Portuguese portraits
Date: 2022-05-30T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Portugal -- Biography

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Portuguese portraits

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Title: Portuguese portraits

Author: Aubrey F. G. Bell

Release date: May 31, 2022 [eBook #68210]
Most recently updated: October 18, 2024

Language: English

Original publication: United Kingdom: B. H. Blackwell, 1917

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/68210

Credits: The Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PORTUGUESE PORTRAITS ***

PORTUGUESE PORTRAITS

By the same Author

THE MAGIC OF SPAIN, 1912.
IN PORTUGAL, 1912.
POEMS FROM THE PORTUGUESE, 1913.
STUDIES IN PORTUGUESE LITERATURE, 1914.
LYRICS OF GIL VICENTE, 1914.
PORTUGAL OF THE PORTUGUESE, 1915.

New York Agents
LONGMANS, GREEN & CO.
FOURTH AVENUE AND 30TH STREET

NUN’ ALVAREZ.
From the earliest (1526) edition of the Cronica.
[Frontispiece.

PORTUGUESE PORTRAITS

BY

AUBREY F. G. BELL

A notavel fama dos excelentes barões e muito antiguos antecessores dina de perpetua lembrança

Duarte Pacheco Pereira, Esmeraldo

Oxford
B. H. BLACKWELL, BROAD STREET
MCMXVII

TO

THE COUNTLESS FORGOTTEN HEROES
OF PORTUGAL

In burning sands or Ocean’s blinding silt,
In Africa, Asia, and the icy North,
They lie: yet came they home who thus went forth,
Since of their bones is all their country built.

Preface

Not seven, nor seventy, names exhaust the tale of Portugal’s great men. The reader need but turn to the fascinating pages of Portuguese history. There he will find a plentiful feast set out before him—the epic strife between Portuguese and Moor, Portuguese and Spaniard, and deeds of high emprise in the foam of perilous seas and the ever-mysterious lands of the East. His delight will be impaired unless he can follow the events in detail in the chronicles and histories of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and for this a knowledge of Portuguese is requisite, since there are few satisfactory translations. But it is as easy to acquire a sufficient knowledge of Portuguese to read it with pleasure as it is difficult to write or speak it.

There is a whole literature, often not less attractive in style than in subject, of histories, memoirs, travels, accounts of wrecks and sieges, recording the deeds of the Portuguese on and beyond the seas. Of the battle of Ourique (1139) Portuguese historians have loved to tell how the Moors numbered 600,000 (since to say 900,000 were an exaggeration) and how, heavy rain having fallen after the battle, the streams that flowed into the far-distant Guadiana ran red with blood. But there were scrupulous and moderate chroniclers like Fernam Lopez and Azurara, and many of the historians of India were sober writers whose narratives (those, for instance, of Fernam Lopez de Castanheda, Diogo do Couto, and Gaspar Correa) bear the stamp of truth while they delight the reader by their wealth of detail and personal anecdote.

They may be pardoned for declaring that their heroes’ achievements outshone those of Greek and Roman. For indeed the half-century (1498-1548) between the voyage of Vasco da Gama and the death of Dom João de Castro is thick with names; the great men tread on one another’s heels in the halls of fame, worthily continuing the work of their predecessors during four centuries in Portugal. Sousa, Mello, Meneses, Cunha, Castro, Noronha, Mascarenhas, Coutinho, Pereira, Pacheco, Almeida, Azevedo, Sá, Silva, Silveira—these are names the very catalogue of which must be music to a Portuguese, and which would require a large volume to chronicle in detail.

And many women hold a high place in Portuguese history, as the Queen-Saint Elizabeth (or Isabel),[1] the stout-hearted bakeress of Aljubarrota, Brites (Beatrice) de Almeida, who slew, if we are to trust the tradition, seven Spaniards with her wooden baker’s shovel, or the heroines of Diu.[2]

Among the men there is Affonso Henriquez, first King of Portugal, half French by birth, and grandson of the Spanish King of Leon, but in heart and action wholly Portuguese; loyal Egas Moniz; Gualdim Paes and other legendary heroes in the conflict with the Moors which transformed Portugal from a dependent province into a free kingdom; and later, if not less legendary, Fernão Rodriguez Pacheco, the astute defender of Celorico, who in starvation by a miracle obtained a fish and sent it to the besieger to show that plenty reigned in the town; or the defender of Coimbra, Martim Freitas, heroically, almost quixotically loyal to the deposed King Sancho II.

On the sea the first to signalise himself was Fuas Roupinho, in the twelfth century; and thenceforth Portugal never failed to produce hardy if obscure seamen, to fish for cod in the Northern Seas or to discover the west coast of Africa till Bartholomeu Diaz rounded the Cape of Storms in 1487, and King João II rechristened it the Cape of Good Hope.[3]

João II (1481-95), “the Perfect Prince,” or as Queen Isabella of Spain more bluntly called him el hombre, “the man,” was one of a series of great kings of the House of Avis, founded by João I (1385-1433) “of good memory,” darling of the Lisbon people. João I was succeeded by his eldest son, the noble but unfortunate student-king Duarte (1433-8). Other brothers of Prince Henry the Navigator, scarcely less famous, were the Infante Pedro, statesman and author, who travelled through “the seven parts of the world,” and the Infante Fernando, who died slowly with saintly patient heroism as a prisoner of the Moors in Africa.

Under Manoel I (1495-1521) the Great, the Fortunate, and his son João III (1521-57), Gama, Albuquerque and Dom João de Castro are the most conspicuous names; but Dom Francisco de Almeida, first Viceroy of India, Pedro Alvarez Cabral, discoverer of Brazil, Fernão de Magalhães, the harsh and fiery navigator[4] who first penetrated by sea to the North Pacific and was slain in the hour of his triumph—his name lives in the Straits of Magellan—and many more were almost equally celebrated. But especially among the discoverers and early adventurers in India the men of fame are but types of hundreds of less fortunate heroes who perished. Men left Portugal with their lives in their hands, and for every one who (like Fernam Mendez Pinto) survived to tell the tale scores sailed away who were never seen or heard of afterwards.

Yet the population of Portugal in the first third of the sixteenth century may have been but 1,500,000, and certainly did not reach twice that figure. That is a fact that must uplift and inspire those who study Portugal’s history or consider her future. For the Portuguese of the sixteenth century fought not against or not only against hordes of undisciplined savages, but against Moors and Turks highly civilised and well equipped with artillery.

Perhaps the secret of their success is that their motto was “God, King, and Country,” and that each man among them relied, under Heaven, on himself, not on this or that sect or party or philosophy, election promises or political programmes. They did not wait and watch for some wonderful Ism, like a brazen serpent, to change the face of the world: they as individuals simply, persistently set to work and—changed it. In less than fifty years after the Portuguese first reached India they were in Japan, converting and civilising the Japanese, and had made possible that tremendous saying of Camões:

E se mais mundo houvera lá chegára.

And had there been more world they would have reached it.

That is, of course, a terrible condemnation as well as an undying honour, for unless each generation were to produce an Albuquerque there could be no hope of maintaining conquests so wide, and Albuquerque had had his hands tied by his own countrymen, so that, like the blinded Samson, he achieved the ruin of his enemies by his unaided strength and at the expense of his own life. But if Portuguese statesmanship was at fault in India, there never failed a sprinkling of individuals who spent their lives in ungrudging service and heroic effort to counterbalance errors committed, and often died heartbroken for their pains.

Two anecdotes will give an idea of the spirit that animated the Portuguese in the sixteenth century. During the siege of Diu a soldier, Fernão Penteado, seriously wounded in the head, went to the surgeon, but, finding him busy with other wounded and hearing the noise of a Turkish attack, he returned to the fight and came back with a second serious wound in the head, only to find the surgeon busier than before. Again he went to fight, and when the surgeon was finally able to attend to him he had a third wound, in his right arm.

The second incident occurred in North-West Africa. During a fight Dom Affonso da Cunha, aiming a mighty cut with his sword at a Moor, missed him, and the sword leapt from his hand. “Go fetch it, you dog!” roared Cunha, and the terror-stricken Moor obediently picked it up and gave it to him, trembling. Cunha thereupon spared his life.

Such were those Portuguese of old, persistent, brave, proud, magnificent. And something of their spirit survives in the Portugal of to-day, ready to reappear at a crisis—more of it, perhaps, than is generally imagined.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Antonio Coelho Gasco in his Conquista, Antiguidade e Nobreza da mui insigne e inclita Cidade de Coimbra (Lisboa, 1805) drew the following rash picture of her from an ancient portrait at Coimbra: “This very saintly lady was of gigantic frame and very stout, very white and very red, with a long face and large serene green eyes, nose rather low with wide nostrils, head long and beautiful.”

[2] Isabel Fernandez, Barbara Fernandez, and Isabel Madeira. Later heroines at home were Isabel Pereira in the defence of Ouguella against the Spanish in 1644 and Elena Perez in the similar siege of Monção in 1656.

[3] The Portuguese accounts of these discoveries are most vivid and minute, a fascinating introduction to the geography of what is now largely part of the British Empire.

[4] Garcia da Orta introduces him with the words “The Devil entered into a Portuguese.”

Contents

| PAGE
I
King Dinis | 1
II
Nun’ Alvarez | 17
III
Prince Henry the Navigator | 47
IV
Vasco da Gama | 61
V
Duarte Pacheco Pereira | 79
VI
Affonso de Albuquerque | 103
VII
Dom João de Castro | 127

List of Illustrations

| FACING PAGE
NUN’ ALVAREZ | Frontispiece
From the earliest (1526) edition of the Cronica.
PRINCE HENRY THE NAVIGATOR | 49
VASCO DA GAMA | 63
AFFONSO DE ALBUQUERQUE | 105
From Gaspar Correa, Lendas da India, frontispiece to vol. ii. pt. 1.
JOÃO DE CASTRO | 129

I
KING DINIS

(1261-1325)

Co’ este o reino prospero florece.
Camões, Os Lusiadas.

Um Dinis que ha de admirar o mundo.
Antonio de Sousa de Macedo, Ulyssippo.

When Henry of the French House of Burgundy became Count of Portugal in 1095 he merely held a province in fealty to the King of Leon, but by his son, the great Affonso I’s victories over the Moors it almost automatically became an independent kingdom. The second king, Sancho I, who has so many points of resemblance to King Dinis, further established the new realm, and he and his successors continued to wrest territory from the Moors. In the reign of the fifth king, Dinis’ father, Affonso III, the conquest of Algarve was completed, and the only remaining difficulty was the claim of the kings of Castille to this region.

Dinis, born on October 9, 1261, was but a few years old when he was sent to Seville to win the consent of his mother’s father, the celebrated Alfonso the Learned, to waive his right to the latest Portuguese conquest. As the shrewd Affonso III had foreseen, he proved a successful diplomatist. Alfonso X, enchanted with the grave, courtly bearing of his little grandson, knighted him and sent him home with all his requests granted.

Thus it came about that when Dinis, to whom his father had given a separate household but a few months before, ascended the throne at the age of seventeen, he was the first king to begin to reign over Portugal with its modern boundaries, from the River Minho to Faro. Two centuries of great deeds had achieved this result—two more were to pass before Spain was likewise entirely free of the Moorish invader—and Dinis now in a reign of half a century (1279-1325) saw to it that the heroism and sacrifices of his ancestors had not been in vain.

His tutor had been a Frenchman, Ébrard de Cahors, who now became Bishop of Coimbra, and the fame of his grandfather Alfonso X was spread through the whole Peninsula. But, young as he was, Dinis at once made it clear that he intended to rule as the national King of Portugal and had resolution enough to withstand the Castilian influence of his mother and Alfonso X. His first care was to acquaint himself thoroughly with his kingdom, and he spent the great part of the first year of his reign in visiting the country, paying especial attention to the still almost deserted region of Alentejo.

But the first years of his reign were not entirely peaceful, for his younger brother Affonso laid claim to the throne. Dinis was born before the Pope had legitimised Affonso III’s second marriage; Affonso, two years his junior, afterwards: hence the partisans of the latter affected to consider Dinis illegitimate. The dispute was scarcely settled when Dinis married Isabel, daughter of Pedro III of Aragon, who proved so efficacious a mediator in the even more serious troubles at the end of his reign, and, after sharing his throne for forty-three years, is still venerated as the Queen-Saint of Portugal.

In his differences with Castile, Dinis was successful, both in peace and war, and it was a tribute to his character and authority that he was chosen as arbitrator between the claims of the kings of Castille and Aragon. At home he was confronted by a powerful secular clergy, by the excessive and growing wealth of the religious orders, and by an overweening nobility, while his newly conquered kingdom urgently required hands to till it and walls and castles for its defence. Dinis dealt with all these problems in a spirit of equal wisdom and firmness, upholding the rights of the throne and the rights of the people till he had welded a scattered crowd of individuals into a nation.

His quarrel with the clergy, who protested that the King had infringed their rights, was referred to Rome, and in 1289 a formal but not a lasting agreement was reached.

Two years later the King checked the ever-growing possessions of the religious orders by a law limiting their right to gifts and legacies. Their wealth was the result of the great part they had played during the long conflict against the Moors, but it naturally began to prove inconvenient to King and people in time of peace. The nobles were in like case, and Dinis showed the same resolution towards them and abolished certain of their privileges.

He could protect as well as check. When the Knights Templar were abolished by the Pope, Dinis secured an exception for Portugal and reorganised them as the Order of Christ in 1319. Indeed he was essentially a builder, not a demolisher. In 1290 he founded the University of Coimbra; in 1308 he renewed and consolidated the treaty between Portugal and England; in 1317 he invited to Portugal a Genoese, Manuel Pezagno, to organise his fleet and command it as Admiral.

He encouraged agriculture, calling the peasants the “nerves of the republic” and passed many laws to ensure their security, so that in his reign men began to go in safety along the roads of Portugal, hitherto infested by brigands, and he divided grants of land among the poor of the towns. He planted near Leiria the pines which still form so delightful a feature of the country between that town and Alcobaça.

Some have called King Dinis a miser, others declare that in his reign there was a saying “liberal as King Dinis.” It is certain that he expended his money wisely, and, while no early king ever accomplished more for the land over which he ruled, he left a full treasury at his death. The charge of avarice perhaps arose from the charming legend which so well exemplifies the simplicity of those times.

The Queen was in the habit of distributing bread daily to a large number of poor, and Dinis, who perhaps would rather have seen them digging the soil, forbade the charity. Queen Isabel continued as before, and one morning the King met her as she went out with her apron full of bread.

“What have you there?” said King Dinis.

“Roses,” said the Queen.

“Let me see them,” said King Dinis.

And behold the Queen’s apron was filled with roses.

In the matter of buildings King Dinis not only fortified many towns with castles and walls, but founded numerous churches and convents. The traveller in Portugal even now can scarcely pass a day without coming upon something to remind him of the sixth King of Portugal. The convent of Odivellas, the cloisters of Alcobaça, the beautiful ruins of the castle above Leiria are but three of many instances which show how King Dinis’ work survives even in the twentieth century.

It was said of him that—

Whate’er he willed
Dinis fulfilled.

But he nearly always wrought even better than he knew. He realised no doubt that Portugal was an all-but-island, especially when the relations with Castille were unfriendly; but he could scarcely foresee that of his pinewoods would be built the “ships that went to the discovery of new worlds and seas”; that a future Master of his new Order of Christ would devote its vast revenues to the great work of exploring the West Coast of Africa, the work which bore so important a share in transforming Europe from all that we connect with mediævalism to all that is modern; that his embryo fleet would grow and prosper till Portugal became the foremost sea-power; or that the treaty with England would still be bearing fruit six centuries after his death.

The University, too, lasted and became one of the glories of Portugal, and a source of many of her greatest men in the sixteenth century. Since the sixteenth century, after being several times moved from Coimbra to Lisbon and from Lisbon to Coimbra, it has been fixed in the little town on the right bank of the Mondego and remains one of the most treasured possessions of modern Portugal. The quality that explains how so many of King Dinis’ institutions endured and prospered marvellously in succeeding centuries was thoroughness, the conviction that any work, however humble, if thoroughly done must bear excellent fruit, and a certain solidity which finds little satisfaction in feeding beggars precariously, but great satisfaction in setting them to work on the land.

Perhaps, then, it may come as a surprise that King Dinis was also a poet, one of the greatest of Portugal’s early poets. We have nearly one hundred and fifty poems under his name. He may not have written them all, some may have been composed by the palace jograes, but he showed his good taste and inclination for the national and popular elements in writing or collecting not only poems in the Provençal manner, then on the wane in Portugal, but that older, indigenous poetry which is the most charming feature of early Portuguese literature.

And King Dinis’ poems are among the most charming of all. Here is one of his quaint popular songs, the fascination of which is only faintly discernible in translation:

Friend and lover mine
—Be God our shield!—
See the flower o’ the pine
And fare afield.

Friend and lover, ah me!
—Be God our shield!—
See the flower on the tree
And fare afield.

See the flower o’ the pine
—Be God our shield!—
Saddle the colt so fine
And fare afield.

See the flower on the tree
—Be God our shield!—
The bay horse fair to see
And fare afield.

Saddle the little bay
—Be God our shield—
Hasten, my love, away,
And fare afield.

The horse so fair to see
—Be God our shield!—
My friend, come speedily
To fare afield.

It was King Dinis’ affection for his illegitimate son, Dom Affonso Sanchez, also a poet, that brought trouble on the latter years of his reign. His eldest son and the heir to the throne, Affonso, jealous of the regard, the lands, and privileges bestowed upon Dom Affonso Sanchez, afraid perhaps that the King might devise a way of leaving him the throne, rose in rebellion in 1320 and advanced through Minho to Leiria and Coimbra, ravaging the country as he came. The King, now nearly sixty years old, set out against him and several engagements were fought: it was not till 1322 that Queen Isabel succeeded after strenuous exertions in bringing about peace.

The reconciliation was but temporary. Dom Affonso Sanchez retired to Spain, but returned, and the Prince Affonso rose in arms again in 1323. Again Queen Isabel, going from one to the other, exerted herself to make peace. King Dinis, his anger now thoroughly roused, was not easily appeased. Finally he agreed to increase the Prince’s income, and, much against his will, to part once more from Dom Affonso Sanchez.

Not many months after this settlement King Dinis fell ill at Lisbon, where he had been born, and which he made the real centre of his kingdom (his instinct unfailing in this as in other matters concerning the future greatness of his country). Prince Affonso was summoned from Leiria, and a sincere reconciliation followed. The Queen watched day and night by her husband’s bedside, and to her his last words were spoken when on January 7, 1325, one of the greatest of Portugal’s kings died. He was buried according to his wish in the Convent of São Dinis de Odivellas, which he had founded near Lisbon.

Three hundred years after his death it was still the custom in Portuguese law-courts for a prayer to be said for his soul; and if we consider how far-reaching, how immense were the results of the measures taken by this strong-willed, wise, and energetic ruler, we may conclude that the custom might well be continued in the twentieth century. Humane and affable (conversavel, the quality of so many great men), he won the personal love of his people and gave them immediate prosperity, but he also, apparently, saw deep into the future.

II
NUN’ ALVAREZ

(1360-1431)

Mas quem podera dignamente contar os louvores deste virtuoso barom, cujas obras e discretos autos seemdo todos postos em escrito ocupariam gram parte deste livro?—Fernam Lopez, Cronica del Rei Dom Joam.

Fifty years after the death of King Dinis it seemed as if the kingdom that he had so carefully built up was to crumble away like dry sand. The disorders and extravagances of King Ferdinand’s reign had brought it to the verge of ruin, and the marriage of his only child Beatrice with the King of Castille in 1383 appeared to destroy the last hope of an independent Portugal.

It is ten years before that date that Nun’ Alvarez Pereira, to whom mainly Portugal was to owe her continued existence as a separate nation, first comes on the scene. His father was the powerful Prior of Crato, Dom Alvaro Gonçalvez Pereira, in high favour at Court, son of the Archbishop of Braga and descendant of a long line of nobles. His mother, Iria Gonçalvez, was lady-in-waiting to the Princess Beatrice.

In 1373 there was war between Portugal and Castile, and a rumour spread that the enemy was approaching Santarem. The Prior sent Nuno and one of his brothers with a few horsemen to reconnoitre. On their return they were received by the King and Queen. Queen Lianor, struck by the bearing of the shy, precocious boy of thirteen, took him for her squire, and the King knighted him, after a suit of armour of his size had at last been found, belonging to the king’s half-brother John, the Master of Avis, he who was king thereafter.

For three years in the palace the Queen’s squire gave his days to riding and the chase, and to the reading of books of chivalry, of Sir Galahad and the knights of the Round Table. Then his father arranged a marriage for him with the rich and noble Dona Lianor d’Alvim, a young widow of Minho.

Marriage was not in Nuno’s thoughts, but Dona Lianor had consented, the King approved, and reluctantly he yielded. His life on their estate was happy. Fifteen squires and thirty henchmen were in attendance in their house, and after hearing his daily mass Nun’ Alvarez would spend long days hunting the boar and the wolf in the wooded hills of Minho or exchanging visits with the Minhoto nobility.

Of their three children two sons died in infancy; the daughter, Beatriz, was married to the Count of Barcellos, son of King João I, and through her Nun’ Alvarez was the ancestor of that line of kings which was still reigning in 1910.

It was a life too quiet for the times, and a few years later Nuno was ordered to Portalegre to defend with his brothers the frontier against the Spanish. As they marched from Villa Viçosa to Elvas, Nuno, the wish father of the thought in his keenness to encounter the enemy, mistook the glint of the morning sun on the lances of their own footmen, who had been sent on ahead, for the enemy advancing and gave the alarm. To his vexation there was no fighting, and when he challenged the son of the Master of Santiago to combat, ten against ten, the king forbade the encounter, and the Earl of Cambridge, then at the Portuguese Court, to whom Nun’ Alvarez appealed, pleaded for him in vain.

In 1382 a powerful Spanish fleet besieged Lisbon. The defence of the city was entrusted to Nun’ Alvarez and his brothers. It was in late summer, quando l’uva imbruna, and parties from the fleet would land to gather grapes and other fruit. Nun’ Alvarez saw his opportunity and, leaving the city one night with some fifty horse and foot, lay in ambush in the vines by the bridge of Alcantara. The first boatload of twenty Spaniards to land was driven headlong into the sea, but a larger force came ashore and the Portuguese, seeing themselves outnumbered five to one, fled.

Nun’ Alvarez, left alone, spurred his horse to a gallop and dashed into the midst of the enemy. His excellent armour stood him in good stead, but his lance was shattered, his horse cut down, and one of his spurs caught in the saddle as he fell. Thus disabled he still fought on, and then for very shame his followers turned to assist him. The first to come up was a Lisbon priest, afterwards Canon of Lisbon Cathedral.

Nun’ Alvarez, hearing a few months later that the King was to engage the enemy between Elvas and Badajoz, proposed to his elder brother Pedr’ Alvarez, who had succeeded their father as Prior of Crato, that they should have a hand in the fighting. Pedro, who had orders to defend Lisbon and intended to obey them, refused, and, having previous acquaintance of Nuno’s methods, gave instructions that no armed persons should be allowed to leave the city. Nuno with a few attendants dashed past the guard at the gate and rode post-haste to Elvas. He was well received by the king, but again there was no fighting. Peace and the betrothal of Beatrice were celebrated in a banquet at Elvas. King Ferdinand was too ill to attend, but King Juan was present.

Nun’ Alvarez, in his bitterness at seeing Portugal given over to Castille, for once forgot his manners. He and his brother Fernão, going in more leisurely than the rest, found all the tables crowded, and, unable to obtain a place, he pushed away the support from one of the tables, which went crashing to the ground, and calmly went out. King Juan remarked that he who so acted had a heart for greater things, but, in the words of the old chronicle, had they been Castilians he might have spoken differently.

After King Ferdinand’s death Nun’ Alvarez, brooding over his country’s wrongs, keenly took the part of the young Master of Avis. He was not present at the murder of the Queen’s favourite, the Count Andeiro, but he approved the act, and when news of it reached him at Santarem he hastened to Lisbon to the Master of Avis.

It was at Santarem one evening as he sauntered along the banks of the Tagus after supper that he chanced to pass the door of an armourer and sent for his sword to be sharpened. The alfageme refused any payment till he should return as Count of Ourem. Hail to thee, Thane of Cawdor! The story adds that Nun’ Alvarez, returning Conde de Ourem to Santarem after the battle of Aljubarrota, found the armourer in prison as a friend of Castille and his property confiscated, and was able, by protecting him, to pay his debt.

Nun’ Alvarez now became one of the Prince of Avis’ Council, his most loyal and most trusted counsellor to the end of their lives. His first important command was in Alentejo, and after delaying in order to take part in a fight with eight Spanish ships in the Tagus he set out at the head of his two hundred horsemen. Henceforth Evora, the ancient walled city in the wide plain of Alentejo, was his headquarters. He instilled confidence into his men and increased his army, although it rarely exceeded five hundred horse and as many thousand foot, and was often very much below that number.

The war continued with varying success. At one time Nun’ Alvarez advanced to Badajoz, at another the Spanish were at Viana, but a couple of leagues from Evora across the flowered charneca. But Nun’ Alvarez seized town after town and more than once defeated the enemy in the open field. Monsaraz was taken by a wile, for some cows were driven temptingly beneath the walls and when the commander sallied out to seize them the Portuguese rushed in through the open gate. Nun’ Alvarez’ favourite method was to ride all night across the charneca and appear unexpectedly before a town in the early dawn, so that the enemy called him “Dawn Nuno,” Nuno Madrugada.

Thus he attacked Almada. He had but recently taken Palmella on the height overlooking the Tagus, and, hunting in the neighbourhood, had slain a boar and sent it as a present to the commander of Almada, promising to pay him a visit soon. He now set out to ride thither by night across the charneca, but they lost their way in the many paths, and the sun was up when Nun’ Alvarez, in his eagerness outriding his companions, advanced alone into the town. Four squires presently came up to his support, and Almada was taken without difficulty.

The Master of Avis had summoned Nun’ Alvarez to Lisbon or Nun’ Alvarez had determined to see the Master. From Palmella one night looking across the river he saw the whole city apparently in flames. Not knowing that the fires were lit by the King of Castille, whom plague in his camp had forced to raise the siege, and aware that the Master had powerful enemies within the walls, he watched the conflagration in dismay, but next morning the city reappeared in all its beauty.

The Spanish fleet remained in the Tagus, and a squire besought Nun’ Alvarez not to cross, saying that he had dreamt that the enemy had captured him as he passed through their fleet. Nun’ Alvarez went on his way, leaving the squire with his dream on the further shore. When he was in mid-stream, still perhaps thinking of the timid escudeiro, he bade his trumpets blow the enemy a challenge. But the Castilians little imagined what a prey was within their grasp, and his small boat passed through safely to Lisbon.

A little later he joined the Master of Avis at Torres Vedras and together they advanced to Coimbra, where the Master was crowned king as João I. His first act was to appoint Nun’ Alvarez his Constable.

At Oporto, whither he went to organise a fleet, Nun’ Alvarez found his wife and daughter, who had been prisoners of the Castilians for a time at Guimarães.

From Oporto he set out on a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. His purpose was threefold, “to serve God in pilgrimage,” to reduce Minho on the way, and to secure mounts for his men. But the River Minho was too swollen to cross, and the news that Braga was wavering thus came opportunely. Leaving Viana do Castello he turned east along the beautiful valley of the Lima and seized the little granite town of Ponte do Lima and Braga on its steep hill. The King had also come north, but the news that King Juan had crossed the Beira frontier and was advancing rapidly into the heart of Portugal brought them south again.

At Abrantes the King held a council. Many were of opinion that he should not advance further against the enemy. Nun’ Alvarez—the same Nuno who had ridden alone into two hundred and fifty of the enemy on the banks of the Tagus and advanced alone into Almada—thereupon set out with his men, and in the name of God and Saint George sent a challenge to the King of Castille. Each fresh success of Nun’ Alvarez had raised him envious backbiters in Portugal, and here was a new opportunity to accuse him of arrogance. King João silenced his accusers by following him to Thomar.

They then went west to Ourem and took up a position towards Leiria. The advance of the King of Castille caused them to turn the front of their battle towards the little village of Aljubarrota. The Portuguese, barely 5,000 strong, were outnumbered seven to one, but they were drawn up on foot in a small compact force and desperate, flight being practically cut off. On the right was the Ala dos Namorados, the lovers’ wing, pledged to yield no inch of ground; on the left fought a few hundred English archers, gens-d’armes Anglois si peu qu’il en y avoit, says Froissart.

The Spanish chronicler and poet, Pero Lopez de Ayala, and Nun’ Alvarez’ brother Diogo rode over before the battle and asked to speak with him alone, but succeeded neither in winning him to their side nor in casting suspicion on his loyalty. As he had said when fighting against his brothers earlier in Alentejo, for the land that gave him birth he would fight against his own father.

At nine o’clock on the morning of August 15, 1385, the battle began with a great hurling of stones, followed by fighting with the lance, and then at still closer quarters with axe and sword. Nun’ Alvarez was constantly where the fight raged most fiercely, and his words “Fight, Portuguese, fight for king and country” kept ringing out above the din. The flower of Castilian chivalry fell that day and many Portuguese nobles fighting for Castille. Nun’ Alvarez saw his brother the Master of Calatrava fall pierced by a lance, but was never able to find his body. The King of Castille fled to Santarem. The Convent of Alcobaça still preserves a huge cauldron taken from the enemy at Aljubarrota, but the noblest memorial of Nun’ Alvarez’ victory is the Church and Monastery of Batalha.

Nun’ Alvarez, not yet as old as Napoleon when he conquered Italy, crossed the Guadiana with a few hundred horse and a few thousand foot and advanced into Castille. All the nobles from the south of Spain who had not been present at Aljubarrota collected to give him battle. The enemy, he was told, were as the grass of the field in number. “All the greater will be our honour,” said Nun’ Alvarez.

A trumpeter with a bundle of rods knelt before Nun’ Alvarez seated to receive him: “My Lord Constable, the Master of Santiago, my lord, sends to defy you with this rod,” and the Master of Calatrava, the Master of Alcantara, the Count of Medina Celi and many another had sent him rods of defiance. The Constable received them one by one patiently, gave the messenger a hundred gold pieces and bade him thank the senders for the rods with which he would presently come and beat them.

The battle of Valverde that followed was an attack of several hills from which the enemy had to be dislodged. “If Portuguese kneel in battle,” said a later, sixteenth-century historian, “it is to the Cross of Christ”; and certainly it was from no fear or weakness that Nun’ Alvarez, wounded by an arrow in the foot, knelt to pray in the thickest of the fight. Anxious messengers came up with news that his men were hard pressed, imploring his presence, but he, without answering, still knelt in prayer. At last rising with a look of great joy he ordered on his standard to the attack, and a few hours later no Spaniard was to be seen.

It was in memory of this battle that the Constable built the Church and Convent of Carmo, still in its ruins one of the most beautiful of Lisbon’s buildings. This was the last of his great battles, although he saw much more fighting (for peace with Castille did not come for many years), and when fifty-five years old took part in the expedition that conquered Ceuta.

But his abiding fame was won when he was twenty-five. His success was due to his singleness of purpose. The independence of Portugal was his object, and to secure that object he put forth his whole strength not only ungrudgingly, but with a passionate eagerness, his strength based on deep piety and faith. A keen judge of men, he was terrible in his calm disdain to those whom he suspected of shirking or treachery; without a word of abuse on his part he made their humiliation unbearable. But he inspired his followers with extraordinary devotion. His clear, piercing eyes and his self-possession gave them confidence—des yeux pleins de mitraille et un air de tranquillité—and he was always generous in rewarding constancy and valour. His energy, fearless courage and fervent serenity won many a fight against overpowering odds.

His fame extended throughout Spain. One evening near Caceres ten henchmen appeared before him. The Count received them kindly, and on hearing that they were from Castille asked how they were so bold as to come without safe-conduct. Relying on his great goodness, they said. He then asked what he could do for them, and they announced that their only object in coming was to see him, and now they had seen him; and so, refusing the supper he ordered for them, they departed as they had come.

Many incidents show his power over his own men. Once, when they were unwilling to go forward to attack a superior force, he just stepped across a stream and bade those who were willing to follow him cross it, and not one held back.

On another occasion an uproar arose in his camp owing to the fact that the day’s booty had consisted of “many and good wines.” The Constable came unarmed from his tent, but many soldiers, seeing him thus and hearing the noise, rushed forward to protect him and formed a canopy of swords over his head.

The irregular pay and supplies received for his men made it difficult to maintain strict discipline; for some days they lived entirely on figs, then as now one of the principal fruits south of the Tagus; for one whole day Nun’ Alvarez’ own food consisted merely of a piece of dry bread, a turnip, and a drink of wine from the flask of a common soldier. Another time there was no bread in the whole camp except five small loaves reserved for Nun’ Alvarez’ table; five starving Englishmen came up, and he entertained them to dinner, giving each a loaf of bread.

It was impossible in such circumstances to forbid or prevent plunder when it was obtainable. But, although he was obliged to allow his followers to live on the land, he set his face against any unnecessary pilfering, and one squire, convicted of taking a chalice from a church, he sentenced to be burnt—indeed, the wood was piled and the fire lit before he pardoned him at the instance of his captains.

In the teeth of great opposition, too, he resolutely forbade the presence of women in his camp.

He was not less renowned for his chivalry towards the weak, women, prisoners, and peasants, than for his victories in battle. He provided pensions for “women who had been honoured and prosperous and were now poor.”

But his chivalry went further. A countess at Coimbra who had held out against him, and then plotted to seize his person by treachery, he secured from the reprisals of his followers; the wife of the commander of a captured town he sent away free to Castille. And these were no isolated instances; his conduct never varied in its simplicity, dignity and charming thought for others.

His biographers love to tell of the poor blind man of Torres Vedras who had no way of escaping from the advancing Castilians and whom Nun’ Alvarez carried behind him on his mule for four leagues out of the town. “Oo que humano e caridoso señor!” exclaims the old chronicler.

But it is the incidents of an illness when he was between thirty and forty that throw most light on his character and on the devoted attachment of those around him. The fever and deep depression that came over him seem to have been in part, at least, due to the perpetual self-seeking and mendicity with which he had to deal now that he was a power in the land as great as the King himself—greater, said his enemies. Sometimes, we are told, he seemed to have recovered from his illness, and then the very sight of a stranger, especially of a man with a letter, would give him a relapse. His secretary found it necessary to intercept all letters.

Nun’ Alvarez, who had sought health in vain at Lisbon, set out to return to Evora. Accompanied by his mother and his daughter, he was carried in a litter to Palmella. His illness prevented him from going further, and he was taken to the small village of Alfarrara, where there were many trees and streams. The very sight of the garden of the quinta where he was to lodge seemed to restore his health. Several of the foremost citizens of Setubal came to welcome him, and he received them gladly; but, as they were leaving, one of them (who was very stout) had the misfortune to bid him “remember the town of Setubal.”

Nun’ Alvarez, thus reminded of “men with letters,” fell into so great a passion and fever that he was like to die. He refused to eat, and it was only after much coaxing that he was persuaded to sit down at table. They brought him water for his hands and roast birds to eat. His daughter began to carve them before him, and his mother fanned him with a fan; but he refused to eat, telling his mother that “that bloated churl with his Setubal has been the death of me.”

His secretary, Gil Airaz, would have excused the offender, but Nun’ Alvarez turned on him in a rage: “The fellow, for what he said, deserved a score of blows, and if you cared for me or my health you would have given him them.”

Gil Airaz said that there was still time, if that was his pleasure, and the Constable answered that such a pleasure would seem to him all too long in coming. So the secretary, in his presence, took a stick and went out. When he came back and told him how he had beaten and kicked and covered with mud and water the citizen of Setubal, Nun’ Alvarez seemed to recover instantly and began to eat and drink.

To any other man, lord of half Portugal, it might perhaps have seemed a little thing to have had a citizen beaten and rolled in a ditch, but presently Nun’ Alvarez stopped eating, his eyes filled with tears, and he began to wish he was dead. “Do you not see, Gil Airaz,” he said, “that it would have been better for me to die than that you should have done what you did to that good man?” “Now would to God I had no part of all that land that God and my Lord the King have given me, so that this thing were undone!”

When Gil Airaz saw that he was in earnest he told him how he had only made a pretence of having beaten the man of Setubal and how all the citizens had gone contentedly home. Nun’ Alvarez was so overjoyed at this that he rose straightway from the table and went out to the orchard and flowing streams. In three months, with the help of the King’s physicians, he was well, and going alone with a page he set to cutting the brushwood in front of him, and found his strength had returned.

There is something infinitely touching in this story about a man who was usually so calm and restrained that he might be in a passion of anger and only show it—to those who knew him—by his smile, and whose whole life was marked by exceptional strength of will. But his old vigour returned, and very soon he was challenging the Master of Santiago, begging him not to tire himself in advancing through so hot a country, as he, “Nun’ Alvarez Pereira, Count of Barcellos and of Ourem and of Arrayolos and Constable of my Lord the King of Portugal,” would save him the trouble.

The great grief of the latter part of his life was the death of his daughter Beatriz, Countess of Barcellos, and his life must have been lonely despite the friendship of the King and especially of Prince Duarte, heir to the throne. Before the expedition to Ceuta they went to ask his advice under pretext of consulting him about some dogs for the chase, so as to keep the secret of their enterprise. None better than the King knew the value of Nun’ Alvarez’ opinion. He always seemed to know precisely the right thing to be done and the right moment to do it, was as far removed from boasting and vanity as from false humility, and respected his own rights as well as those of others.

In charity he gave liberally, but never carelessly. Thus he yearly bestowed the same quantity of cloth, but bestowed it in different districts, and stored the corn from his estates, to be given away in years of scarcity.

Before the end of the fourteenth century (1393) he divided most of his land, that is a great part of Portugal, between his followers. Large portions of Tras-os-Montes, Minho, and Alentejo belonged to him. He was Count of Ourem, of Arrayolos and Barcellos, Lord of Braga, Guimarães, Chaves, Montalegre, and nearly a score of other towns. His policy of dividing these lands among his vassals under condition that they should maintain certain forces in his and the King’s service, proved unsatisfactory. Like the sated Marshals of Napoleon, they were subsequently less willing to leave their estates and risk their persons in battle.

The King, who had been too lavish in his gifts, proposed to buy back his grants of land. Other nobles agreed to sell, but Nun’ Alvarez was resolved not to brook the injustice, and, far from agreeing to the proposal, departed to Alentejo and gathered his followers with a view to leave Portugal, although, as he said, he would never serve any other king.

King João, thoroughly alarmed, sent the Bishop of Evora, the Dean of Coimbra and the Master of the Order of Avis post-haste after him. But Nun’ Alvarez then, as always when he seemed to be acting rashly on impulse, was carrying out a quick but well-reasoned decision, and was only with difficulty persuaded to a compromise. It was finally agreed that his vassals should be transferred to the King, while Nun’ Alvarez was to retain in his own hands most of his territorial possessions. Seven years after the victorious capture of Ceuta he again renounced them.

He had always been a man of great piety; after one of his victories he had gone barefoot in pilgrimage to Santa Maria de Assumar; he had founded churches throughout the country, heard mass twice or thrice daily, and would rise at midnight to pray the hours. But it was probably the death of his only daughter that moved him to retire to serve God in the monastery of Santa Maria do Carmo, which he had founded in memory of his victory of Valverde. There, on August 15, 1423, he professed as Frei Nuno de Santa Maria, after giving away all his lands and titles. Of his daughter’s three children, Isabel married the Infante João, Affonso became Conde de Ourem, and, later, Marquez de Valença, and Fernando, Conde de Arrayolos and, later, Duke of Braganza.

When Nun’ Alvarez, penniless, retired to his cell it was his purpose to beg his daily bread in the streets of Lisbon, and he also intended to end his days where he might be quite unknown; but Prince Duarte went to see him at the Carmo and affectionately ordered him to accept a pension from the King, a great part of which, however, he spent in charities.

In 1431, in his seventy-first year, and two years before his life-long friend, King João, the greatest of all Portugal’s great men died. “God grant him as much glory and honour as in this world was his,” says the old chronicle.

Surely no truer man or more chivalrous knight ever donned helmet or drew sword. Tradition says that the Lisbon people long assembled to sing songs and witness many miracles at his grave. But his fittest and most enduring monuments are the noble buildings of Carmo and Batalha, and, above all, a free and united Portugal.

PRINCE HENRY THE NAVIGATOR.

III
PRINCE HENRY THE NAVIGATOR

(1394-1460)

Ca trabalho seria de se achar antre os vivos seu semelhante.—Gomez Eannez de Azurara, Cronica de Guiné.

Mestre insigne de toda a arte militar.—D. Francisco Manoel de Mello.

O homem a quem a Europa deve mais.—José Agostinho de Macedo, Motim Literario.

For some years before his death, Nun’ Alvarez might well rest satisfied with the prosperity which largely by his own exertions had fallen upon his country. Nor was it a careless or degenerate prosperity. The five noble sons of King João I and his English wife, Queen Philippa, daughter of “time-honoured Lancaster,” had grown to manhood, and the time was pregnant with great deeds. If Duarte was perhaps Nun’ Alvarez’ favourite among the princes, he certainly must have discerned in his younger brother his own successor in guiding the destinies of Portugal. Although possibly less chivalrous than Nun’ Alvarez, Prince Henry possessed his strong will and intensity of purpose, with a wider range of vision. A Portuguese writer represents him living in retirement at Sagres, his eyes fixed exclusively on Heaven; but Prince Henry believed that he could best serve Heaven by bringing to success the earthly affairs on which he had set his heart.

It was certainly with the keenness which marked the young Nun’ Alvarez that Henrique, then twenty-one, embarked with his father, King João I, and his brothers, Duarte and Pedro, in the expedition against Ceuta in 1415. He had his father’s promise that he should be the first to land, and in the storming of the town he was ever in the thickest of the fighting. The Moors defended the town obstinately, and a fresh danger arose when the victorious Portuguese dispersed to plunder. Henry, with a little band of seventeen followers, saved the situation against such odds that news was at first brought to the King that his son was dead. For his gallant behaviour on that day he was made Duke of Vizeu and Lord of Covilhã, while his brother Pedro became Duke of Coimbra.

But Henry returned from North-West Africa with perhaps a still greater prize—increased knowledge of the Dark Continent and a fixed determination to explore further a land which he now knew to be no mere sandy and unfertile desert. To this work he devoted the next forty-five years, without a shadow of turning, since political events might hamper but could not weaken his purpose, merely delaying the promised end.

It is often asked what was his object, as though the wish to win fresh knowledge, to acquire new territory for his country, and glory and riches, and to extend the Christian faith were unaccountable or unworthy aims. Rather we cannot wonder that the discoveries became the absorbing passion of his life, so that he has been blamed for his lukewarm intervention in contemporary politics and his weak defence of his brother, the Duke of Coimbra.

On the discoveries as Grand Master of the Order of Christ he spent its princely revenues, and in 1418, retiring from the Court, he settled on the Sacred Cape, or Sagres, now Cape St. Vincent. His palace and observatory soon drew a village round it, known as Terça Naval, or the Villa do Infante (Princestown). Here, as Governor of Algarve, he spent the greater part of his life, fitting out ships in Lagos harbour, welcoming travellers, poring over maps brought to him by Prince Pedro and others from their travels, observing the heavens, and watching for the return of his ships.

His keenness was not inconsistent with a certain shyness and reserve. He was a student prince, but less literary and more scientific than his brothers. All day, and often far into the night, he would be at work, an energetic hermit such as the Middle Ages had not known. His eyes in the intensity and even fierceness of their glance repelled the timid, but they also had the far-away look as of one watching and dreaming, while his firm lips and jaws were those of one planning and willing. His iron will and self-discipline curbed his equally strong temper and impatient eagerness, so that when most moved to anger he would merely say, like an Irishman, “I leave you to God.”

Courageous and persistent, he prepared all his schemes with the utmost thoroughness, and all the help that science could afford, and he carried them out with unfaltering resolution. All through his life he acted up to his French motto, Talent de bien faire, which we may translate by the “love of useful glory” to which, according to the poet Thomson, he roused mankind. And if we do not sit cowering before the unknown on all sides it is to Prince Henry and a few men of similarly keen intellect and stout will that we owe it.

It must not be thought that he met with no opposition, apart from the great difficulties that naturally beset all discoverers and innovators. On the one hand, the perils of navigating down the coast of Africa were considered insurmountable, and, on the other, the gains to be derived from it were held to be nugatory. It was not till the first slaves and the first gold arrived that men began to realise thoroughly that Prince Henry was something more than an empty dreamer. No one with less faith, a faith based both on religion and science, would have persevered, as Prince Henry persevered, in face of the slight support at first given by public opinion and the slight success obtained. But, although there were many disappointments and progress was slow, the mysteries of the African coast did gradually recede before his persistency, as year after year he sent out ships with definite instructions based on his maps and scientific knowledge.

The death of King João I in 1433 did not seriously interfere with his plans; his brother Duarte gave him every possible support, and the expedition against Tangier in 1437 was not an interruption but rather one aspect of his life-work. Indeed, he was the leading spirit of the enterprise. He and his younger brother, Fernando, obtained from King Duarte the consent for which they had ceased to hope from their father; but Duarte at first, and Pedro throughout, were opposed to the expedition. It set out in August, and the little army of some six thousand men disembarked at Ceuta, and, without waiting for the ships to return to Portugal for reinforcements, marched to attack Tangier.

Failing to take the place by storm, the princes settled down to blockade it. The danger of such a course was obvious, but even when the Moors, who trooped down from the hinterland, outnumbered the Christian force by twenty to one they were driven back in a series of magnificent attacks. But the Moorish host continued to grow by scores of thousands daily, and in the second week of October it became apparent even to the fiery heart of Prince Henry that he was embarked on a hopeless enterprise.

The siege was raised and the small army attempted to regain their ships. Henry with the cavalry protected their retreat. But the cowardice of some, the treachery of others, and the overwhelming number of the enemy proved too much for his splendid defence, and on October 15 he was forced to come to an agreement with the enemy. By this capitulation the Portuguese were to be allowed to re-embark without their arms, Ceuta, their twenty-two years’ possession, was to be given up, and Prince Fernando, with certain other hostages, was to remain in the hands of the enemy until the Portuguese should have evacuated the town.

Prince Henry, in his despair, fell ill at Ceuta and afterwards retired to Sagres. He would not give up Ceuta, and he could not save Fernando otherwise. King Duarte, confronted by the same cruel alternative, succumbed to grief and illness at Thomar in the following year.

To Henry’s sorrow for the death of one brother and the living death of another—the tortures of Fernando’s captivity ended in a miserable dungeon in 1443—was added the crushing of his hopes and projects. For the new King was but a boy, and it needed no peculiar foresight to prophesy impending trouble in Portugal. It required all Prince Henry’s fortitude and faith to persevere, in loneliness and remorse. Prince Pedro had strongly opposed the expedition: it was on Henry that its failure rested. Nor was he one to wish to shirk responsibility, and many an hour he must have spent brooding over the fatal effects of his rashness.

Henry is too great a man to need to have his mistakes glossed over. He had underestimated the difficulty of the enterprise, he had been rash in advancing from Ceuta without awaiting reinforcements, he had been rasher in not retiring after the first unsuccessful attempt to scale the walls of Tangier. His object certainly had been a noble one, based on no personal greed or ambition, and the results of his failure were felt by none more than by himself. In the eyes of others his magnificent courage and steadfast retreat placed him even higher than before.

Fortunately for him, there was plenty of work ready to his hand, for, although he did not personally accompany the ships of exploration, he scientifically worked out their instructions, equipped them, and followed their progress on his maps. Perhaps a certain estrangement between Pedro and Henry was natural after 1437; Henry, at least, did not very actively support his brother in his quarrel with the Queen-Regent, and failed to stand by him later when he had resigned his Regency and was venomously attacked and slandered by his enemies before his weak son-in-law, King Affonso V. When the matter came to open conflict Pedro, with his small band of followers, could not hope for victory, and again Henry did not resolutely intervene. Pedro’s tragic death at Alfarrobeira in 1449 cannot have diminished Henry’s remorse for the death of Duarte and Fernando eleven and six years earlier.

Meanwhile, his austere devotion to the work of discovery bore increasing fruit, and before he died the rich islands of the Azores, Madeira, the Canaries, and Cape Verde were discovered, and the coast of Africa explored as far as Sierra Leone, which was reached by the famous Venetian, Luigi Cadamosto, in the service of Prince Henry, nearly a quarter of a century after Gil Eannez had rounded Cape Bojador in 1434. The Infante himself had lost little of his energy, and although nearly sixty-five, accompanied his nephew Affonso V in the expedition against Morocco in 1558, and took a prominent part in the siege and capture of Alcacer.

The last two years of his life were spent at Sagres. In September 1460 he disposed of certain of his revenues, potential rather than actual, to the Order of Christ and to the State, which had hitherto recognised his right to receive the profits of the discoveries as it had allowed him to bear its burden. The burden to the day of his death was far greater than the profits. Yet he must have realised that his life’s purpose was attained, and that the rest was but a matter of time, as surely as though he had planted an orange-tree and died when it was covered with blossom. His body was taken to Batalha, and, if it was not to remain on Cape St. Vincent looking southwards over the sea to Africa, no worthier resting-place could be found for it than the splendid church built to commemorate the victory of his father and of his friend Nun’ Alvarez. Prince Henry spent himself, his time, and his revenues without stint in the service of a great idea and a high ambition. Nun’ Alvarez had worked for the independence of Portugal; Prince Henry left it well on the road to an imperishable glory.

A generation later, when the full effects of his life’s work were manifest, his countrymen and the world recognised in this strong, tenacious ascetic, with his burning zeal for God and country, his fearlessness and unwavering devotion, the inspirer and origin of Portugal’s new greatness.

VASCO DA GAMA

IV
VASCO DA GAMA

(1460?-1524)

O qual Vasco da Gama era homem prudente e de bom saber e de grande animo para todo bom feito.—Gaspar Correa, Lendas da India.

King João II pressed on vigorously with the discovery of the west coast of Africa. The year of his accession was not ended before Diogo de Azambuja set out with ten ships (1481), and after his return the King assumed the title of “Lord of Guinea.” Diogo Cam in 1484 and 1485 carried the discovery still further, past the River of Crabs (Cameroons), past Congo and Angola to Walvisch Bay, and two years later Bartholomeu Diaz rounded the Cape, and with that the problem of the sea-route to India was practically solved, so that King John died (October 1495) in sight of the promised land. Indeed, the departure of the ships which Vasco de Gama was destined to command was only delayed by the King’s death. He had given “orders for such wood to be cut in wood and forest as the carpenters and builders should desire, and this was brought to Lisbon, where at once three small ships were begun.”

In appointing Vasco da Gama, a knight of his household, to the command King Manoel showed that he knew the value of the men who had grown up in the stern school of João II. The Gamas were a distinguished family of the south of Portugal; they had already rendered good service to the State—Vasco himself may have had a part in the work of discovering the coast of Africa—and if they were at times quarrelsome and unruly their loyalty and courage were never in doubt. In 1497 the meekest of them, Paulo, Vasco’s eldest brother, was in trouble for having wounded a judge at Setubal,[5] and received the King’s pardon before he sailed as captain of one of the ships.

Vasco, a man of medium height and knightly bearing, was bold and daring in enterprise, patient and determined in adversity, but harsher and more irascible than his brother. It is a curious instance of the continuous if often slight connection between the two nations of seafarers, the English and the Portuguese, that Vasco da Gama had English blood in his veins. The name of his mother, Isabel Sodré, which survives in Lisbon’s Caes do Sodré, was a corruption of Sudley, her grandfather having been Frederick Sudley, of the family of the Earls of Hereford. Vasco was born probably in 1460, in the little sea-town of Sines, of which his father was Alcaide Môr, and in honour of which Vasco later is said to have been in the habit of firing a salute as he passed.

The third captain appointed by King Manoel was Nicolao Coelho.

The three ships, of about a hundred tons, São Gabriel (Vasco da Gama), São Raphael (Paulo da Gama), and São Miguel[6] (Nicolao Coelho), after solemn procession and leave-taking of the King, on July 8, 1497, sailed down the Tagus from Belem and rounded Cape Espichel to the south. The crews averaged little over fifty men, being perhaps 170 in all, including six convicts in each ship to be cast ashore in order to spy out the land at different points. Bartholomeu Diaz, bound for the fortress of São Jorge da Mina, accompanied them as far as the Cape Verde Islands.

In November they reached the bay of St. Helena where Vasco da Gama was slightly wounded in an affray with the natives. Hitherto their voyage had been prosperous; but they encountered heavy storms both before and after rounding the Cape of Good Hope, and it required all Vasco’s resolution and Paulo’s persuasiveness to keep the crews to their voyage. The mutinous crew of the São Gabriel had counted without its host, and found Gama little less formidable than the storms of these unknown seas. Not if he were confronted with a hundred deaths, he said, and not if the ships were all filled with gold, would he go back a single yard; but he did not wholly disregard the murmurings of the men, for he clapped the mate and pilot of his ship in irons, to hold them as hostages, and, as they were the only persons who knew anything of the art of navigation, the crew was effectually cowed.

At Christmas they reached the land which to this day bears the Portuguese name, Natal, of the time of its discovery. Passing slowly north along the coast, they arrived towards the end of January at the Zambezi River, and in this shelter made a stay of several weeks; but scurvy among the crew forced them again to sea, and in the beginning of March they reached Mozambique. Here, as at Mombasa a month later, the natives received them with every appearance of friendship, but made a treacherous if rather courageous attempt to seize their ships. The King of Melinde, a little further north, was friendly and loyal, and here the Portuguese obtained pilots for the voyage to India.

The passage lasted less than a month, and on May 18 they sighted Asia, the end and object of their enterprise, and came to anchor off Calicut on the 21st. Calicut was a few miles distant, and Vasco da Gama, although implored by his brother not to risk his person by disembarking, started on the overland journey. It required some courage, for among the native sightseers who crowded round the Portuguese there were not a few armed and covertly hostile Moors.

In the minds of the Portuguese, the East had long been connected with the empire of the Christian Prester John, the half mythical ruler of Abyssinia, and they expected to find the majority of the natives Christians. Accordingly they were easily duped here (as indeed they had been in Africa) and Vasco da Gama and his companions on the way to Calicut worshipped in a Hindu pagoda. The images on the walls were unlike those of the saints to which they had been accustomed in Portugal. Some of them had four arms, the teeth of others protruded a whole inch from their mouths, and their faces were hideous as the faces of devils. Like Little Red Ridinghood, one of the Portuguese, João de Sá, was in the most serious doubt when he saw these figures, and, as he knelt down, in order to avoid any mistake, he said aloud “If this is a devil I worship the true God.” And Vasco da Gama looked across at him and smiled.

A che guardando il suo duca sorrise.

This does not tally well with the character of the disciplinarian, despotic Gama, as it is usually represented. But these qualities developed later.

The Portuguese were as ignorant about the King of the country as about its gods. For the Samuri of Calicut was no simple King of Melinde, but a great potentate accustomed to traders and to foreign civilisations. It was not without difficulty that Gama obtained an interview, and when he succeeded, the King, all aglow with jewellery, seated chewing betel, a page on either side, and his chief Brahman behind his chair, was fully a match for the haughty Gama. From one of his bracelets gleamed a priceless stone of a thumb’s thickness, his necklace was of pearls almost of the size of small acorns, and from a gold chain hung a heart-shaped jewel surrounded by pearls and covered with rubies, and in the centre a great green stone, an emerald, of the size of a large bean, belonging to the ancient treasure of the Kings of Calicut. His golden trumpets were longer by a third than those of the King of Portugal.

It appears that the Portuguese had brought no present worthy of so great a monarch. The same historian, Correa, who thus vividly describes the King’s appearance, also gives a detailed account of the present. It consisted, he says, of “a very delicate piece of scarlet, and a piece of crimson velvet, and a piece of yellow satin and a chair richly upholstered with brocade, with silver-gilt nails, and a cushion of crimson satin with tassels of gold thread, and another cushion of red satin for the feet, and a very richly wrought gilt ewer and basin, and a large and very beautiful gilt mirror and fifty red caps with buttons and veils of crimson silk and gold thread upon them, and fifty gilt sheaths of Flemish knives, which had been inlaid in Lisbon with ivory.”

The King should have been satisfied, but probably this present, if it ever existed, had dwindled in gifts to natives of Africa on the way. The question in the King’s mind was that asked once of Telemachus: Had they come as peaceful traders, or were they pirates?

Vasco da Gama, faced by a reception so courteous yet so insulting, maintained a proud, serene attitude, as he had when on his way to the palace—he is represented advancing slowly, waiting for the crowds to be cleared out of his way—and as he did later when placed under arrest by the Catual, or Governor of the city. By his resolution during the dangers and obstacles of the voyage and by his calm behaviour in Calicut he justified the King’s choice and his subsequent fame.

The Samuri himself was far more favourably inclined to the new-comers than were the Moors, who naturally resented the appearance of other traders. The Portuguese were greatly helped throughout by a Mohammedan who had learnt Spanish at Tunis, but, although Gama brought home specimens of pepper, ginger, cloves, musk, benjamin, and other spices as well as pearls and rubies, his visit to Calicut, which ended with the high-handed measure of seizing and carrying off several natives, was unsuccessful, since it resulted in no treaty of friendship or commerce.

At the end of August they started on the homeward voyage, but remained for some time off the coast of India, and in the Indian Ocean lay becalmed for many days, during which the crew again suffered terribly from scurvy, a considerable number dying. The remnant of the crews struggled on in their three ships towards Portugal; at Cabo Verde, Coelho separated from the others and carried the news to King Manoel (July 1499). Paulo da Gama was worn out by anxiety and exertions, and Vasco sailed with him north-west to the Azores, where, in the island of Terceira, Paulo died. It was not till the end of the summer that Vasco da Gama reached the Tagus.

It is said—although Coelho’s earlier arrival contradicts the story—that a Terceira trader, Arthur Rodriguez, about to sail from his island to Algarve, saw two ships at anchor and asked whence they were. “From India,” came the answer. At these magic words he set sail, not, however, to Algarve, but due East, and in four days cast anchor in the harbour of Cascaes. The King was at Sintra, and had just sat down to supper when Rodriguez hurried in with the good news.

When the few survivors[7] arrived at Lisbon (September 1499) they were given a splendid reception, and Vasco da Gama was never able to complain that his services went unrewarded. He was granted the coveted title of Dom, and became hereditary Admiral of India, while his pensions (300,000 réis a year) and facilities of trade with India made him one of the richest men in the realm. So powerful did he become in Sines that the Order of Santiago interfered, with the result that Gama was obliged to leave his native town and in 1507 went to live at Evora.[8] In November 1519 the Duke James of Braganza sold him the town of Vidigueira, of which Gama became first Count.

A large part of his triumph belonged to Prince Henry, to King João II, and to Bartholomeu Diaz, who was drowned in the following year off the Cape which he had been the first to round.

King Manoel, overjoyed at having attained the goal of nearly a century’s constant striving, now styled himself not only King of Portugal and the Algarves and Lord of Guinea but Lord of the Navigation, Conquest, and Commerce of Ethiopia, Arabia, Persia, and India; he sent word of the discovery to the Pope and all the princes of Christendom; and at Belem, on the right bank of the Tagus, whence the discoverers had set sail over two years before, he built the fine monastery of São Jeronimo, where now are the tombs of the King himself, of Dom Vasco, who brought him all this glory, and of Camões, who celebrated it in deathless verse.

The building stands in strange contrast to that of Batalha, where Prince Henry the Navigator lies buried. The pure Gothic of Batalha, with its magnificent plain pillars and soaring arches, spells heroic aspiration; the Manueline of Belem in its exuberance and rich profusion of detail bears traces of satisfied accomplishment, as though Portugal might now throw simplicity and austere endeavour to the winds.

Dom Vasco da Gama in February 1502 set sail a second time for India, and returned in September 1303 with the first tribute of gold from India. “As the King was then at Lisbon, Dom Vasco, when he went to see him, took the tribute which he had received from the King of Quiloa[9]. A nobleman in plain doublet with uncovered head went before the Admiral on horseback in great solemnity, carrying the gold in a large basin of silver, to the sound of drums and trumpets, and in company of all the gentlemen of the Court. And the King ordered a monstrance to be wrought of it, as rich in workmanship as in weight, and offered it to Our Lady of Bethlehem as first fruits of those victories of the East.”

The death of Paulo da Gama seems to have killed the gentler strain in Vasco’s nature, and his many honours, titles, and estates rendered him more overbearing. It was on his second voyage to India, in October 1502, that he blew up a peaceful trading ship from Mecca with 380 (or by another account, 240) men on board, besides many women and children, after relieving it of all gold and merchandise. As to his overweening pride, he is said to have signed himself Count in a letter to the King before the title had been actually conferred.

Despite the crying need for a strong man to restore discipline in India after Albuquerque’s death, King Manoel did not send Dom Vasco out as Governor, and it was only in the reign of King João III, and when Gama was over sixty, that he left Lisbon, in April 1524, as Viceroy of India, with his sons Estevão and Paulo and a force of 3,000 men. He reached Goa in September and presently proceeded to Cochin. He was resolved to bring some measure of order and justice out of the confusion and corruption of India; and whereas most other Governors on their arrival were too busily occupied in enriching themselves to pay careful attention to other matters, Gama bent his whole will to effect reforms.

The reforms were salutary, but they filled native and Portuguese alike with consternation and were decreed in a harsh, unconciliatory spirit. Gama came into conflict with the outgoing Governor, Dom Duarte de Meneses, and only reduced him to obedience by giving orders to bombard him in his ship.

The first three months of Gama’s vice-royalty proved that the task of reforming the rule of the Portuguese in India was work for a younger man, and on Christmas Day 1524, to the relief of the self-seekers, to the grief of those who cared for the future of their country, Dom Vasco da Gama died, exactly twenty-seven years after the sight of Natal had given him the first real promise of success in his earlier great adventure.

FOOTNOTES:

[5] This may have been the occasion on which Vasco da Gama, closely wrapped in his capa, one night in the streets of Setubal refused to reveal his identity to the Alcaide going his rounds, declaring that he was no malfeitor. The Alcaide’s attempt to arrest him failed.

[6] Also apparently called Berrio, after the pilot from whom it was bought (?). Since Berrio = New (Basque berri) it was an appropriate name for a ship going to the discovery of mares nunca dantes navegados.

[7] It is said that only 55 out of the original 170 returned.

[8] This apparently continued to be his home for twelve years, since a document of November 7, 1519, has “in the city of Evora in the house in which now lives the magnificent Lord Dom Vasco da Gama, Admiral of India.”

[9] Now Kilwa; soon, perhaps, Quiloa again.

V
DUARTE PACHECO PEREIRA

(1465?-1533?)

O gram Pacheco, Achilles lusitano.
Luis de Camões, Os Lusiadas.

Diversas et incredibiles victorias obtinens.
Damião de Goes, Hispania.

One of the captains who sailed from Lisbon with the cousins Albuquerque in 1503 was Duarte Pacheco Pereira. Like the great Affonso de Albuquerque with whom he sailed, he was still unknown to fame. He may have been between thirty-five and forty years of age, but his subsequent glory has thrown no light for us on his earlier years; and beyond the fact that he was born at Lisbon, that he was a knight of the King’s household, and that under João II he was employed in the discovery of the west coast of Africa, we have to be content with silence.

Five years had passed since the Portuguese had first reached India, and instead of peaceful trade there was war between the King of Calicut and the Portuguese, and hostilities between Cochin and Calicut by reason of the King of Cochin’s friendship with the new-comers. The King of Cochin, indeed, had been uniformly loyal to the Portuguese and had shown conspicuous firmness of purpose, and to Cochin the Albuquerques directed their course.

It was in an expedition against one of the King of Cochin’s enemies, the Lord of Repelim (Eddapalli), that Pacheco first signalised himself for dashing bravery and learnt what daring and energy could do against a numerous but ill-equipped and undisciplined enemy. As he returned in four boats at ten o’clock one night from a long day’s victorious expedition against six or seven thousand natives he found his progress blocked by thirty-four ships chained to one another. After encouraging his men by a stirring speech he locked his own boats together and forced his way through, and then immediately went about so as to be able to stop the enemy’s pursuit with his artillery. A fierce combat ensued, but Pacheco had completed his victory before the Albuquerques could come to his assistance.

The King of Cochin was so greatly impressed by this exploit that he henceforth held Pacheco in the highest esteem. He little knew at the time how intimately their fortunes were to be linked. Before Affonso and Francisco de Albuquerque left for home it was known that the King (the Samuri) of Calicut was about to attack Cochin with his entire forces by land and sea. None of the Portuguese captains evinced any alacrity to be left behind in its defence, and when Pacheco accepted with a good will, but “rather to serve God and the King than for any hope of profit,” those who knew how great was the might of Calicut said: “God have mercy on Duarte Pacheco and those who remain with him,” scarcely expecting to set eyes on him again. As it proved it was Francisco de Albuquerque who perished, on his way home, while Pacheco died many years later, in peace and on dry land.

Whatever Pacheco’s thoughts may have been at the prospect before him, he knew that to instil confidence into his men was half the battle; he said little, but showed by his demeanour that he was perfectly satisfied, and asked for not a single man beyond those whom the Albuquerques had found possible to leave him. Thus he remained alone in India, still an unknown country to the Portuguese, with his own ship and three even smaller vessels, and, in all, ninety men.

It was little wonder that even the faithful and resolute King of Cochin began to despair when it was known that the host, or horde, from Calicut consisted of 60,000 men. He himself could provide about half that number, but of these three-quarters were actively or passively hostile. The Moors, moreover, who supplied Cochin with provisions were minded to abandon the city, and would have done so had not Pacheco intervened.

He at first determined to hang the ring-leader in this treachery, but the King declared that, should he do so, the rest would rise in mutiny, and he accordingly assembled the “honest merchants,” and addressed them in a speech of such vigour that for the moment he had no further trouble from the Moors. Purple with rage and speaking so loud that he seemed to be actually fighting, he offered them his friendship, but should they thwart him he promised to be a crueller enemy to them than any King of Calicut. Their respect for Pacheco was further increased by his astonishing energy, for, after working all day at preparations against the coming invasion, he spent the nights in forays into the Repelim country.

Pacheco’s task was to defend the city of Cochin, and the Portuguese fort recently built by the Albuquerques. The territory of Cochin was separated from that of Repelim by salt-water channels, and the preparations of the Portuguese were directed to the defence of the principal ford, which was only passable at low tide, with deeper water at each end. With this object stakes were made ready to be driven in all along the ford in a serried stockade. By the time the King of Calicut reached Repelim, Pacheco had put a salutary fear into the hearts of the citizens of Cochin, so that when the news of his arrival came their first impulse to abandon the city was immediately checked.

The better to inspire them with his own fearlessness, he made his usual night expedition into Repelim and set fire to one of the villages. He experienced some difficulty in returning, and five of his men were wounded, but when the King of Cochin expostulated against this foolhardiness he merely laughed and said that all he wished for was that the King of Calicut should advance to attack him.

The first attack at the ford occurred on the last day of March 1504 (Palm Sunday), and the period that followed may well claim to be one of the most brilliant Hundred Days in history. The enemy on this Palm Sunday, relying on their overwhelming numbers, crowded down to the ford at low tide, but the sharp stockade confronted them and the artillery from the boats stationed in the deep water on both sides of the stockade cut them down. Their own “cannon” were not very formidable, for we are told that they did not propel their projectiles with greater violence than that with which one might throw a stone, and at the end of the day the Portuguese had but a few injured and none killed. Their danger was nevertheless great, for although the enemy had suffered considerably in this first assault they were so numerous that they could continually renew the attack, and sleepless vigilance, with intervals of terrific exertion, was necessary to defeat them.

But Pacheco had succeeded in imparting something of his own spirit to his men. Undeterred by the flight of the Nairs who should have supported him, he took advantage with his usual energy of the breathing-space secured by this first victory, ordered his men to make a show of revelry at intervals during the following night in order to impress the enemy, and next day with forty men set out and burnt a village. The enemy’s attacks were repeated on Good Friday and Easter Sunday and Easter Tuesday, and in the intervals of victory Pacheco kept on burning villages, to the delight of those in Cochin.

The endurance of the defenders was tested to the utmost when the King of Calicut attacked on the same day in two places, at the ford and in a deep water channel. He seems to have made a mistake in not waiting to attack with his fleet until low tide enabled the infantry simultaneously to assault the ford, or, at least, the plan did not work out well, and Pacheco was able to deal first with the numerous fleet of boats, said to have been two hundred and fifty in number.

The four little Portuguese ships seemed almost lost in the multitude of the enemy. The darts and arrows, says one of the early Portuguese historians, were in such quantity that they cast a shadow over the ships, and so loud were the shouts and cries that it seemed to be the end of the world. Again and again the enemy’s boats, chained together, came on to the attack, but they never succeeded in boarding the Portuguese caravelas, although many of the Portuguese were wounded.

Meanwhile twelve thousand infantry had advanced against the ford. Message after message came to Pacheco for help, but the tide was still running out and he contented himself with answering that he was still engaged with the fleet but that this was “not the day of the King of Calicut.” At the turn of the tide, after having dealt faithfully with the fleet of the enemy’s boats, he went; but the water was still too shallow when he approached the ford and the ships grounded. He was able, however, to work great havoc with his artillery among the many thousands of assailants, although he could not come up to fight with them at close quarters.

For a long hour the low water at the ford gave every advantage to the enemy. Crowds of them surrounded the stranded ships, thousands rushed forward to attack the ford. The water was tinged with red. And still the ships refused to move. At last they floated, and as the tide rose the danger of the attack grew less and less, till at dusk it ceased entirely.

Another most formidable battle was fought at the beginning of May when the King of Calicut in person attacked the ford. The Nairs from Cochin who were to have defended the stockade deserted their post, many of the enemy actually succeeded in crossing, and it was only by unparalleled exertions that Pacheco, after being retained with his ship by the low water, was able to hurl them back with great loss. A cannon-shot aimed at the King of Calicut, which succeeded in killing several persons near him, profoundly discouraged him in what began to seem a hopeless enterprise, instead of child’s play as at first.

But the strain on Pacheco was not relaxed, and he spent night and day watching and fighting. One Sunday as he sat at his midday meal in his caravel after keeping watch all night, the look-out man sighted eighteen hostile craft approaching. He determined to attack, but when he arrived in mid-stream another fleet of sixteen, and then eighteen more, darted out suddenly from behind a promontory, and it proved no simple affair to beat them off.

The King of Cochin came up in time to witness Pacheco’s victory, and after congratulating him reproached him for having exposed himself alone to such a risk. Pacheco did not think it advisable to tell the King that he had attacked in the belief that the enemy were only a third of their real number, and his prestige with the natives was still further enhanced.

The King of Calicut was in despair, and his forces were already reduced from 60,000 to 40,000 men by battle and cholera, when a Moor of Repelim invented a scheme which put new heart into the King and seemed to give certain promise of capturing the Portuguese ships and all the Portuguese in them. The device resembled that of moving towers built to the height of the walls of a besieged town. Two boats were lashed together to support a square wooden tower capable of holding some forty men.

Pacheco had spies in the enemy’s camp who warned him of the new danger, but the information was also divulged in Cochin, to the dismay of the King and his subjects. The King paid Pacheco a visit, and, although he was received on board with dance and song, besought him with tears in his eyes to save himself by flight since further resistance was useless, and when he left bade him farewell as for the last time.

To embolden the natives, Pacheco declared that he intended to defeat the enemy now as on previous occasions, and asked them if he had ever failed to keep his word. The further to encourage them, he erected a great pointed stake on which to “spit the King of Calicut.” He did not neglect more practical measures, for he raised the prows of his vessels by means of wooden structures high enough to dominate the enemy’s castles, and he put together a boom and fixed it by means of six anchors a stone’s throw in front of his ships.

About two hours after midnight on Ascension Day a few shots announced that the enemy were in motion. Pacheco landed, and after harrying the advancing infantry returned to his ships at dawn in readiness to receive the approaching fleet. At first the Portuguese artillery seemed to make no impression on the strongly built tower that confronted them, and for a short time it seemed that the enemy must be victorious. “Lord, visit not my sins upon me now!” was Pacheco’s despairing cry. But at last one of the towers came crashing down and Pacheco knelt on deck and gave thanks to God, for the destruction of the rest was now only a matter of time. The fighting lasted till dusk fell. So complete was the discomfiture of the enemy and so miraculous seemed the escape of the handful of Portuguese that the natives of Cochin lost all fear of Calicut, and the Portuguese in India acquired far and wide a reputation for invincible prowess.

The King of Calicut now had serious thoughts of giving over the war, but two Italians, Milanese, persuaded him to attempt a night attack. The plan was for the Prince of Repelim to advance with a large force, and when he had engaged the enemy certain Nairs, posted in palm-trees, were to raise fire-signals for the King of Calicut to follow with the second army.

Unfortunately for them, Pacheco had wind of the arrangement and, aware of his great danger, resolved to save the Nairs their trouble. He accordingly set friendly Nairs in palm-trees, and as soon as the first army started they gave the fire signal. The King of Calicut hurried forward, but in the darkness either army mistook the other for an ambush of natives from Cochin, and a long, fierce battle followed between them, while Pacheco listened to the uproar but awaited the enemy in vain. At dawn the two hostile armies found out their mistake and retired in horror and dismay, while Pacheco, like some great gloating demon, appeared in the increasing light to add to their confusion with his artillery.

This was the last serious attack, and one by one the lords and princes opposed to him came to terms with Pacheco. By boundless energy, complete fearlessness, bluff, and the power of inspiring men at will with fear or with confidence and devotion, Pacheco had achieved this amazing triumph, which certainly had far-reaching effects on Portuguese rule in India.

The King of Cochin lacked Pacheco’s imposing personality, but he was affectionate and reliable throughout, bidding his subjects obey Pacheco as they would his own person, and this despite the fact that Pacheco’s behaviour was often very disconcerting. More than once he all but hanged some treacherous Moors, although the King had warned him that this would entail the cutting off of provisions from Cochin.

On another occasion a body of hostile Nairs made a surprise attack on the island of Cochin, but were beaten off by the workers in the rice swamps with their rustic weapons. Their victory was the easier because a Nair considered himself polluted if one of these low-caste peasants approached him.

Pacheco, delighted at the victory of these humble workmen, and mindful moreover of more than one desertion of Nairs at difficult moments, suggested that the King should make Nairs of these men, in the belief apparently that the caste system could be brushed aside or altered at will.[10] It was only after heated and repeated argument that the King was able to persuade him that the thing he asked was impossible. The heroic labourers were, however, permitted to bear arms and to approach Nairs in future.

For himself Pacheco refused the King’s spices and other gifts, aware that he could ill afford them, and accepted only the strange coat-of-arms that the King bestowed on him—five crowns of gold on a crimson ground—emblem of the much blood he had shed in his victory over five kings—surrounded by eight green castles on blue and white.

At the beginning of the year 1505 he set out for home, to the sorrow of the King of Cochin, and in the summer arrived at Lisbon. He was received with great honour; on the Thursday after his arrival he walked with the King in solemn procession from the Cathedral to the Convent of São Domingos. The Bishop of Vizeu preached, exalting Pacheco’s heroic deeds, and similar services were held throughout Portugal. News of his exploits were sent to the Pope and to the Kings of Christendom.

Pacheco received a yearly pension of 50,000 réis, a considerable sum in those days,[11] and other gifts and favours, and he married D. Antonia de Albuquerque, daughter of one of King Manoel’s secretaries. Better still, he received further employment from the King, being entrusted with the survey of the coast of South-East Africa.

Already in 1505 he was at work on his Esmeraldo de Situ Orbis, which had to wait nearly four centuries for a publisher. He was more accustomed to hold the sword than the pen, but his book contains much of interest and affords occasional insight into the character of its author. Thus he says—and the philosophic tone of the words is of interest in view of the neglect and poverty into which he is said to have fallen in his last years: “No one is content with his possessions, and in the end eight feet of earth suffice us and there ends and is consumed the vanity of our high thoughts,” and “Virtuous men who love God and are of clean heart and uncovetous are never forsaken of the grace of the Holy Spirit.”

He dwells more than once on the iniquity of oblivion wrought by time: “Difference of ages and length of time hide the knowledge of things and render them forgotten.” His descriptions are clearly those of an eyewitness, as that of “a little river which flows from the top of the mountains to the sea through reeds and mint and rushes and wild-olives.” He praises Prince Henry the Navigator and King João II, whose deeds are worthy to be told “by the ancient fathers of eloquence and learning,” and it was in gratitude to them, a gratitude which posterity shares, that he wrote: “Experience causes us to live free of the false abuses and fables that some of the ancient cosmographers recorded.”

Although the great events of India under the rule of Albuquerque may have obscured the deeds of Pacheco, he was evidently not forgotten, for in January 1509 he was sent with several ships against the French pirate Mondragon and defeated and captured him off Cape Finisterre, and probably about the year 1520 he was appointed Governor of the fort of São Jorge de Mina, a coveted post on the west coast of Africa.

Tradition has it that he came home in irons, and he may have been the victim of one of those accusations by subordinates which were becoming so common in the Portuguese overseas possessions. Pacheco had shown of old that he was one of those whom he calls inimigos da cobiça, with thoughts set on higher things than gold. But a new king was on the throne, who was but two years old when Pacheco was winning immortal renown for the Portuguese in India, and it seems to have been the general feeling that he was unfairly treated. Camões speaks of his “harsh and unjust reward.”

It appears that he continued to receive his pension, yet he is said to have died, about the year 1530, in extreme penury. We may be sure at least that his heart did not quail before poverty any more than it had before the countless host of Calicut. The recollection of his wiles and devices during those hundred days at Cochin must have been a powerful antidote to neglect and old age. “The thought of what he had done would prove music to him at midnight.”

A few, no doubt, of the heroic ninety on whose behalf Pacheco wrote to the King, recalling their services, survived, and they might discuss the apparent miracle of their famous victory, and, in Pacheco’s words, “the multitude of things in the very wealthy kingdoms of India,” glad at heart the while to be at home under the more temperate sun of Portugal and to rind their “eight feet of earth” in their own soil.

FOOTNOTES:

[10] “The nobles,” says Correa, “are called Nairs, and are men devoted to war.” The peasants “are so accursed that if they go along a road they must go shouting, lest Nairs should meet and kill them, for they may not carry arms, whereas the Nairs are always armed. And if as they go shouting a Nair answers they scuttle away into the wilds far from the road.”

[11] The poet Luis de Camões, after his return from the East, supported life on less than a third of that amount.

AFFONSO DE ALBUQUERQUE.
From Gaspar Correa, Lendas da India, frontispiece to vol. ii. pt. 1.

VI
AFFONSO DE ALBUQUERQUE

(1462?-1515)

Aquelle invencivel e espantoso capitão Affonso de Albuquerque.—Heitor Pinto, Imagem da Vida Christam.

O sem segundo Affonso de Albuquerque, honra de todos os advertidos e scientes capitães que teve o mundo.—João Ribeiro, Fatalidade historica da Ilha de Ceilão.

Albuquerque terribil, Castro forte.—Camões, Os Lusiadas.

Had Affonso de Albuquerque died five or six years before he did the world would never have realised that it had lost one of the greatest men of all nations and ages. Born of an ancient family[12] about the year 1460,[13] Albuquerque had in 1514 seen thirty-eight years’ service. He won the regard of Prince João in the campaign against Spain in which that prince saved his father from irretrievable defeat, and he became his equerry when he had succeeded to the throne as João II. He also served with distinction in Africa.

It was in 1503, when he was over forty, that he first went to India. In April of that year he sailed with his cousin Francisco de Albuquerque in command of six ships, the chief object of the expedition being to establish the friendship existing between the King of Cochin and the Portuguese and to build a fort at Cochin. Albuquerque made no long stay in India, and in July of the following year was back in Lisbon. But he remained long enough to see the vast possibilities there of failure or success for Portugal, and when, two years later, he again went out, although he sailed as the subordinate of Tristão da Cunha, it was on the understanding that he should soon obtain independent command and with the provisional appointment as Governor of India in his pocket.

Smooth co-operation with other officials was not Albuquerque’s strong point, and he felt no doubt that if he was to serve his King and country as he would wish he must be able to act freely. It is significant of his commanding personality that during his two years’ presence at Court he succeeded in imposing his views. In his absence later his enemies were often able to tie him hand and foot even though he was Governor of India.

There were two opposed policies. Hitherto the Portuguese in India had been confined to the sea, and many considered that this situation should continue. In a sense they were right, since it was obviously impossible in so vast an empire to conquer and hold large tracts of land. But Albuquerque considered that this floating empire should be nailed down at cardinal points by capturing important towns and building strong forts, and it was with this purpose that he went out to India.

In the summer of 1507 he separated, according to his instructions, from Tristão da Cunha, and when the latter returned to Portugal with the rest of the fleet Albuquerque with his six ships remained in India. Of these ships he has left a vivid description: there were no provisions, the lances and other arms were few and rotten, with great scarcity of cables, sails, and rigging; the powder was all wet, of bombardiers there were but few, of carpenters one or two, and a hundred and fifty men were dying of disease.

Even so he set to work to strike terror into the Moors and hammer the Portuguese Empire into shape. Coasting down Arabia he sacked various cities, spreading desolation with fire and sword and mercilessly mutilating the Moors who surrendered. The poet Antonio Ferreira called Albuquerque “clement.” It is not a clemency that we would wish to encounter in ordinary life, and even among his contemporaries some condemned his cruelty. Bishop Osorio, for instance, considered it as unworthy of so great a man: illius rebus gestis indignum.

But although Albuquerque could be harsh and grim enough (his suggestion to King Manoel that Spanish and Portuguese Jews in India should be extinguished one by one is most sinister), and was quick to anger and a stern disciplinarian, he had no delight in cruelty for cruelty’s sake. He wished to reduce the Moors throughout India to subjection, and considered that such acts would best spread the terror of his name and conceal the difficulties of his position. He would have been the first to admit that his policy in this respect was a sign of weakness.

Albuquerque’s first great achievement was the bombardment and capture of the important city of Ormuz, at the entrance of the Persian Gulf, and in October he set about building a fortress. Milton in the following century wrote of “the wealth of Ormuz.” To Albuquerque it was but the first stone in the vast edifice of his projects, but to his captains it was already more than enough. They wished to be making prizes on the high seas, not to be bottled up in Ormuz building a fort as if they were masons. Albuquerque, to whom in their complaints they were very much like gnats in a thunderstorm, went on with his work, tore up their first petition and placed a second under a jamb of one of the fort’s doorways as it was being built. This was too much for the vanity of his captains and several of them sailed away to India.

The result of this desertion was that Albuquerque was obliged temporarily to abandon Ormuz. Small wonder that he wrote of their conduct with extreme bitterness. “Without shame or fear of the King or your Lordship,” he says in his letter to the Viceroy, Dom Francisco de Almeida, “they deserted me in time of war, and during actual hostilities with this city they left me and fled.... Portuguese gentlemen have been guilty of no such vileness these three hundred years, nor have I read of any such in the ancient chronicles.”

Even if they had all the right in the world on their side, these men had deserted in the presence of the enemy; and had they been shot by order of the Viceroy there and then, Portuguese rule would have been greatly helped and strengthened and not only many troubles but many lives spared in the future.

But no such salutary discipline prevailed in India; the instructions given to the captains were partly independent, and the Viceroy received them courteously and bade them draw up a document of their complaints. When Albuquerque arrived in India his enemies took care to foster differences between him and the Viceroy, who was opposed to Albuquerque’s policy and methods, and, after being treated with great discourtesy, Albuquerque was placed under arrest. One of the accusations of his captains was that he wished to make himself King of Ormuz.

They little knew their man. To expect Albuquerque, whose dreams of conquest were as wide and magnificent as those of Alexander, to vegetate as King of Ormuz was a mistake as colossal as to believe that Napoleon could be content to rule Elba. There can be no doubt that Albuquerque was unjustly treated by men incapable of understanding him, all the more so in that Almeida’s term of office was up and by right it was Albuquerque and not he who should have been governing India. Albuquerque for his part disdained to be conciliatory.

Fortunately for Albuquerque and for India his imprisonment only lasted a few weeks. The arrival of the Marshal, Fernando Coutinho, from Portugal put a new face on the situation; he released Albuquerque and installed him as Governor of India. Almeida set out for, but never reached, Portugal.

The year 1509 was almost out, and it is 1510 which marks the beginning of Albuquerque’s victories. With the Marshal he attacked Calicut, but the Marshal’s impetuous rashness (he was so nettled by a first success of the impetuous but wise Albuquerque that he said he would take Calicut with no other arm than a stick in his hand) involved the expedition in disaster, and, although they sacked Calicut, the Marshal and many of the Portuguese lost their lives in a disorderly retreat to the ships, Albuquerque himself receiving a wound which permanently disabled his left arm.

The rest of the year was occupied with Goa.[14] He obtained possession of this city after a mere show of resistance, but a large and ever-growing army of Turks forced him to abandon it after being reduced to great straits and danger. Albuquerque had had fresh trouble with his captains, but on the arrival of a few ships from Portugal he returned to Goa in the autumn and stormed it. Most of the Moors were put to the sword in a massacre which lasted four days. Some Moorish women of almost white complexion he married to Portuguese soldiers. This was a deliberate policy, approved by the King of Portugal, in order to provide a peaceful settled population.

The possession of Goa changed the whole position of the Portuguese in India. Remote kings who had hitherto looked on the new-comers as passing freebooters now sent ambassadors offering friendship and treaties.

Barely six months after taking Goa, Albuquerque stormed and sacked Malaca, in Malay, a city which now belongs to the British Empire and has about 100,000 inhabitants, and which then, in Albuquerque’s own words, was “muito grande cousa.”[15] Of all the great spoils the Governor characteristically reserved for himself only two great bronze lions which he intended to have placed on his tomb. But his ship, laden with the costliest plunder, much of which was intended for King Manoel, met with a violent storm and foundered. Albuquerque, dressed in a brown coat and anything that came to hand, escaped on a raft.

In 1513 he carried out his long-cherished project of an attack on Aden, whence, he said, “vermilion, currants, almonds, opium, horses, dates, gold” went to India. The Portuguese assaulted but failed to take the town—in their eagerness the ladders broke again and again under their weight—and it was not safe to blockade it for fear of adverse winds, lack of water, and the large and speedy assistance the enemy might expect. Swift cameleers carried the news of the attack in fifteen days to Cairo, and, generally, the presence of a large Portuguese fleet in the Red Sea made a far-reaching impression.

Albuquerque set out to attack Aden again in 1515, but was occupied for some time at Ormuz, and fell ill there. He started to return to India, and on the way received tidings from a passing boat that his successor to the Governorship of India had been appointed, and many important posts given to his personal enemies.

This was his death-blow. Only a year before he had written to the King of his determination to continue in India for the rest of his life, at whatever sacrifice to himself, for the sake of maintaining and strengthening the empire he had won. Now heartbroken he exclaimed, “Out of favour with men for the sake of the King, and out of favour with the King for the sake of men. It is good to make an end.” He dictated a last brief letter to the King “in the throes of death,” recommending his son, and died as the ship came in sight of Goa, straining his eyes to see the tower of the church he had founded (December 1515).

Next day his body, dressed in the habit of Santiago, was carried ashore and buried amid universal grief. The natives perhaps mourned him sincerely, since he had worked for their prosperity and his attitude towards them, as distinguished from the Moors, had always been kindly. The gods, they said, had summoned him to war in heaven. His enemies continued to fear him even dead, so that King João III declared that India would be safe so long as Albuquerque’s body remained there, and it was only in 1566 that his bones were brought to Portugal.

A contemporary Portuguese historian, Barros, thus describes Albuquerque: “He was a man of medium height, of a cheerful, pleasant countenance, but when angry he had a melancholy look; he wore his beard very long during the time of his command in India, and as it was white it made him very venerable. He was a man of many witty sayings and in some slight annoyances [menencorias leves! Had not Barros read Albuquerque’s letters?] during his command he said many things the wit of which delighted those whom they did not immediately affect. He spoke and wrote very well with the help of a certain knowledge of Latin [the superior Barros!]. He was cunning and sagacious in business, and knew how to mould things to his purpose, and had a great store of anecdotes suited to different times and persons. He was very rough and violent when displeased and he tired men greatly by his orders, being of a very urgent disposition. He was very charitable and devout, ever ready to bury the dead. In action he was somewhat impetuous and harsh. He made himself greatly feared by the Moors and always succeeded in getting the better of them.”

Another historian, Correa, who had served Albuquerque three years as private secretary in India, knew him better and appreciated his greatness. It is Correa who gives us an imposing glimpse of the Governor of India two years before his death, i.e. at the time when Albuquerque described himself as “a weak old man.” He was dressed “in doublet and flowing open robe, as was then the fashion, all of black damask streaked with black velvet, on his head a net of black and gold thread, and above this a large cap of black velvet; in his belt a dagger of gold and precious stones worth fifteen thousand crusados, round his neck a thick chain; and his long white beard, knotted at the end, gave him a very venerable presence.”

Albuquerque was sincerely devout, even to the verge of mysticism or superstition. He believed that St. James went before the Portuguese on a white horse guiding them to victory, and when in the Red Sea that a fiery cross in the sky was specially sent to beckon him on to further conquests.

There is a massive strength in all that he said and did.[16] After he had subdued Ormuz its king hesitated whether he should pay his customary tribute to Persia and sent to consult Albuquerque. Albuquerque made a little collection of firearms and cannon-balls and answered, “In this coin is the King of Portugal wont to pay tribute.”

But the whole man is in his letters, aptly described as being “written with a sword.” Perhaps it is only in the letters of Napoleon that one finds the same mingling of great plans and conceptions with a mastery of the smallest details and concern for things which a lesser man would scorn to notice.

This Governor, the fear of whose name extended far into China, to whom the Kings of Narsinga and Persia, Siam, Cambaya, Turkey, and Cairo sent gifts, the conqueror of Ormuz and Cananor, Goa and Malaca, who dispatched his agents even to the remote Moluccas, and who was determined to destroy Mecca (five hundred Portuguese were to ride swiftly inland from the coast, take it by surprise and burn it to ashes) and thought of altering the course of the Nile, did not disdain to occupy himself with the alphabets for teaching children to read, the missals and pontificals for churches, pearl-fisheries, the horse trade, the colour of the Red Sea, how to pack quicksilver, and a hundred other matters of great diversity, while on the question of arms and merchandise to be sent from Portugal to India[17] no modern official report could exceed his letters in accuracy and minuteness.

For instance, he declares that lances are sent out unsharpened, as they come from the Biscay factories, to the care of a barbeiro inchado in India, and in 1513 says that he now has workmen in Goa who can turn out better guns than those of Germany. Unfortunately in Portugal India was regarded merely as a mine to be exploited, not as a field that required farming in order to continue productive. Albuquerque, when, as he says, over his neck in work, had to answer great bundles of letters from the King, often filled with carping criticisms of his actions or containing contradictory projects. He complains that there is a new policy for each year, almost in the words of Dante in the Purgatorio:

fai tanto sottili
Provvedimenti ch’ a mezzo Novembre
Non giunge quel que tu d’Ottobre fili.

It must be confessed that Albuquerque in these letters, filled with the eloquence of the Old Testament, gave as good as he got: the pity is that the King probably only saw them in the official summaries. “Sir, the soldiers in India require to be paid their salaries,” he says on one occasion, or “Your Highness is not well informed,” and he warns him that should matters continue as in the past the empire will come crumbling about the King’s ears.

Again he writes that he is not amazed that the accusations should be made, but amazed that the King should believe them. The names of his accusers were withheld, as later in trials before the Inquisition, but he knew whence the trouble came and does not mince his words in telling the King of the corruption, greed, carelessness, and incompetence of the officials in India appointed by the King. “And if I were not afraid of Your Highness I would send you a dozen of these mischief-makers in a cage.”

In five days he writes nineteen letters to the King, some of them of considerable length, this task occupying him till dawn, after a long day’s work. On a single day he wrote the King eight letters, one of which contains a splendid general account of the state of India, another is a little masterpiece describing the misdeeds of one of his captains.

No doubt his critics believed him to be harsh and insensible. That this was far from being the case is shown by the fact that on receiving, amid a shower of blame and criticisms, a sympathetic letter from his old friend, the historian Duarte Galvão, he shed tears, and also by the deep feeling he displayed when a whole batch of letters came from the King full of dispraise. “Your Highness blames me, blames me, blames me,” he wrote, and again, “My spirits fell to the ground and my hair turned twice as white as it was before.”

When, therefore, a few months after he had written of his intention to return from Ormuz to India in order to see the King’s letters and know if he had sent ships and men for the expedition against Aden, he heard that his successor was appointed, it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that the news killed him.

Albuquerque’s crime was to have thought of India and Portugal first, before personal interests and ambitions. “They call me a harsh man,” he said; and “these officials of yours do not love me.” But if he could vigorously show his dislike of the false and slovenly, he always liberally rewarded good service, was loyal, generous, and unselfish, and showed a most delightful pleasure in any thorough work or workman. “The best thing I ever saw,” he says of a map; and of a good carpenter, “he is a marvellous man.”[18]

No sooner was Albuquerque dead than his greatness was felt, and posterity has never sought to deny it. If we consider the conditions under which his great work was accomplished in six years—his ships often so rotten that they sank of sheer old age, his men few and ill-armed (before he received reinforcements in October 1512 he says that the whole number of Europeans under his command in India were but 1,200, of whom barely 300 were properly armed), the fact that all his projects were liable to be upset by orders dictated in ignorance at home, and that as soon as his back was turned (for instance, when he went to attack Aden) all the officials in India treated him as dead and his instructions as a dead letter—we will not deny that posterity has done well to honour and admire this man in his lonely magnificence. Fannomi onore e di ciò fanno bene.

No doubt he had great faults, since everything in him was great. He adopted oriental methods in dealing with the kings of the East. He murdered in cold blood the powerful minister of the young King of Cochin, and in one of his letters to King Manoel he remarks calmly, “In all my letters I bade him kill the Samuri of Calicut with poison.” But he understood the East and was the only man who could have established the Portuguese Empire firmly. That he was not given a free hand and every assistance from the first was the doom of that empire, and Portugal never saw his like again.

FOOTNOTES:

[12] Albuquerque’s father, Gonçalo de Albuquerque, was in favour at Court. His grandfather João Gonçalvez had been secretary to King João I and King Duarte, but was hanged for murdering his wife in 1437.

[13] In 1461 or 1462. In one of his letters (April 1, 1512) he says that he is fifty. Correa, who calls him old in 1509, says that he was over seventy at the time of his death. Despite the very definite assertion in his letter, perhaps the last word has not been said as to his age. Misprints in these matters are common. Couto, for instance, says that Albuquerque’s nephew Naronha is nearly seventy in 1538 and eighty in 1540. All the historians call Albuquerque old, yet the captain of a fortress was considered too young for the post because he was under forty (Correa III, 687). On the other hand not Borrow merely but Couto (VI. 2. ix) calls Castro old, although he did not live to be fifty. Perhaps in Albuquerque’s letter we should read LX instead of L (for indeed why should he speak so fatherly to King Manoel (1469-1521) if he was not considerably older than the King?), and sesenta for setenta in Correa.

[14] Goa is thus described by an early traveller: “La città di Goa è la più fresca delle Indie e la più abbondante di tutte le cose da.... È detta città molto grande, con buone case e grandi e belle strade e piazze, murata d’intorno con le sue torri e fatta in una buona fortezza. Fuori di detta città vi erano molti horti e giardini copiosi e pieni d’infiniti arbori fruttiferi, con molti stagni di acque; eranvi molte moschee e case d’ orationi di gentili. Il paese d’intorno è molto fertile e ben lavorato.”

[15] The same traveller says: “Questa città di Malaca è la più ricca scala di più ricchi mercatanti e di maggior navigatione e traffico che si possa trovare nel mondo.”

[16] The story, maliciously recorded by Barros, that Albuquerque sent ruby and diamond rings to the historian Ruy de Pina to jog his memory in relating the events of India, may or may not be true. In a way it is characteristic, for Albuquerque, if he wished for Pina’s praise, which one may be inclined to doubt, was not a man to beat about the bush. Perhaps after all it was more honest to plump down the rubies than to indulge in elogio mutuo.

[17] In one letter he bids the King plant all the marsh-lands of Portugal with poppies, since opium is the most welcome merchandise in India.

[18] Estimava muito os homens cavalleiros, says Correa, who knew him personally and insists more than once that he was very accessible. To cope with what Albuquerque himself calls the “mountains of petitions” that beset him he employed six or seven secretaries, but he dealt with them unconventionally, signing them or tearing them up in the street as they were given him, thereby expediting his business but offending the vanity of the petitioners.

JOÃO DE CASTRO.

VII
DOM JOÃO DE CASTRO

(1500-1548)

Era tambem de sua pessoa tam esforçado como em letras insigne.—Pedro de Mariz, Dialogos de Varia Historia.

In that low shady quinta, embowered amongst those tall alcornoques, once dwelt John de Castro, the strange old Viceroy of India.—George Borrow, The Bible in Spain.

Castro was still a schoolboy when Albuquerque died. Born in 1500, the son of D. Alvaro de Castro, in high office under Kings João II and Manoel, and a daughter of the Count of Abrantes, he studied with the famous mathematician, Pedro Nunez, and had a scientific as well as a classical education. There is every reason to believe that he was a promising and fervent scholar, but the victories of Dom Duarte de Meneses in North Africa appealed to him even more than did the figures of Euclid, and in 1518 he “took the key of the fields” and fled to Tangier. There he served with the greatest distinction for nine years, and stood high in favour with the Governor, Meneses, who knighted him and on his return to Portugal in 1527 furnished him with a glowing recommendation to the King.

Of the next few years of his life comparatively little is known. He received a comenda from the King, was employed on various service, and married D. Leonor de Coutinho, of noble family but poor. Probably he was able to devote considerable time to quiet study. In 1535 he commanded one of the twenty-five Portuguese ships in the Emperor Charles V’s victorious expedition against Tunis. It was on this occasion that Castro’s lifelong friend, the gallant poet Prince Luis, followed his example of 1518 and ran away to join the expedition against the wishes of his brother King João III.[19]

In the autumn Castro was back in his favourite Cintra. There he himself planted a quinta, to which his thoughts, later in India, constantly turned. Those who go along the delightful shady road of orchard and running streams, rock and woodland from Cintra to Monserrate and Collares come in a few minutes to an archway and green door on the right. It is here, in the quinta now known as Penha Verde, overlooking the fertile plain of Collares to the sea, that Castro, like Pitt planting by moonlight or Garibaldi in his island, indulged his love of husbandry.

“Here,” says one of his early biographers, “he entertained himself with a new and strange kind of agriculture, for he cut down fruit-bearing trees and planted wild woods, perhaps to show that he was so disinterested that not even from the earth would he expect reward. Yet it is no wonder if one who disdained the rubies and diamonds of the East should think little of the products of Cintra’s rocks.” It was to the matos of the Serra de Cintra that he longed to return in 1546. But he certainly did not despise the fruits of the soil, and probably occupied himself with grafting experiments.

In the spring of 1538, as perhaps previously in the spring of 1537, he sailed to India as captain of a ship. The fleet arrived at Goa in September 1538 and went on to the relief of Diu. In March of the following year he returned to Goa, and two years later accompanied the new Governor, Dom Estevão da Gama, to the Red Sea.

On all these occasions Castro kept a log or roteiro, from Lisbon to Goa, from Goa to Diu, and from Goa to the Red Sea. They display a strong scientific interest, a spirit thoroughly modern—nothing, however small it might be, was to him necessarily unimportant or negligible—or perhaps ancient, since he complains that in his day the scientific investigations of the ancients were no longer in vogue. The logs are written with that vivid directness which mark his letters, “written,” he said, “not for the ladies and gallants of the Court and royal palaces, but for the mariners of Leça and Mattosinhos.”

His descriptions are precise and accurate, which does not prevent them from being often picturesque. He notices many birds, including one white and grey which, he says, the sailors call frades (monks). “I pay great attention to eclipses of the moon,” he writes, as also to longitudes and latitudes, fishes, seaweeds, currents, winds, the colour of the Red Sea, and every detail that might concern the art of navigation, to the delight of his friends Dr. Pedro Nunez and Prince Luis, who had furnished him with special instruments and other assistance for his voyage.

In the summer of 1542 he was back at Cintra, but in December of that year he was appointed to the command of the coast fleet, the main duties of which were to keep clear the coast of Portugal from pirates, such as Mondragon, who perpetually hovered in wait for the priceless spoils and cargoes of Portuguese ships homeward bound from India. He seems to have gone to sea before the end of the year and held this post for two years, with a brief interval in 1543 when he commanded the Portuguese fleet sent to co-operate with the Spanish against Barbarossa. They did not come to an engagement, and Dom João, after visiting Ceuta, returned to Portugal.

He was at Cintra in the beginning of 1545 when the unwelcome news reached him that he had been appointed Governor of India. Most unwillingly he accepted this new post, the difficulties and disquiet of which he had been able to gauge at first hand during his former sojourn in Goa. His young sons were to accompany him.

A picturesque story of the Governor-elect cannot be better told than in the words of the historian Couto, who served under him in India: “Passing one day by the door of a tailor [in Lisbon] he noticed a pair of very rich and fashionable velvet breeches, and pulling up his horse asked to see them. After examining their curious workmanship he asked whose they were. The tailor, not knowing whom he was addressing, answered that they were for a son of the Governor who was going to India. Dom João de Castro thereupon in a rage took up a pair of scissors and cut them into shreds. “Bid that young man buy arms,” he said to the tailor, and so passed on.”

At the end of March the fleet sailed. The number of men actually enlisted was eight hundred, but many more who had been rejected for some defect or were escaping from justice succeeded in embarking as stowaways. In the Governor’s ship alone there were nearly two hundred of them, and they required to be fed during a voyage of many weeks. The Governor was advised to cast them adrift in the provision ship or to maroon them in the Cape Verde Islands, but humanely and persistently refused.

He had not been long at Goa when, in April 1546, news was brought that a formidable attack was being prepared against Diu, the fort commanded by the heroic Dom João de Mascarenhas. Castro sent his son Dom Alvaro with a strong fleet to its relief. The fleet was delayed by violent storms, and when it finally reached Diu there was little of the fortress left. The walls and bulwarks were levelled with the ground, most of the defenders dead, and those who remained either wounded or ill. No one but Mascarenhas could have held on in such conditions, and even so “six more days,” wrote Castro to the King, “and relief would have come too late.”

Most of the nobles in Diu were dead, and among them Dom João de Castro’s other son, Fernando, who had been blown up with many others on a mined part of the wall on which they had rashly remained, although warned by Mascarenhas of their danger. “He should have obeyed Dom João,” wrote Castro stoically to the King, and he added: “Of what Dom Fernando did till the time of his death I will say nothing to your Highness, for it cannot be that men are so wicked but that some among them will inform your Highness of the services and great exertions that my sons undergo in your service.”

The King of Cambaya still boasted of victory, and Dom João de Castro himself sailed north with a powerful fleet from Goa. After striking terror into the enemy by ravaging the coast of Cambaya, setting it all aflame and, in his own words, “sparing no living thing,” he left these shores covered with dead and crossed to Diu.

The fortress was now again invested by an army of 60,000 Moors, and in the battle with the besieging force the Governor was himself more than once in the greatest danger before the enemy was routed. Indeed, it was his personal exertions which largely decided the day, and with pardonable pride he wrote to the King that it was “the greatest victory ever seen in all the East.”

He sent the King a long list of those who had conspicuously distinguished themselves, and for himself he asked for the reward or alviçaras which it was customary to give to a general who had won a battle or taken a city. “And because your Highness may give me one unsuited to my nature and mode of life, I will ask for it specifically, and it is that you should grant me a chestnut-grove which you have in the Serra de Cintra, by the King’s Fountain, bordering on my quinta, that my servants, having chestnuts to eat on my estate, may not go plundering what does not belong to them. Its value may be ten or twelve thousand réis, but to me it will be worth many thousands of crusados.”

There may be something a little theatrical and fantastic (contemporary historians call him bizarro and fanfarrão) in some of Castro’s actions in India, in his Albuquerquian prowess on the coast of Cambaya, the pawning of his beard (again in imitation of Albuquerque), his triumphal entry into Goa, his preparation of stakes on which to spit the Sultan as Pacheco had prepared one for the Samuri of Calicut; but there can be no doubt of the sincerity of his desire to obtain this Cintra castanhal.

After his victory he besought the King not to prolong his term of office beyond the ordinary three years, and to allow him to return to the Serra de Cintra, and in his will he says: “I have near Cintra a quinta, called the Quinta of the King’s Fountain, which I made, and to which I am greatly devoted because I made it and because it is in a country where my father and ancestors were born,” while his letters contain several pathetic references of the same kind.[20]

After his victory over the Moors, Dom João de Castro set about rebuilding Diu, and to obtain money sent an appeal to the citizens of Goa with some hairs of his beard in pawn,[21] since it was impossible to send the bones of his son, as he had first intended, his death being but recent. The citizens of Goa responded nobly to the appeal, and when the Governor returned to Goa in the spring of 1547 received him with great rejoicing. His barbaric “triumph” has been often described.

“He was richly Cloath’d, giving the season its due, and became them as well and sprightly as his Arms. He had on a French suit of crimson satin, with Gold twist about the Slashes and Seams, and, not to forget he was a Souldier, he put on a Coat of Mail wrought on Cloth of Gold with Buttons of Plate [i.e. silver].

“The Magistrates of the City received the Governour under a Canopy and presently a Citizen of Quality, reverently bowing, took his Hat from his Head, putting him on a Crown of Triumph and in his Hand a Palm.

“The ladies from their Windows sprinkled the Triumpher with distilled Waters of diverse Spices.”[22]

In Portugal, too, the news of the victory before Diu was received with universal exultation. The King raised Castro to the dignity of Viceroy—the fourth Viceroy of India—granted him ten thousand crusados, and gave his son Dom Alvaro the command of the Indian Sea. But instead of allowing him to return he prolonged his term of office for another four years. Castro was ill at the time, and shortly afterwards this “saint and hero,” as the modern Portuguese historian Oliveira Martins calls him, died at Goa in the arms of his friend St. Francis Xavier (June 1548).

Thus Albuquerque, whose ties with Portugal had been gradually replaced by those that bound him to Goa, which he had made, as Castro his quinta, died with the bitter knowledge that, if he lived, he must spend his years in Portugal, a whale among minnows, and watch his work being undone by others; Castro, with his thoughts ever turning to the rocks and woods of Cintra and the study of philosophy in his beloved quinta, died in a foreign grandeur at Goa. He died in poverty, for, ever disinterested and humane and generous towards others, he had spent his money on the soldiers whom the State neglected to pay, and himself remained penniless.

The last scene of his life in which he addressed the chief officials and magistrates of Goa is almost as famous as the pawning of his beard. “I am not asham’d, gentlemen, to tell you that the Vice Roy of India wants in this sickness those Conveniences the meanest Souldier finds in the Hospitals. I came to Serve not to Traffick in the East, I would to your Selves have pawn’d the Bones of my Son and did pawn the Hairs of my Beard to assure you I had no other Plate or Hangings in the House to buy me a Hen, for in the Fleets I set forth the Souldiers fed upon the Governour’s Salary before the King’s pay, and ’tis no wonder for the Father of so many children to be poor. I request of you during the time of this Sickness to order me out of the King’s Revenue a proportionable maintenance and to appoint a Person of your own who may provide me a moderate allowance.”[23]

It may be said that for the Governor of a great Empire to leave himself without the means “to buy me a Hen” was the height of extravagance, but that is only the cavil of a more mundane spirit, incapable of attaining so heroic a sublimity, and his countrymen, at least, have always been grateful to Castro for ostentatiously proving that amid all the prevailing corruption there remained one honest man.

Like Albuquerque and Gama, he died in harness. But, great as Castro was as a soldier, he would in all probability have been no less celebrated for his services to literature had it been granted him to spend his old age in the quiet of his shady quinta.

Couto ends his portrait of the Viceroy thus: “And for his great charity, temperance, disinterestedness, exceeding love of God, and other qualities of a good Christian, it may be affirmed that he will be receiving in glory the prize and guerdon of all his trouble and toil.” By his energy, vigour of thought and action, by his splendid character, humane and resolute, he closed the most brilliant half-century of Portugal’s history with a key of gold.

FOOTNOTES:

[19] The Emperor, who was the Prince’s cousin and brother-in-law, welcomed him with open arms at Barcelona. On one occasion, when neither would go through a door before the other and the Emperor insisted on Prince Luis being the first to pass, the latter seized a torch from one of the pages and so preceded him.

[20] In a letter to King João III from India he recalls all his services since the age of eighteen and says: “For the love of God and in reward for these services I beg your Highness to allow me to return to Portugal to live with my wife and children and end the few troubled days that remain to me in the Serra de Cintra,” and in 1540 he writes to Prince Luis that only the arrival of a Turkish fleet in India will prevent him from returning to Portugal.

[21] Then, as in the Middle Ages, the beard was considered an honourable pledge, and men swore by it as Zeus might swear by the River Styx. Albuquerque in India had given some hairs of his beard to a soldier and afterwards redeemed them by a payment of money.

[22] From Sir Peter Wyche’s picturesque seventeenth-century translation of Jacinto Freire de Andrada’s Life of Dom João de Castro.

[23] Wyche’s version.

Printed by Hazell, Watson & Viney, Ld., London and Aylesbury.

Transcriber’s Notes

A few minor errors in punctuation have been corrected.

The spelling of “King Diniz” changed to “King Dinis” in a few spots throughout the text.

The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.

*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PORTUGUESE PORTRAITS ***

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Table of Contents

- PORTUGUESE PORTRAITS

- Preface

- FOOTNOTES:

- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- I KING DINIS
- II NUN’ ALVAREZ
- III PRINCE HENRY THE NAVIGATOR

- IV VASCO DA GAMA

- FOOTNOTES:

- V DUARTE PACHECO PEREIRA

- FOOTNOTES:

- VI AFFONSO DE ALBUQUERQUE

- FOOTNOTES:

- VII DOM JOÃO DE CASTRO

- FOOTNOTES:

- Transcriber’s Notes

- THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG™ LICENSE