As an Englishman who for many years has studied Portuguese history, and in particular the history of the Portuguese in Asia, I feel especially honoured to have been invited by my generous Portuguese hosts to deliver this lecture before so distinguished an audience in this year of 1986. I am sure that I need not remind anyone here that this year is the six hundredth anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Windsor between England and Portugal, and that one important consequence of that treaty was the marriage in the following year of D. João I and Philippa of Lancaster, sister of Henry IV. One of the children of that marriage was the Infante D. Henrique, who initiated that extraordinary maritime expansion which took the Portuguese across "oceans never before navigated"(1)to the most distant corners of the globe.
However, it was not to commemorate that sexcentenary that I was invited to come here this evening, but rather to say a few words about the origins of the Portuguese communities in Asia, to whose remarkable continuity tribute was paid in Évora on the 10th of June at the celebrations for the Day of Portugal, of Camões and of the Portuguese Communities - celebrations which I was privileged to attend. If an appropriate anniversary is needed as a pretext for a lecture on this subject, allow me to remind you of two. 1986 is the four hundred and seventy-fifth anniversary of the conquest of Malacca by Afonso de Albuquerque and of the introduction of Christianity into Southeast Asia that followed it. This event was most movingly commemorated on the 24th of May this year in Thailand, a country with which Portugal has maintained friendly relations continuously since 1511, by a Mass celebrated at the Portuguese Embassy in Bangkok by the archbishop of Thailand with the participation of numerous priests - Thai, Portuguese and of other nationalities. The second anniversary of which I should like to remind you is, I suspect, rather less well known. Four hundred years ago, on the 10th of April 1586, King Philip II of Spain and I of Portugal, by a decree signed in Goa by the Viceroy, D. Duarte de Menezes, conferred the status of a city on the Portuguese settlement in Macau, confirming its name as ‘The City of the Name of God in China' and granting to it the same privileges, liberties, honours and prerogatives as those enjoyed by the city of Évora. I was reminded of this only three days ago when I heard the address given by your President Mário Soares in the Paços do Concelho in Évora. On the wall behind his chair was painted the coat of arms of Évora, the same as Macau's and with the same motto beneath: "Muy nobre e sempre leal cidade" (Most noble and ever loyal city).
Let us now return to 1511. In April of that year, Afonso de Albuquerque set sail from Goa at the head of a fleet of eighteen ships and a force of eight hundred Portuguese and six hundred Malabar soldiers. He was bound for Malacca, the richest emporium in Southeast Asia, capital of a powerful Muslim sultanate, the city which Tomé Pires described in his Suma Oriental as "a city made for merchandise more than any other in the world, the end of monsoons and the beginning of others; Malacca is surrounded and lies in the middle; and the trade and commerce between the different nations for a thousand leagues on every hand must come to Malacca." (2) On the 1st of July, 1511, Albuquerque's fleet sailed into the harbour of Malacca and cast' anchor to the sound of trumpets and salvoes of gunfire.
On the 24th of August, Albuquerque, his patience exhausted after making several attempts to negotiate a peace agreement with the rulers of Malacca, took the city by force, and his men marched through the streets six abreast, killing anyone who tried to resist them. In this way, another jewel, of unusual splendour and brilliance, was added to the necklace of Portuguese fortresses and trading posts that was eventually to extend from Hormuz to Ternate and from Sofala to Nagasaki, and another possession was added to the maritime empire of D. Manuel I, Lord of the Conquest, Navigation and Commerce of Ethiopia, Arabia, Persia and India.
Having gained mastery over Malacca, Albuquerque's most immediate task was to ensure that it maintained its position as an important international emporium, and to this end he sent embassies to Ayutthaya in Siam and to China and also tried to persuade the Indian, Peguan, Chinese and Javanese merchants who had fled from the city after the conquest to return, to make their submission to the new Portuguese rulers and to continue with their trading activities. In Ayutthaya a large and flourishing Portuguese settlement was soon established, which survived until the city was sacked by the Burmese in 1767. This settlement, known in Thai as the Ban Portuget has recently been restored by the Department of Fine Arts of Thailand with the generous support of the Gulbenkian Foundation. To this day, the descendants of these Portuguese from Ayutthaya still live in another Ban Portuget in Thonburi, across the Chao Praya River from Bangkok, which was the capital of the Siamese kingdom for a few years after 1767.
During the five months that Albuquerque remained in Malacca after the conquest, he also saw to the defences of the city and on the site of the great mosque of Sultan Mansur Syah he built the fortress known as A Famosa. A Famosa survived all the vicissitudes suffered by Malacca during the hundred and thirty years that it was under Portuguese rule and the subsequent hundred and sixty years of Dutch domination, until it was demolished by the English in 1807. Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir, in his autobiographical description of Malacca at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Hikayat Abdullah, gives a vivid description of the demolition, which reads almost as if it were an epitaph on Portuguese Malacca:
"The next morning," he wrote, "Mr. Farquhar appeared on horseback holding a slowmatch in his hand. He sent men to clear out everyone on the Fort side and they ran away in all directions. Then he touched off the fuse and at once spurred his horse away. After about ten minutes the gunpowder exploded with a noise like thunder, and pieces of the Fort as large as elephants, and even some as large as houses, were blown into the air and cascaded into the sea. Some went right over the river and struck the houses on the other side. Everyone was startled when they heard the noise, their surprise all the greater, because never in their lives had they heard such a sound or seen how gunpowder can lift bits of rock as big as houses. At last they realised that the Fort could be destroyed by the English, and they shook their heads saying: 'Great indeed is the skill and ingenuity of these white men. But what a pity that a building as fine as this should be brought low in an instant of time. For if they wished to repair it there is no knowing how many years it would take before it was finished'. For the Fort was the pride of Malacca and, after its destruction, the place lost its glory, like a woman bereaved of her husband, the lustre gone from her face. But now, by the will of Allah, it was no more, showing how ephemeral are the things of this world. The old order is destroyed, a new world is created and all around us is change."(3)
The principal objective of the Portuguese conquest of Malacca was to acquire a base from which to gain direct access to the trade of the region, on which the prosperity of Malacca depended. In particular, they hoped to end the domination that the Venetians had long enjoyed over the trade in three rare and valuable commodities, for which, according to Tomé Pires, the Malaccan merchants maintained that God had specially created three groups of islands in the Indonesian archipelago - the Moluccas for cloves, the Banda Islands for nutmeg and mace, and Timor for sandalwood. In the ten years following the conquest of Malacca, the Portuguese sailed to the Lesser Sunda Islands, to Banda and to the Moluccas. Until they were beaten out of Indonesian waters by their European rivals during the first half of the seventeenth century, their chief commercial activity east of Malacca was concentrated in these three areas, while their missionary endeavours were likewise almost exclusively confined to the eastern islands: the Dominicans, based first in Solor and Flores and then in Timor, and the Jesuits in Ternate and later in Tidore.
I do not propose to discuss now the controversial question of whether the dominant motive impelling the Portuguese when they conquered Malacca and penetrated into the islands to the east was God, gold, glory, or a bit of all three, or whether commercial considerations were of greater significance to them than the interests and obligations imposed upon them by the Padroado Real. Let us leave the last word on this to João de Barros, who tells us that in 1538, following the baptism in Ternate of two noblemen from Makassar in Sulawesi (Celebes), António Galvão, then captain of the Moluccas, sent a casado (married settler) in his service named Francisco de Castro accompanied by two priests on a mission to Sulawesi, with instructions to seek the friendship of the local rulers, in the hope that thereby "down one path both souls and revenue could be won". (5) It is important to remember that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Portuguese communities in the Estado da India were generally known as 'Cristandades'; in other words, the adoption of Christianity and the acquisition of Portuguese citizenship were considered to be synonymous.
Late in 1511, a fleet under the command of António de Abreu reached Banda. The quatrain which Camões devoted in The Lusiads to a description of these remote islands is of such lyrical beauty that one is almost tempted to believe that he had seen them with his own eyes:
Consider the Banda Islands, bedecked with many colours that the red mace embellishes, and the various birds that fly there, taking their tribute from the green nutmeg. (6)
On the return voyage from Banda, the vessel commanded by Francisco Serrão was wrecked in the Banda Sea, and Serrão, having obtained a native boat, sailed with a small group of companions to Ternate, where he remained until his death in 1521 and became a close friend and chief counsellor of the sultan.
At first the Portuguese were well received by the Bandanese. In February 1523, António de Brito, first captain of the Moluccas, wrote from Ternate that he had set up the largest and most beautiful padrão (stone pillar) that could be found in Banda as a mark of possession of the islands and had concluded an agreement to trade in cloves, nutmeg and mace with all the notables, "because there is no king, and they all appointed me to execute it and agreed that whoever opposed it should die for it."(7) However, the Bandanese never permitted the Portuguese to establish themselves on a permanent basis in the islands and they fiercely resisted all attempts to convert them to Christianity.
Ternate, the most important of the clove-producing islands of the Moluccas and the most powerful of the Muslim sultanates in the area, remained the centre of Portuguese commercial and missionary activity in eastern Indonesia for most of the sixteenth century, and, until they constructed a fortress on Ambon in 1567, the Portuguese fortress on Ternate was their sole permanent establishment in the area. Portuguese and other missionaries, including St. Francis Xavier, would sail from Ternate on the perilous enterprise of trying to convert the inhabitants of Seram, Halmahera and other neighbouring islands.
The first serious attempt by the Portuguese to establish relations with the numerous small kingdoms in Sulawesi was made, as we have seen, by Francisco de Castro in 1538. However, Castro's mission never reached Makassar and it was not until 1544 that Rui Vaz Pereira, captain of Malacca, sent António de Paiva with twelve companions to Makassar to trade in sandalwood. By the beginning of the seventeenth century, Makassar had become one of the most important commercial centres in the archipelago. After the seizure of Ternate in 1606 by a Spanish expedition from the Philippines and the loss of their other fortresses in the spice islands, the Portuguese increasingly turned to Makassar and, by 1620, between ten and twenty Portuguese vessels were calling at Makassar each year, bringing cargoes of Indian textiles, Chinese silk and porcelain, firearms and other European and Japanese weapons, in exchange for spices, sandalwood, wax, tortoise-shell, diamonds and slaves. As the English merchant, Henry Short, declared, "the Portuguese keep Makassar for their second Malacca and trade there as securely as if they had not an enemy left in the Indies, because they have not once been attacked there." (8)
After the conquest of Malacca by the Dutch in 1641, most of the Portuguese and their dependents retired to Makassar, where they were well received and assigned a quarter of the city in which to settle. By the middle of the seventeeth century there were about three thousand Catholics in Makassar, of whom the majority were Portuguese. Portuguese was widely spoken at the court of Makassar and successive rulers and their ministers spoke and wrote the language fluently. Pattingalloang, for example, who was ruler of Tallo' from 1636, was said to speak the language "with as much facility as it is spoken in Lisbon".(9)
In 1522, Portuguese ships reached Timor and the Portuguese began to participate in the sandalwood trade. The first Portuguese merchants found that the neighbouring island of Solor had a safer anchorage and a more agreeable climate and they decided to concentrate their activities there. However, they did not establish either a permanent trading post or a fortress, but left this task to the Dominican missionaries, who arrived on Solor in 1561 and as early as 1566 claimed to have baptized five thousand people on Solor, Timor and Flores. Nowhere in the Portuguese Indies, they said, were there communities where "monarchies of souls" could be won for God more easily and rapidly. (10)
In 1564, the Dominicans were besieged by a Javanese fleet and were only saved by the chance arrival of a Portuguese galleon homeward bound from the Moluccas. This incident impelled the missionaries to construct a fortress to protect their converts from the attacks of Muslim raiders from Java and Makassar. Around the fortress there grew up a settlement composed of native Christians and the families of Portuguese soldiers, sailors and traders who had married local women. These were the first Topasses, an unruly and rebellious community who were from the outset in almost continual conflict with the Portuguese authorities.
During the first twenty years of its existence, the captains of the Solor fortress were chosen by the Dominican prior in Malacca. In 1585, however, the friars, deeming it "a thing of ambition and unworthy of the humility of the sons of St. Dominic" to nominate the captain, asked the viceroy in Goa to perform this duty. By a royal charter of the 15th of March 1585, António de Viegas, a casado of Malacca was made captain of the "bastion of Solor".(11)Thenceforward, governors of Solor and Timor were regularly appointed, although many of them were prevented from exercising their functions by the rebellious Topasses, and some failed to reach the islands at all.
Fortresses were subsequently built on Ende, at Larantuka in Flores and Lifau in Timor, but despite this, in the eyes of the Portuguese authorities in Malacca and Goa, the Lesser Sunda Islands remained, as the Dominicans repeatedly described them in their correspondence, "the furthest ends of the earth".(12)They were not even listed as possessions of the Portuguese crown until 1681.
Apart from Timor, Flores was the island in the Lesser Sundas in which Portuguese influence made itself most strongly felt. Its very name is Portuguese and its languages, its art, its customs and its traditions contain many Portuguese elements. One striking example of the influence is recorded by António Pinto da França in his book Portuguese Influence in Indonesia, in which he quotes the words used to this day in the proclamation of the raja of Sika in central Flores. The words are clearly Portuguese, although much corrupted, and they appear to have been first taken from some long-forgotten letter from the king of Portugal to the raja of Sika and thereafter transmitted orally from generation to generation:
Viva Altissimo Senhor rei boa saudi el quan Deos nosa Senhor dê longa wida permanosa El-Rei reinno da Sikka. De blaixo de Lixbao(13).
Finally, let us look briefly at Macau, which this year celebrates its four hundredth anniverary as a Portuguese city. Macau, although its origins and subsequent development made it very different from any of the other places that we have considered this evening, nevertheless demonstrates many of the characteristics common to all the Portuguese settlements in the Far East and, with the notable exception of Timor, has been exposed to Portuguese influence longer and more continuously than any of them.
The origins of Macau are shrouded in obscurity and even the name Macau, which is not a Chinese name, is of uncertain derivation. It is certain, however, that the first Portuguese to set foot in China was Jorge Álvares, who in 1514 erected a padrão on the island of Tamão (probably T'unmen) in the delta of the Canton River, and that in 1555, when Fernão Mendes Pinto arrived in China, Portuguese traders were already frequenting Macau. By 1570, there was a flourishing Portuguese settlement there and in 1573, the Chinese, not wishing to take any chances with their new neighbours, built a wall across the isthmus to the north of Macau that gave access to the mainland. In this wall was a gate, known by the Portuguese as the 'Porta do Cerco', which at first was only opened twice a month to allow the passage of foodstuffs and other essential supplies to the city. When it was closed, it was sealed with six strips of paper, and over it was an inscription in Chinese: "Fear our greatness and respect our virtue."
The first settlers in Macau governed themselves as best they could, without any instructions from Goa or Malacca, in much the same way as the Dominicans on Solor. The Senado da Câmara (town council) of Macau was not founded until the viceroyalty of D. Francisco de Mascarenhas between 1581 and 1584. At that time the relations between the Portuguese and the Chinese authorities on the mainland had not yet been regularised. In 1583, Francisco de Sande, a former governor of the Spanish Philippines, wrote from Mexico to the Conde de La Coruña that since Macau "is an established city with approximately five hundred households and has a Portuguese governor and a bishop, every three years the citizens pay to the viceroy of Canton, when he takes up his office, approximately a hundred thousand ducats to avoid being expelled from the country, and the viceroy distributes this sum among the mandarins at the court of the emperor of China. However, they all continually say that the emperor has no idea how many Portuguese there are in his realm."(14)
António Bocarro tells us that in 1638 there were already approximately eight hundred and fifty Portuguese families in the city, each of whom possessed an average of six slaves capable of bearing arms. The children of these families were, in Bocarro's opinion, very much more robust than any others in the East. Macau, he goes on, "is one of the most noble cities in the Orient by reason of its rich and most noble commerce with every part of the world in all manner of treasures and precious things in great abundance, and it has more casados and rich people than any other place in this state [the Estado da Índia]."(15)
The foundations of this "rich and most noble commerce" were the carrying trade between China and Japan, which continued until the final expulsion of the Portuguese from Japan by the shogun in 1639; the trade with Manila, which, in spite of becoming technically illegal after the union of the Spanish and Portuguese crowns in 1580, was permitted and even encouraged by the viceregal government; and the sandalwood trade between China and the Lesser Sunda Islands, which according to a report of 1640 by the Jesuit Francisco Cardim became, after the loss of the Japan trade, the commerce on which depended "the welfare, the maintenance and almost the very existence of this city". (16)
The Macau merchants bought the sandalwood, together with small quantities of gold, tortoise-shell, wax and slaves, first in Solor, later at Larantuka, and finally in Timor itself, in exchange for refined gold, ivory, iron, cloth and silk brought from Macau. Their ships would also call at Malacca, Madura, Bali and Batavia (modern Jakarta), if permitted to do so by the Dutch authorities, and at Japara and other ports on the north coast of Java, where they would dispose of some of their cargo and take on rice with which to pay the troops in Timor. Already by 1580, the net profit on each cargo carried from Macau to Timor amounted to one thousand cruzados. The importance of this trade for the Portuguese increased after the conquest of Malacca by the Dutch in 1641, and the ban on trade with Manila imposed by the Spanish authorities as a reprisal against Macau for having supported the Portuguese revolt in 1640 against Spanish rule and recognized D. João IV as king of Portugal.
In 1654, the inscription "Não há outra mais leal" (There is none more loyal) was laced over the gate of the City Hall, by order of the governor, João de Sousa Pereira, and in 1810 the title of Leal Senado was bestowed on the Council of Macau by the regent, D. Pedro, then in exile in Rio de Janeiro. Today, the Portuguese flag still flies proudly in Macau long after it has ceased to do so in almost all the other places of which I have spoken in this talk. During four centuries, Macau has abundantly proved that "there is none more loyal". I believe, indeed, that the sense of being in some way culturally Portuguese, which your President described in his message of the 10th of June to the Portuguese Communities as " the saudade of our condition of being Portuguese", survives, whatever the political circumstances, almost as strongly among the inhabitants of the Portuguese Settlement in Malacca, the Ban Portuget of Thonburi in Thailand, the village of Tugu near Jakarta, and the kingdom of Sika in Flores, as it does in the Leal Senado of Macau or even in the Praça do Giraldo in Évora.
NOTES
[Except where otherwise stated, all translations from Dutch, French and Portuguese, including those from the Suma Oriental, are by the author]
(1). "Mares nunca dantes navegados." Luís de Camões, Os Lusíadas, Canto I,1.
(2)."A cidade que foi feita para a mercadoria mais que todallas do mundo, cabo de monções, princípio doutras; e cercada Malacca e jaz no meio; e o trato e comércio de umas nações e outras de mil leguas de cada banda a Malaca hão de vir." Armando Cortesão, trans. & ed., The Suma Oriental of Tomé Pires, 2 vols. (London, Hakluyt Society, 1944) II, p. 49.
(3). Quoted in A. H. Hill, 'Munshi 'Abdullah's Account of the Malacca Fort', Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, vol. XXIII, pt. 1, February, 1950.
(4). Cortesão op. cit., II, p. 509.
(5). João de Barros, Décadas da Ásia 1-4, 9 vols. (Lisbon, 1777-78) IV, ch. 21.
(6). "Olha de Banda as ilhas, que se esmaltam/ Da vária cor que pinta o roxo fruto;/ As aves variadas, que ali saltam/ Da verde noz tomando seu tributo." Os Lusíadas, Canto X, 133.
(7). António de Brito to the King, Ternate, 11 February 1523, in Artur Basílio de Sá, Documentacão para a História das Missões do Padroado Português do Oriente. Insulíndia. 5 vols. (Lisbon, 1954-63)I, p. 48.
(8). Dagh-Register gehouden int Casteel Batavia... 1624-29, 8 February, 1625.
(9). Alexandre de Rhodes, S. J., Divers Voyages et missions... en la Chine, & autres Royaumes de l'Orient (Paris, 1653)pt. III, pp. 34-38.
(10). Padre Baltasar Dias to the Padre Provincial da Índia, Malaca, 3 December 1559, in Sá, op. cit., II, pp. 344-45.
(11). Humberto Leitão, Os Portugueses em Solor e Timor de 1515 a 1702 (Lisbon, 1948) pp. 82-84.
(12). "As derradeiras do mundo." 'Fundação das primeiras Cristandades nas ilhas de Solor e Timor', in Sá, op. cit., IV, p. 495.
(13). António Pinto da França, Portuguesse Influence in Indonesia. (Lisbon, 1985), p. 42.
(14). Quoted in C. R. Boxer ed., South China in the Sixteenth Century (London, Hakluyt Society, 1953), pp. XXXVI - XXXVII.
(15). António Bocarro, Livro das Plantas de Todas as Fortalezas, Cidades e Povoações do Estado da India Oriental. 1635, in Arquivo Português Oriental (Bastora, 1938), IV: História Administrativa, vol.II 1600-1699, pt. II, p. 33.
(16). Francisco Cardim, S. J., Relação da Gloriosa morte de quatro embaixadores portuguese da cidade de Macau..., (Lisbon, 1643), folios 19-20.
* Researcher on the Portuguese in the East.
The text of a speech given in the Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon on the 12th of June, 1986.
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