arakan. It had been joined by Portuguese mercenaries fighting in the Arakan army and then by pirates who made a living raiding the coastal communities of the Bay of Bengal for slaves. The Portuguese pirates were lawless, ruthless and cruel, their captives arriving at Dianga with their arms immobilised by bamboo splinters thrust through the palms of their hands. Part of Manrique’s task was to visit these slaves when they arrived at Dianga to try to convert them to Christianity, and he claimed that in this way he was able to make 2,000 converts a year.18
Some Portuguese renegades became the trusted servants and advisers of Asian rulers—like Francisco Serrão who sailed on the first Portuguese voyage among the Indonesian islands in 1512. Serrão was shipwrecked but reached safety on the island of Ambon. From there he travelled to Ternate where ‘he became the Sultan’s intimate counsellor and his right hand man in matters of war’.19 He married a Javanese woman and died in 1521.
The Portuguese who left the Estado da Índia did not, however, intend to give up their Portuguese identity. Portuguese renegades, mercenaries and independent traders tended to congregate together to form their own quarters in Asian cities or to establish their own independent settlements. An example of the latter was the large Portuguese town that grew up near the supposed tomb of the apostle St Thomas, hence called São Tomé—today a suburb of Chennai/Madras. There were sizeable groups of Portuguese merchants in many parts of the Indonesian archipelago, including Patani and Macassar, while the most important of these independent Portuguese towns was the trading settlement founded on the coast of China near Canton, which became known as ‘the City of the Name of God’ or Macao. Macao was eventually brought partially within the orbit of the Estado da Índia, though the Chinese did not acknowledge Portuguese sovereignty there until the nineteenth century. In Japan the Portuguese port town of Nagasaki also remained free of the control of Goa. The largest informal Portuguese settlements, however, were in Bengal: the towns of Hugli and Dianga in the early seventeenth century having a population of over 700 Portuguese, making them larger than any other Portuguese town in Asia except Goa itself.
The decline of the Estado da Índia and the dispersal of the Portuguese
At the end of the sixteenth century the Dutch and English arrived in Asian waters and presented the Portuguese with a major challenge. Over the next sixty years the Estado da Índia was at war not only with its European rivals but also with increasingly aggressive foes in Asia. Slowly its formidable military structure gave way. Ormuz was lost in 1622, Malacca in 1641, Muscat in 1650, Colombo and the rest of Sri Lanka in 1656, Bombay was surrendered to the English in 1662 and the towns on the Malabar coast to the Dutch in 1663. When peace was finally made with the Dutch, the Estado da Índia was reduced to Goa, Diu, the Província do Norte and eastern Africa, though Mombasa and the settlements on the African coast north of Cape Delgado were subsequently lost to Oman in 1698.
The contraction of formal Portuguese power continued in the eighteenth century. Bassein and Chaul were abandoned to the Marathas in 1740 and in 1752 the East African settlements were removed from the control of the Goan viceroy and made a separate governorship. East of Malacca the Portuguese retained only Macao and the trading posts in Timor and Flores in eastern Indonesia.
When the fortresses and towns of the Estado da Índia fell to the Dutch or to local Asian or African forces, a process of dispersal and slow absorption began. Most European Portuguese would leave, retreating to strongholds still held by the Estado da Índia, though when the English took over Bombay and established themselves in Madras some wealthy upper-class Portuguese remained in those cities. The Abbé Carré describes the marriage of the daughter of a wealthy Madras Portuguese, Lucas de Oliveira:
I had been invited to a Portuguese wedding, which was celebrated with as much pomp and magnificence as if it was that of some prince or person of high degree. The English Governor was present, with the principal officers of the town and all the garrison companies under arms. After the church ceremony there was a procession round the precincts of Fort St George, which saluted it with all its guns, with many salvoes of muskets, and similar signs of rejoicing.20
Carré’s account of the hazards of marriage with the daughters of Portuguese families established in India is both a reflection on the declining wealth of the Portuguese, which led them to become obsessive about their fidalgo status, and a more general cautionary tale about marrying in haste and repenting at leisure.21
The indigenous ‘Portuguese’ population was dispersed to other commercial centres, creating a series of small diasporas which served to spread the ‘Portuguese’ ever more widely around maritime Asia. A typical example occurred after the capture of Malacca in 1641 when the ‘Portuguese’ population of the city resettled in Macassar. Sometimes the Luso-Asian and indigenous Christian populations remained under the new rulers and negotiated a new and more subordinate role for themselves. When the Dutch began to establish themselves in India, Sri Lanka and Indonesia in place of the Portuguese, they frequently took Luso-Asian women as wives and incorporated parts of the Luso-Asian population into their settlements. In this way Batavia, in its early days, was largely a Portuguese-speaking and not a Dutch-speaking community. Large numbers of Asian Portuguese also remained settled in the territories of the East India Company in Bombay and Madras and took service with the Company as soldiers. Others entered French or even Dutch service. ‘Portuguese’ in English service were usually identified as just another section of the Indian population.
Once the Asian Portuguese were separated from the Estado da Índia, few if any European Portuguese ever joined their ranks. They became increasingly isolated, and grew away from the rest of the Portuguese world, cut off from continued contact with Portuguese culture, except through the church. However, they retained their separate ‘Portuguese’ identity, which was expressed in the observance of the Catholic Christian rituals, in the retention of Portuguese family names, in certain elements of Portuguese culture and in the use of creolised Portuguese speech. As Stefan Halikowski-Smith has expressed it,
the vast majority of “Portuguese” were … dark skinned mestiços who had never been to Portugal, who appropriated certain items of Portuguese dress such as hats whilst neglecting others such as shoes, and were Christians out of status reasons rather than conviction. Indeed, their greatest claim to being “Portuguese” was often not via their blood, but the creolised dialects they spoke.22
He favours the use of the term the ‘Portuguese tribe’ to describe these people who became, in effect, another caste within Asian society.
The Portuguese language, now no longer the language spoken by the dominant elites in politics, law and trade, became fragmented into a number of regional creoles and dialects; by the nineteenth century most of these were spoken only by small groups in western India around Chaul or Cochin, in Malaysia in the region of Malacca, in Sri Lanka and in eastern Indonesia. The use of Portuguese creole dialects may, however, have had a greater importance than is at first apparent. It has been claimed that ‘a Luso-Asian lingua franca … served as the bridging tongue between not one, not two, but three European powers and the indigenous people’.23 Apparently Frederick North, who was the British governor of Ceylon from 1798 to 1805, ‘had to employ a Portuguese–Sinhala interpreter to accompany his ambassador to the court of the Kandyan king’.24 The ‘Portuguese tribe’ acted out the role of cultural intermediaries long after the Estado da Índia lost its political power. The church continued to be supported by Jesuit, Franciscan or Dominican missionaries who recognised the jurisdiction of the padroado real, often in defiance of ecclesiastical authorities appointed by Rome or by the French; and within the church the Portuguese language survived as a kind of language of ritual, helping to keep alive a tenuous Portuguese identity.
During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the economic and social status of these Asian Portuguese communities inexorably declined. The Macassar Portuguese, numbering possibly as many as 6,000,25 had relocated to Ayutthaya after being expelled by the Dutch from Macassar in 1660. In Ayutthaya they remained throughout the next century occupying a distinct quarter in the kingdom’s capital but declining in wealth and economic status. In the East India Company territories also, the ‘Portuguese’ either took service in the Company’s army in a position little different from the Indian sepoys or survived as low-paid clerks or petty traders. The so-called Mardijkers of Batavia were another fragment of the ‘Portuguese tribe’ which formed a substantial part of the city’s population well into the eighteenth century. Eventually the use of the Mardijkers’s Portuguese creole language died out, except for its retention for religious purposes in the Tugu area, though the use of Portuguese family names continued as a last vestige of their Portuguese origin.
In Sri Lanka a ‘Portuguese’ Catholic community survived under Dutch and British rule, being referred to incongruously as ‘Portuguese burghers’. These were the descendants not of European Portuguese but of slaves, servants, clients and soldiers who had been brought to the island in Portuguese service. Apparently in the census conducted by the British in Colombo in 1800, ‘the five thousand “Portuguese” were observed to possess a darker complexion than the locals themselves’.26 Portuguese family names are still very common in Sri Lanka and the Burghers are still an identifiable group who live in the Batticaloa area. In Sri Lanka there was a live literary tradition, and prayers, ballads and poetry written in creole have survived from the nineteenth century. The creole ballads represent a tradition which the Portuguese took with them to their overseas territories. As Shihan de Silva Jayasuriya observes, ‘the creole communities have been the bearers of these songs for several centuries and have kept them alive through an oral tradition for four centuries before they were recorded’.27 Indo-Portuguese creole was still widely used until the end of the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, however, the use of Indo-Portuguese dwindled to the point where it survives only as a liturgical language in some Catholic areas and as a language spoken at most by only a few hundred people in isolated rural communities. This is in marked contrast to the Portuguese creoles in the Atlantic, which are still widely spoken and have even achieved the status of national languages.
In the Lesser Sunda Islands of Timor, Flores and Solor in eastern Indonesia, a branch of the ‘Portuguese tribe’ survived and, in a limited way, flourished. During the sixteenth century the Dominicans had enjoyed some success in establishing Catholicism in Solor. When the Dutch captured Solor from the Portuguese in 1613, the ‘Portuguese’ Catholic population took refuge in Larantuka in Flores, where they were joined after 1660 by refugees from Macassar who brought with them items from the church treasury there. The Christian group became known as Larantuqueiros or Topazes.28
The term Topaze (also written Toepas or Tupassi) was widely used in India and Sri Lanka to refer to people of mixed race who spoke two or more languages.29 The Abbé Carré, travelling in India in the 1670s, uses the term to refer to Christian Indian soldiers in Portuguese service.30 In the Lesser Sunda Islands the Topazes originated from the contact of Portuguese traders with the local inhabitants and from the success of the Dominican missions in making converts. They formed a group who maintained an autonomous existence in Timor and Flores with an assumed Portuguese identity expressed through their dress (the term Topaz, it has sometimes been claimed, means people who wear hats), their use of Portuguese names and their nominal commitment to Catholicism. William Dampier, who visited the islands in 1699, wrote:
These [the Topazes] have no Forts, but depend on their Alliance with the Natives: And indeed they are already so mixt, that it is hard to distinguish whether they are Portugueze or Indians. Their Language is Portugueze; and the religion they have, is Romish. They seem in Words to acknowledge the King of Portugal for their Sovereign; yet they will not accept any Officers sent by him. They speak indifferently the Malayan and their own native Languages, as well as Portugueze.31
Unlike other branches of the ‘Portuguese tribe’, however, the Topazes did not decline and lose all touch with Portugal. They remained prominent in the sandalwood trade with Macao, and this trade in fact sustained a tenuous Portuguese presence in the Far East as merchants from Macao continued to visit the islands to trade this valuable commodity, in the process helping to sustain the Portuguese identity of their Topaze trading partners. Although the leading Topaze families, like the Hornay and da Costas, fought hard to maintain their independence from the control of the Portuguese in Macao, they were also wary of being brought under Dutch rule and had to maintain a difficult balancing act to survive. For this reason it was convenient to have an official Portuguese presence in the main ports of Larantuka (in Flores), Lifau and Dili.
In the nineteenth century this presence, and the local influence of the Topazes, enabled Portugal belatedly to establish a claim to possession of East Timor and Flores. Although a formal partition agreement resulted in Flores being ceded to the Dutch in 1854, the Topazes continued to dominate Timor. Gervase Clarence Smith, writing of the late nineteenth century, described how
the Portuguese position in the area… depended almost entirely on a group of creoles much addicted to piracy, and on a number of petty chiefs who paid a small tribute and were often baptised catholics. Both creoles [Topazes] and chiefs who were tied to each other by marriage and other links, were involved in raids and wars, and the captives taken in such skirmishes were sold as slaves.32
East Timor remained a Portuguese possession with a small Portuguese population until 1975 when it was invaded and annexed by Indonesia. On achieving its independence in 1999 it decided to adopt Portuguese as its official language and to join the CPLP (the Comunidade dos Países de Língua Portuguesa).
António Pinto da França in search of the Portuguese in Indonesia
In the 1960s the Portuguese Consul General in Indonesia, António Pinto da França, enthusiastically travelled throughout the archipelago searching out artefacts, religious traditions and linguistic survivals of Portuguese provenance, uncovering the half forgotten relics of the Portuguese diaspora of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. His book A Influência Portuguesa na Indonésia, published originally in 1970, was a strange work of dedicated cultural archaeology.33
He found bells and inscriptions from Portuguese churches and a Portuguese cannon which had become a cult object to aid childless Javanese women. In Solo in central Java he heard of the cannon called Sutomi, according to local legend named after a princess called Sutomi but with an inscription clearly reading ‘São Tomé’. In Ambon he saw Portuguese helmets used in local ceremonies and was shown the royal regalia of the Raja of Sika in Flores, which included gold objects presented by the Portuguese to his ancestors in the early seventeenth century. He visited the summer palace of the Sultans of Jogjakarta and recorded the tradition that it had originally been built by shipwrecked Portuguese. Nearby was a large stone slab, at one time used as a seat by Prince Senopati, bearing a Latin inscription. Elsewhere in Indonesia he thought he could detect Portuguese motifs in local song and dance and items of dress of Portuguese origin.
More intriguing were the linguistic relics. Pinto da França recorded the Portuguese family names in use in Ambon, Sulawesi and Flores and the numerous words of Portuguese origin found in the dialects spoken not only in Tugu and Flores but also in Ambon, Ceram and Sulawesi. He recorded that the Portuguese dialect was still spoken in the region of Tugu near Jakarta which had been a settlement of the so-called Mardijkers. He recorded the words of four songs with Portuguese dialect words—the dialect he thought was similar to the papiah dialect spoken near Malacca. In Flores, where Portuguese influence had been strong until the middle of the nineteenth century, he found that local Catholics maintained a Confraternity dedicated to ‘Reinja Rosario’ and still used Portuguese titles for its office holders. There he also heard prayers still recited in Portuguese. In Sika, also in Flores, where the king bore a Portuguese name, Dom Sentis Alexu da Silva, a Christmas play, the Sandiwara, was still produced using a curious Portuguese creole dialect, and he reproduced the text of this play as he was given it. He likewise noted down a Portuguese dialect song heard by Charles Boxer in a Jakarta restaurant in 1933.
The Portuguese Asians through Conrad’s eyes
In the late nineteenth century, as the European powers scrambled for colonies in Africa, South East Asia and the Pacific, this carving up of the world was usually justified as the bringing of modern civilisation to backward peoples. To this claim there was always a racial gloss—being white was synonymous with being civilised. The Portuguese, however, were a problem. Were they really white? The country that had once produced conquistadores like Albuquerque was now seen as decadent, its European heritage diluted through intermarriage with Asians and Africans.
In his fiction Joseph Conrad put this simplistic view of the world to the test, but in so doing painted a most unflattering picture of the surviving relics of the Portuguese diaspora in the East. At the start of An Outcast of the Islands (published in 1896) Willems, the central character, described as ‘the confidential clerk of Hudig & Co.’,34 a trading firm in Macassar, is married to a local woman, a member of the Da Souza family, who are descendants of Portuguese who had settled in the islands centuries before. Willems is a white European and ‘fancied… he would be able as heretofore to tyrannise good-humouredly over his half-caste wife, to notice with tender contempt his pale yellow child, to patronise loftily his dark-skinned brother in law’.35 We are told that he cannot imagine anything he might do which would lessen ‘the submission of his wife, the smile of his child, the awe-struck respect of Leonard da Souza and of all the Da Souza family. That family’s admiration was the great luxury of his life.’36
The Da Souzas represent the class of person for which European empire builders reserved special contempt—the person of mixed race who was neither truly European and civilised nor had the virtues of the ‘noble savage’. In Willem’s eyes they
were a numerous and an unclean crowd, living in ruined bamboo houses, surrounded by neglected compounds… they were a half-caste lazy lot, and he saw them as they were—ragged, lean, unwashed, undersized men of various ages, shuffling about aimlessly in slippers; motionless old women who looked like monstrous bags of pink calico stuffed with shapeless lumps of fat, and deposited askew upon decaying rattan chairs in shady corners of dusty verandahs.37
Willems had taken up the ‘white man’s burden’.
He heard their shrill quarrelings, the squalling of their children, the grunting of their pigs; he smelt the odours of the heaps of garbage in their courtyards: and he was greatly disgusted. But he fed and clothed that shabby multitude, those degenerate descendants of Portuguese conquerors…. They lived now by the grace of his will. This was power. Willems loved it.38
Coming back from a night out, Willems decides ‘he had not talked enough about himself, he had not impressed his hearers enough’. So he makes his wife get up and listen to him: ‘She was used to those night discourses now. She had rebelled once—at the beginning. Only once.’39 So the non-European world, and with it Portugal and the Portuguese, had to listen to the lectures and bragging of the racially charged imperialists of the late nineteenth century.
In setting the scene for his novel in this way, Conrad is using Willems to present a view, widely held in northern Europe and America, about the relationship of the white man with the non-white. The non-white was seen as lazy, squalid, living off the charity of the white, lost in moral decadence. For the purposes of this story it is the mixed-race Portuguese who has to stand as the symbol of decadence. The relationship of Willems with the Da Souzas is structured to be the relationship of Europe with the non-European world. That this relationship is soon to be transformed, as the power of the white man leads inevitably to his moral corruption, is the very essence of Conrad’s vision of empire.
Macao
With the decline and break-up of the Estado da Índia, there remained only two Portuguese communities in Asia able to sustain a viable economy and to remain centres of Portuguese culture: Goa and Macao. Each of these was to generate its own wave of emigrants in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and to contribute to the multifaceted Portuguese diaspora.
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Macao was a rich commercial city whose merchants traded with Japan and throughout the China Sea as far as the Moluccas and Timor. With the closure of Japan after 1639 the prosperity of Macao declined, though it retained a role in some East Asian trades. Macao remained under Portuguese control and until the middle of the nineteenth century was the only European port on the coast of China. Because Macao remained technically part of China, it became in effect a sort of semi-autonomous trading republic ruled over by its Senado da Câmara. Although there were always some European Portuguese based in Macao, most of the Macao ‘Portuguese’ were of mixed Chinese, Portuguese and Malay origin. They traded with the Topazes of the Lesser Sunda Islands and found other niche markets in the East, but increasingly the city became the resort of private traders trying to evade the East India Company’s monopolies or the embargo on opium imports imposed by the imperial Chinese government.40 As a commercial centre the city had constantly to reinvent itself, becoming in turn a hub for the trade in opium, gold, and contract labour and in the twentieth century a centre for gambling.
It was from Macao that Christian missions were despatched to Japan and China; and in China a small, partially Lusitanised, Christian community came into existence. Macao was also seen as offering a possible solution to the problem of peopling the hard-pressed Estado da Índia and there were plans to send orphan girls from Macao to provide wives in eastern Africa—an echo of the policy adopted towards orphans in Portugal itself.
In the nineteenth century Macao became a centre for the recruitment of Chinese labour, shipments of indentured workers being made to Peru and Cuba. Clarence Smith estimates that Cuba imported 125,000 Chinese and Peru 100,000 between 1847 and 1874.41 These were not Lusitanised Macaonese and they have no real place in the history of the Portuguese diaspora; but they were recruited by Portuguese agents in Macao, some were shipped in Portuguese vessels and the trade was financed by Portuguese capital. Just as the origin of the transatlantic African slave trade had been linked to Portuguese overseas expansion, so this last phase of what was in effect a slave trade was generated in one of the Portuguese diaspora’s most long-lived communities.
In the twentieth century there has been a considerable exodus of Macaonese who, of course, had Portuguese citizenship until the city was handed over to China in 1999. Many Macaonese took advantage of being Portuguese and moved to Lisbon from where there was free movement within the European Union, while others moved to the booming commercial centre of Hong Kong where, according to official Portuguese estimates, there were 20,000 Portuguese residents in 1997.42
The Goan diaspora
Goa became the capital of the Estado da Índia after 1530 and the centre of its military, political and ecclesiastical administration. As the city grew it attracted a very mixed population and became what the twenty-first century would call a multicultural community. Those Indians who adopted Christianity in time joined with the offspring of Portuguese and Indian women to form a population with a distinctly Goan ethnic identity which, while retaining Indian caste distinctions, was heavily influenced by Portuguese language, culture and ideas.
Individuals from this community were partially absorbed into the Portuguese ruling elite, having access to education, and occupying administrative and ecclesiastical positions within the Portuguese world. Goans, along with other Luso-Asians, were employed in various capacities throughout the Estado da Índia. Michael Pearson gives as an example the
very distinguished Xavier family… descended from a convert originally called Narsu Quenim, [who] apparently had no, or very little, European blood. Despite this they flourished in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Family members held such official positions as interim secretary-general of Portuguese India, secretary to the governor general of Mozambique, president of the municipal council of Mozambique, and commander of the artillery in Lisbon’s national guard. Others were a priest, a doctor, a headmaster, and the famous littérateur Filippe Nery Xavier.43
The Abbé Faria
Some Goans found their way to Europe along the pathways built by the centuries of imperial commerce. An intriguing example is the Abbé Faria, one of the best known and most vividly portrayed characters from the Portuguese diaspora.44 The very ambiguity that surrounds him only emphasises the uncertainties that typify most diasporic identities. The Abbé Faria is a central character in the first part of Alexander Dumas’ novel The Count of Monte Cristo. The hero of the story, Edmond Dantès, becomes Faria’s fellow prisoner in the notorious prison, the Château d’If. In the course of the story the two make contact with each other, strike up a friendship and, when the Abbé eventually dies in his cell, Edmond escapes from the Château by substituting himself in the Abbé’s shroud and getting carried out of the prison to be buried at sea. However, before his death the Abbé had imparted the secret of a hidden treasure that made Edmond’s fortune and enabled the adventures of the rest of the novel to unfold.
Most commentators are agreed that Dumas based his Abbé on a real person, a priest called José Custódio de Faria who had spent fourteen years as a prisoner in the Château d’If. However, with the name and the coincidence of incarceration the similarities apparently end. In Dumas’ story the Abbé is Italian, has been imprisoned for his activities as an Italian nationalist propagandist and had come across the information about the hidden treasure during his period as chaplain to an Italian cardinal. In his prison he had displayed immense ingenuity in making for himself writing materials and tools and had begun the laborious task of digging for himself an escape tunnel. Once he made contact with Edmond he became the young man’s mentor, teaching him languages and advising him on the ethical conduct of his life and on the techniques of survival in prison. The Abbé suffered from some acute nervous disorder from which he eventually died—still a prisoner.
The real Faria was Goanese. He had travelled with his father to Rome and had taken holy orders. In France he had taken an active part in the Revolution and for that he had been imprisoned. However, he did not die in prison and on his release began a career as a scientist. He studied hypnotism and is acknowledged as one of the founders of modern psychoanalysis.
So, was there any link between the fictional and the real Abbé, apart from the name?
In Dumas’ imagination Faria becomes a typical member of an enlightened intellectual elite, educated within the church, but able to become a master of contemporary science and to use his education, with its philosophical subtleties and casuistries, to chart a path through the turmoil of revolutionary Europe. Although coming from a priest-ridden background, he had nevertheless surmounted the superstitions of his age and had embraced the science of the Enlightenment.
A child of the Portuguese diaspora, the real Faria was also an estrangeirado, receiving his education and training in Italy. He had carried out experiments in hypnotism and research into the human psyche—strange, innovative and unorthodox areas of knowledge. This comes through clearly in Dumas’ character: ‘I am the poor mad prisoner of the Chateau d’If: for many years permitted to amuse the different visitants to the prison.’ His understanding of mankind, he explains to Edmond, is based on the idea that humans have innate ideas: ‘the natural repugnance to the commission of… a crime prevents its bare idea from occurring to you … our natural instincts keep us from deviating from the strict line of duty.’45 Dumas’ character is a student, even a master, of human psychology and Edmond describes him as ‘the wonderful being whose hand seemed gifted with the power of a magician’s wand’ and ‘one gifted with supernatural powers’.46 Later Edmond says of Faria, ‘you who see so completely to the depth of things and to whom the greatest mystery seems but an easy riddle’.47 The Abbé describes what it is to be a scientist and student of human psychology: ‘to learn is not to know; there are the learners and the learned. Memory makes the one; philosophy the other.’48
The Goan diaspora in the nineteenth century
In East Africa, where Goans were usually known as Canarins by the Portuguese, they served as priests in the parish churches, traded for gold and ivory and became the holders of prazos, the semi-feudal grants of land and population which were made in the Zambesi valley region and in the Querimba Islands. As late as the 1880s some of the most influential figures in East Africa, like the warlord Manuel António de Sousa, were Goans.
With the contraction of the Estado da Índia in the eighteenth century and the decline of its economy, the Portuguese government was no longer able to provide career opportunities for educated Goans and it became increasingly common for them to seek employment in the territory of the East India Company—particular in nearby Bombay, which by the nineteenth century had a large Goan community, its members typically filling low-status clerical positions in government or business offices. Poorer Goans found employment as seamen or in domestic service.
The Portuguese established a medical school in 1842 in Goa, the Escola Médico-Cirúrgica de Goa, and Goan-trained doctors practised in other Portuguese colonies and in various parts of the British Empire. Zanzibar was one destination popular with Goans in the nineteenth century and many, including a number of doctors, found employment in the service of the Sultan. When the British took control of the areas that later became Uganda and Kenya, Goans from Zanzibar found expanded job opportunities working for the British administration or British companies, again filling clerical positions and sometimes more humble occupations like cooks.
Goans had Portuguese passports and had to be treated as Portuguese citizens by the British authorities, and this set them apart from other Indians. For the British, Goans had an advantage over other Indians in being Christian and having a partly European educational background. The Portuguese themselves appointed consular officials in East Africa from among the Goan community and this became an established practice until the end of the colonial regime. One Goan consul, a doctor named Rosendo Ayres Ribeiro, allegedly went on his rounds mounted on a zebra.49
It was not just the Goanese diaspora which gave the Portuguese some influence in British India, for this influence had another basis in the partial control that Portugal still retained over the Catholic church through the padroado real. The Portuguese continued to claim the right to make church appointments, even in branches of the church located in British India. Renamed the Padroado Ultramarino Português and, since 1911 (following the Portuguese Law on the Separation of Church and State), the Padroado Português do Oriente, the padroado real remained in much of Asia as the ghostly presence of the long defunct Estado da Índia. The sphere of its influence steadily contracted although its continued existence was confirmed by the Pope in 1928. It finally disappeared with the withdrawal of Portugal from Macao in 1999.
Not all Goans were Christian and, especially after the acquisition of the Novas Conquistas which greatly expanded Goan territory towards the end of the eighteenth century, rather more than half the population was Hindu. In the outlying port-towns of Damão and Diu, which still remained under Portuguese control, most of the population were non-Christians. Many Hindus, Parsees and Muslims from Portuguese-controlled territories traded, and even settled, throughout the Indian Ocean, and were especially prominent in the Portuguese-controlled ports in eastern Africa. Although this trading diaspora had its point of origin in the Portuguese ports of northern India, and although its members probably spoke and wrote Portuguese, they were only ‘Portuguese’ in the most marginal sense.50
Organised opposition to Portuguese rule in Goa began to emerge in the eighteenth century and continued with sporadic rebellions and conspiracies in the nineteenth century. These movements were too weak to destabilise Portuguese rule but did lead to political exiles joining the Portuguese diaspora in British India.
Although the Portuguese always considered Goa to be part of the pluricontinental kingdom of Portugal, it was only with the declaration of the Portuguese Republic in 1910 that Goans were explicitly given equal rights with metropolitan Portuguese and that the idea of equality of the Portuguese nation was given full expression. The Republic also offered the Asian and African territories of Portugal autonomy within what, in effect, was intended to be a federal structure.51 However, any suggestion of Goan autonomy was ended with the demise of the Republic in 1926 and the passing of the Colonial Act in 1930 which, while affirming the unity of the Portuguese nation across the world, brought the administration of Goa directly under the control of Lisbon. As Salazar’s Portugal tried to ‘go it alone’ in the world of the 1930s, seeking the elusive goal of autarchy and trying to stem the spreading flood tides of liberalism and communism, Goa became ever more detached from the developments taking place in British India. Goans increasingly looked outside the closed Portuguese world for education, for career opportunities and for political freedoms. According to Caroline Brettell, ‘an estimate made in 1954 suggested that about 180,000 Goans were away from their homes’52 and, as with Portuguese emigrants elsewhere in the world, the remittances sent back to their families were a substantial contribution to the economy of Portuguese India.
The determination of Salazar to view Goa as essentially a branch of the Portuguese nation led once again to increasing numbers of Goans, like the Cape Verdeans, being employed in the Portuguese colonial service in Africa. Caroline Brettell gives the example of Edgar Fernandes who arrived in Lisbon from Goa in 1958 and was employed in a technical capacity in Cape Verde and Timor.53
Goa and the Goan diaspora after 1961
After the independence of India in 1947 the political future of Goa became an urgent issue. Broadly speaking three different paths to the future were outlined. There were those, mostly Hindus who formed possibly 60 per cent of the population of Goa, who wanted unification with India and incorporation into the Indian Republic; then there were those who wanted independence for Goa apart from India; and thirdly those who wanted to remain as part of Portugal. The last group were mostly Goan Christians. The Goan diaspora was also divided along similar lines as to how it saw the way ahead.
In the event India invaded Goa in December 1961 and the territory, along with Damão and Diu, was fully incorporated into India. This resulted in yet another wave of the Goan diaspora. Some Goans, unwilling to be taken over by India, left for Portugal, escaping first to Karachi and then travelling by boat to Lisbon. Others went to the Portuguese African colonies, but there was a further dispersal after these colonies were granted independence in 1975. While some Goans joined the ranks of Frelimo or the MPLA, most left for Lisbon, Brazil or other destinations. Edgar Fernandes, as Caroline Brettell found out, had cousins in Canada, Britain and the United States.
The Goan diaspora, therefore, has four distinct elements and many subdivisions. First there are those who left while Goa was still under Portuguese rule; second there were those who left soon after the Indian take-over in 1961; third were the Goans who had already moved to Africa but after 1975 found they had to move again to Europe or the Americas; and finally there are Goans who have left more recently, taking advantage of the regulations drawn up in Lisbon in 1991 which allowed anyone who could establish that they, their parents or grandparents were born in Goa prior to 1961 to apply for Portuguese citizenship. This included Hindu as well as Christian Goans and greatly increased migration from India to Portugal and from Portugal to the rest of the European Union.54
Within the broad category of recent Goan emigrants there are various subdivisions, for example between Catholic and Hindu Goans or between those who had worked for the Portuguese dictatorship and those who arrived after its demise. To these divisions have to be added the divisions which have grown up between Goans who settled in Portugal and those who settled in Britain or the Americas. Moreover it was not only Catholic and Hindu Goans that left India and arrived in Portugal via the African colonies. There were significant numbers of Ismailis and Gujeratis who had made careers within the Portuguese empire, who spoke Portuguese and had been educated in the Portuguese colonies. Many of these also left the Portuguese African territories in the 1970s to settle in Portugal and from there spread to western Europe.
The Portuguese diaspora reaches Australia
It is probable that Australia was sighted by Portuguese navigators in the sixteenth century, but most improbable that there was any settlement there. During the gold rush of the early 1850s some Madeirans who had settled in British Guiana chartered a ship to go to Australia, but only a handful of Portuguese are recorded in any of the Australian states until the period of the Second World War. During the War Macao was not occupied but remained under close Japanese surveillance from Hong Kong. Portuguese Timor, however, was invaded by Japanese forces in 1942 and remained under their control until the end of the war. It was during the war that the first significant number of Portuguese and Luso-Asians departed for Australia to begin the formation of a Portuguese community there.
There was a renewed influx of Portuguese after the Indonesian invasion of East Timor in 1975 and by the 1980s the Portuguese community, mostly in the state of Victoria, numbered between 2,000 and 3,000. By 1997 the numbers of Portuguese in Australia had risen to 55,339, according to the often exaggerated statistics compiled by the Portuguese Ministry of Foreign Affairs.55 Figures for 2010 compiled by the Centro de Investigação de Estudos de Sociologia (CIES) gave 18,520 people in Australia as having been born in Portugal.56