GOA AND ITS EUROPEAN RIVALS

The second half of the seventeenth century is one of the most neglected periods in the history of the Estado da Índia. Until the publication in 2006 of the relevant volumes of the Nova história da expansão portuguesa almost nothing of substance had been written about it, aside from Glenn J Ames's pioneering monograph on the viceroyalties of the 1670s and a few specialist articles and papers. Such disinterest may be attributed largely to the devastating decline suffered by the Estado da Índia itself during the first half of the century – a decline much commented upon by those living at the time. Subsequently generations of Portuguese historians simply turned their backs on the period, while foreign scholars focused on the English, the Dutch and the French.

When hostilities between the Portuguese and their European rivals east of the Cape of Good Hope finally halted in the 1660s the Estado da Índia found itself reduced to just four widely-separated components. These were Macau, part of Timor, the Portuguese interests in East Africa and the enclaves in India. To what extent this shrunken entity could survive the next few decades was clearly going to depend heavily on relationships with the English and the Dutch.

A truce with the English had been signed at Goa as early as 1635, after which the Portuguese gradually came to see the Anglo-Portuguese alliance in Asia as essential.

BEGINNINGS: THE CONQUEST OF CEUTA

Portuguese expansion into North Africa began in 1415 with a massive military expedition against the Moroccan port-town of Ceuta, a short sea-voyage from Portugal across the narrow Straits of Gibraltar. Various explanations have been offered as to why the Portuguese leadership decided to launch this expedition, the most important of which have been conveniently summarised by Isabel and Paulo Drumond Braga.

Firstly, there were alleged strategic objectives such as gaining a degree of control over the Straits, obtaining a port from which to combat Muslim piracy and outmanoeuvring Castile; but there is little to suggest any of these aims was of decisive importance in 1415. A second type of explanation stresses the economic incentive. Ceuta was known to receive exotic trade goods from trans-Saharan and trans-Middle Eastern caravans for which reason it had already attracted attention from the Venetians and Genoese. Perhaps Ceuta was also seen as a potential supplier of wheat – a commodity Morocco produced in some abundance but Portugal needed to import. In any event, merchant interests, particularly in Lisbon, were supposed to have strongly favoured the expedition. Such explanations received wide credence especially in the mid-to-late twentieth century, when the magisterial writings of Vitorino Magalhães Godinho were at their most influential.

A third kind of explanation sees the Ceuta expedition, which was strongly supported by the service nobility, as primarily an extension of the Iberian peninsula's long tradition of Reconquest. Recent historiography has tended to lean towards this view – and with good reason.

PROFITS ON THE FRINGES OF THE SAHARA

The first profits accruing to the Portuguese as a result of their African coastal voyaging came from fishing and privateering off Atlantic Morocco and slaving in the Canaries. Later, when Prince Henrique's captains explored beyond Cape Bojador in the mid-1430s, they found significant colonies of seals – the first hint of new economic opportunities ahead. By the start of the 1440s, the prince's men had commenced slaving razias on African soil and were bartering for gold dust, first at the Rio do Ouro on the coast of Western Sahara, then, more significantly, on the island of Arguim off Mauritania. For the Portuguese, slaves and gold had already become, and would long remain, Atlantic Africa's fundamental attraction.

The discovery of Arguim was a significant advance. Although a barren sandy island that itself produced nothing of commercial value, it possessed a safe anchorage, had reliable wells and was relatively easy to defend. Arguim adjoined rich fishing grounds and offered a convenient base for slaving. But more important commercially was its relative proximity to Wadan, a town some 350 kilometres away in the Mauritanian interior. Wadan was a staging-post for desert caravans passing between West Africa and the Maghrib. Arab and Sanhaja merchants brought horses, cloth and a range of other goods south by this route to exchange for African slaves, and for gold dust from sources near the middle and upper reaches of the Volta river in modern Ghana.

INTRODUCING THE PRIVATE TRADER

In 1524 Vasco da Gama sailed from Portugal to India for the third and final time, a quarter century after his celebrated first voyage of 1497–9. Tired and ageing, he undertook the journey most reluctantly, having been obliged to accept the office of viceroy on João III's personal insistence. The viceregal fleet duly reached southwest India late in the year, but by that time Gama was seriously ill and so was taken straight ashore at Cochin and lodged in the house of a certain Diogo Pereira, a prominent Portuguese settler. Hidden among coconut trees but strategically located close to the lagoon, the church and the fortress, Pereira's house was, we are told, richly decorated with Chinese porcelain. It was here, on Christmas Eve 1524, that the old admiral finally passed away, Pereira's half-Indian family anxiously hovering in the background.

In view of what Diogo Pereira actually stood for there is irony in this deathbed scene. A minor nobleman who had settled in Cochin almost twenty years before, Pereira had held the important offices of escrivão, factor and captain. But he had also pursued a long and successful career in local and regional private trade, building up an extensive network of Asian business contacts and maintaining a close association with the rajah of Cochin. He had married an Indian wife, founded a Eurasian family, learned to speak Malayalam fluently and integrated so successfully into Kerala society that he was nicknamed the Malabari.

This second volume of A History of Portugal and the Portuguese Empire from Beginnings to 1807, which concerns the Portuguese empire, is organised somewhat differently from Volume 1. Here each chapter engages with Portugal's presence in a particular geographical region – or, in the cases of Chapters 16 and 19, with the processes of exploring and opening up communications. Given that the Portuguese empire was an extraordinarily widespread and dispersed entity, only loosely held together – a complex patchwork of disparate parts – it seemed to me such a framework constituted easily the most appropriate option for a volume of this kind.

The volume begins with a chapter on the Portuguese presence in North Africa, where the kingdom's overseas expansion began in 1415. Portugal continued to maintain considerable commitments in this region for at least a century – and only abandoned its last North African outpost in 1769. Next, there is a chapter on Portuguese voyages of exploration in the Atlantic, concluding with Dias's rounding of the Cape of Good Hope in 1487 and the overland reconnaissances of Covilhã. The two following chapters describe how the Portuguese established and maintained themselves, respectively, in numerous parts of Atlantic Africa, from Mauritania to Angola, and in various Atlantic archipelagoes – particularly Madeira, the Azores and the Cape Verde Islands. Then there is a cluster of three chapters on the Portuguese in maritime Asia, up until the crisis of the mid-seventeenth century.

VASCO DA GAMA'S FIRST VOYAGE TO INDIA

After receiving the reports of Cão, Dias and probably Covilhã in the late 1480s and early 1490s, João II knew that he was tantalisingly close to linking Portugal by sea to the trading world of monsoon Asia. With that objective in mind, he therefore began preparations for a major new expedition – but was soon distracted by internal matters, then immobilised by ill-health. João finally died in 1495, and it was therefore under the patronage of his successor, King Manuel, that the expedition set sail two years later. In command was Vasco da Gama, at the time a service nobleman of no obvious distinction.

Despite an upsurge of interest in Vasco da Gama in the late 1990s – the five hundredth anniversary of his famous voyage – we still know relatively little about his background and early career. However, both his parents came from Sines in Baixo Alentejo, an area long associated with the Order of Santiago, and it is clear Vasco himself was closely identified with this order. As a young man he participated in various military enterprises and probably served for a while in North Africa. He is known to have commanded a minor naval operation in 1492; but, overall, there is nothing unusual in his service record and no evidence he possessed any particular maritime skills or experience.

EARLY VOYAGES AND THE AGE OF FEITORIAS

It is uncertain today which European voyager was the first to sight the coast of Brazil, or precisely where. A Portuguese expedition commanded by Duarte Pacheco Pereira may have explored off Pará and Maranhão in 1498, though the evidence for this is slight and inconclusive. In January 1500, the Spanish navigator Vicente Yáñez Pinzón certainly reached somewhere in northeastern South America and possibly sailed along part of Brazil's northern coast, discovering en route the mouth of the Amazon. But there is much uncertainty about exactly where Pinzón went, he may never have reached Brazil at all and the great river he encountered might have been the Orinoco. Moreover, whatever the truth about the Pinzón voyage, it was not followed up and had little direct bearing on the future of Brazil.

The first European landing in Brazil for which irrefutable evidence exists was made by men of a Portuguese fleet commanded by Pedro Álvares Cabral, en route to India, in April 1500. The immediate circumstances of Cabral's visit are clear enough. After Vasco da Gama's return from Calicut in 1499 King Manuel resolved to dispatch to India a second, much larger fleet, comprising thirteen ships, of which he gave Cabral command. Cabral himself came from a minor noble family of Beira Baixa with strong links to the house of Viseu – the house of King Manuel.

POST-WAR RECONSTRUCTION: SUGAR, TOBACCO AND CATTLE

After the expulsion of the Dutch in 1654 Brazil faced a huge task of post-war reconstruction. Almost a generation of conflict had devastated the country's plantations, particularly in Pernambuco. By as early as the late 1630s up to half the Pernambucan sugar mills had already ceased producing. Then, when the uprising against the WIC broke out in Pernambuco in 1645, the Portuguese governor-general in Salvador ordered the insurgents to abandon the captaincy's mills and burn its cane-fields. To what extent this was actually done is unclear; but destruction wrought during the uprising was certainly extensive, and the impact was later compounded by several years of drought. In the late sixteenth century Pernambuco had easily been Brazil's leading sugar captaincy, responsible for 60 per cent of the country's output. But at the end of Dutch rule this former front-runner could manage only a mere 10 per cent. Bahia had replaced it as the largest producer – and remained so for the rest of the colonial period.

For years the post-war reconstruction of Pernambuco was hindered by disputes over ownership of mills and land. These disputes mostly pitted former owners, who had fled to Bahia during the Dutch occupation, against persons who had acquired ownership under the WIC – but had also, in many cases, later played important roles in the 1645 revolt.

THE ROLE OF PRINCE HENRIQUE

At the start of the fifteenth century, Europeans understood little about the Atlantic outside of their own coastal waters. They regarded with awe and foreboding the mighty Ocean Sea, which stretched away to the north and west into a mysterious world of storms, mists and cold. The south, being almost wholly unknown, they feared even more; many mariners doubted whether any ship that ventured far in that direction could possibly return. Yet, as the century wore on, perceptions changed greatly. Europeans accumulated more and more knowledge about the Atlantic – knowledge based on actual observation and experience. They learned about its wind systems, currents and weather patterns, and they developed the ships, navigational techniques and practical know-how to sail almost anywhere within its waters, confident they could return safely. By the late 1480s they had successfully explored the entire length of Africa's Atlantic coast and found almost all the ocean's significant archipelagoes.

The Portuguese were in the forefront of this momentous process. They were the principal European pioneers of African coastal sailing, and it was they who first rounded the southern tip of Africa, finally passing from the Atlantic into the Indian Ocean. Their voyages along these coasts were therefore the prelude to one of the most significant breakthroughs in world history – the linking of the Atlantic maritime communications system to that of the Indian Ocean.

THE ESTADO DA ÍNDIA BEYOND THE SUB-CONTINENT

In the century-and-a-half after 1663, there were three major components of the Estado da Índia located beyond the Indian sub-continent: Macau, Portuguese Timor, and Portuguese East Africa. All, especially from Goa's perspective, were isolated places, remote not only from the viceregal capital itself, but from each other. Each had its own special character, unique in the context of the Portuguese empire – a port-city on the South China coast; enclaves and interests on a remote island in the Indonesian archipelago; settlements and holdings on a vast coastline and along a great river valley, stretching far into the African savanna.

In each of these disparate settings the colonists were deeply pre-occupied with their own problems, and in each local issues held centre stage. This is not to deny they also had much in common. All the colonists expressed loyalty to the same crown, were to a degree affected by the same central government policies and subscribed to the same basic traditions and values. Nevertheless, such were the differences between Macau, Timor and Portuguese East Africa, and so far were they all from the core of the Estado da Índia, that it seems compelling to treat each as a discrete colonial entity. The smallest of them, in some respects the most extraordinary but by no means the least significant, was the port-city of Macau.

THE ESTADO DA ÍNDIA

The Portuguese crown's possessions in maritime Asia and East Africa were called collectively the Estado da Índia – the State of India. This expression began to appear regularly in Portuguese documents from about the mid-sixteenth century. In a strict legal sense it meant all the cities, fortresses and territories listed in the deed of transfer given to each incoming viceroy or governor at his ceremonial induction. However, there were also numerous Portuguese settlements not listed because they were unofficial – they had been established informally by private initiative. Some such settlements were eventually elevated to formal status, given an official captain, granted a câmara (town council) and brought under crown protection. Their names would then duly appear on the next deed of transfer. The most important of these was Macau, which became an official settlement only in the early seventeenth century.

The expression Estado da Índia was also sometimes used in a much broader sense, as though it embraced all the coasts, islands and waters east of the Cape where the Portuguese crown maintained a presence or claimed a vague theoretical lordship. One early-seventeenth-century writer described this Portuguese ‘state’ as extending all the way from the southern tip of Africa to the lower Yangste river. But this chapter is concerned with the Estado da Índia in its restricted sense – with formal, officially-acknowledged Portuguese possessions only. Informal Portuguese settlements and interests are discussed in the next chapter.

TREES AND TRADERS

When Cabral's men made their first Brazilian landfall on 22 April 1500 they were confronted by a seemingly endless profusion of forest. Just how awesomely tree-rich the ‘new’ land appeared to be is made abundantly clear, both in Caminha's letter and on the famous Cantino Map. The latter shows the entire coast of Brazil from the equator southwards covered in great arboreal stands. Such an overwhelming image is understandable, for Brazil possessed the largest forests in the world with a far more extensive range of species than Europeans had ever imagined possible. Not surprisingly it was Brazilian forests that were soon providing the Portuguese with their first commercial exports from the New World.

To the Portuguese, Brazil's trees were a most welcome discovery. At the start of the sixteenth century Portugal itself was chronically short of timber, while accessible woodlands in Madeira and the Azores, which had been much exploited during the previous century, were now heavily depleted. Potential demand in Portugal for Brazilian timber and timber products – especially for ship-building, house-construction and cabinet-making – was therefore considerable. However, it was brazilwood (caesalpina echinata), the source of a deep red or purple dye much sought after in the textile industry, that became the early focus of attention. Probably it was this association that gave to ‘Brazil’ its name.

The Portuguese began extracting brazilwood from coastal forests shortly after Cabral's voyage of discovery, and the French were soon doing likewise.