And let those seek out some other to join with them than me, who will reckon the kings of Castile and Portugal amongst warlike and magnanimous conquerors, because, at the distance of twelve hundred leagues from their lazy abode, by the conduct of their captains, they made themselves masters of both Indies; of which it remains to be seen if they have but the courage to go and in person to enjoy them.
Michel de Montaigne, ‘Against Idleness’.Footnote 1Introduction
In the Indian Ocean world, the seventeenth century was characterized by the intense competition between a variety of political and imperial projects, from the Mughals and Safavids among Islamic polities, to the Portuguese, and the various East India companies—English, Dutch, and French. While it may be tempting to treat these in a classic comparative framework, wherein each polity has stable diagnostic features, the risks of this approach have long been identified.Footnote 2 On the contrary, each political system evolved and adapted in response to a combination of internal dynamics and external pressures. In this context, how does one understand the evolution of the Portuguese Estado da Índia over the middle decades of the seventeenth century, and in particular after the period of the so-called ‘Union of the Crowns’ with Castile from 1580 to 1640? While some recent historiography has dealt with the years leading up to 1640, debating issues of ‘connection’ and ‘disconnection’ between different imperial structures, the subsequent period has not received much attention.Footnote 3 In part, this is because it is a notoriously difficult period to characterize, especially in terms of the familiar schematizations that are available in imperial history. Thus, general formulas such as ‘the Portuguese empire's future depended on fending off private interlopers and rival empires and keeping enclaves in line’ or ‘the repertoire of Portuguese empire expanded as opportunities opened’ at once attempt to say too much and too little for our purposes.Footnote 4
It is by now a commonplace among analysts of long-lasting imperial structures that the conventional ‘sine-wave’ model of rise, consolidation, failure, and decline is hardly the most satisfactory way of dealing with them. This dissatisfaction gave rise to notions such as that of a ‘second British empire’, consolidated after 1783 and the loss of the American colonies, and perhaps present in nuce already from around 1763. In the past few decades, a similar reconceptualization has been visible in Ottoman historiography, replacing the problematic idea of an endless phase of ‘imperial decline’ running from the late sixteenth century onwards.Footnote 5 As one of its proponents has written, ‘the Ottoman polity [between 1760 and 1820] experienced a turn from a vertical empire, in which the imperial elite sustained claims to power through a hierarchical system, to a horizontal and participatory empire, in which central and provincial actors combined to rule the empire together’.Footnote 6 In the case of the Portuguese empire, it has often been standard to divide its long history into at least three phases: a first one running from 1415 to the 1660s, focused largely on the Atlantic Islands, Africa, and the Indian Ocean; a second phase, in which Brazil became the central focus, and which was in part driven by the multiple mining booms of the eighteenth century; and a ‘third empire’, running for a good part of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, when the African colonies were the main focus and resource after Brazil had separated itself from Portugal in the 1820s. This tripartite organization naturally does not find favour in the eyes of all historians: some remain resolutely non-committal on the issue of periodization, while others have preferred their own more-or-less idiosyncratic ‘turning points’.Footnote 7
The historiography on Portuguese India, which once tended to focus largely on the period of conquest and consolidation in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, has over the years reoriented itself to a considerable degree, as I have shown at length elsewhere.Footnote 8 This was a trend that arguably began with the late Charles R. Boxer, who showed a marked preference for the seventeenth century as a period of study, in part because it allowed him effectively to conjugate his double competence in Portuguese and Dutch textual and archival sources.Footnote 9 It was continued in a different vein in the works of historians such as Anthony Disney and James Boyajian, both of whom worked on the trading history of the period of the Union of the Crowns (1580–1640), and also by Glenn Ames, whose chief focus was on imperial policy in the phase after the 1660s.Footnote 10 A small but growing number of historians have also rediscovered the riches of the Portuguese archives for Indian Ocean history in the eighteenth century, especially from the point of view of commercial dealings.Footnote 11 As a broad generalization, it can be asserted that thus far Portuguese and French historians have tended to show a preference for the sixteenth century, while historians in the Anglo-American sphere have tended to follow in the footsteps of Boxer, although a few exceptions can undoubtedly be found to both of these rules. The same trend can be seen in the study of individual careers and trajectories: even younger Portuguese historians continue to focus on figures such as Dom Afonso de Noronha and Dom Luís de Ataíde from the sixteenth century, while the main works centring on seventeenth-century figures have been those of Boxer and Disney.Footnote 12
The mid-century moment
In the twilight years of his publishing career, Boxer returned to his favourite hunting grounds with a short book entitled Portuguese India in the Mid-Seventeenth Century.Footnote 13 This was a period that he knew very well indeed, whether from the point of view of Portuguese Asia or of the south Atlantic. It was at this time that the official Portuguese presence in Japan—the so-called ‘Christian century’—finally came to an ignominious end, under the shogunate of Tokugawa Iemitsu. The fall of Beijing and the death of the last Ming ruler Chongzhen in 1644 signalled the consolidation of power in China by the emergent Qing dynasty, even if the political transition would continue for a few more decades on account of the resistance of Ming loyalists. In peninsular India, the 1630s and 1640s witnessed the dramatic southward expansion of the Golconda and Bijapur sultanates, the latter a close neighbour of the Portuguese; it was hence a tense moment in relations between the Portuguese and Muhammad ‘Adil Shah (r. 1627–56). But this also was a crucial phase of political transformation in Portugal itself, with the Restoration of 1640 that brought the Braganzas to the throne and led to an extended frontier struggle with the Habsburg monarchy, ending only with the Treaty of Lisbon in 1668 in which Portugal's independence was recognized. It was imagined in Portugal that the Restoration would afford them some early respite overseas from the relentless Dutch attacks of the previous decades, which included naval raids on and blockades of Goa itself, but this proved easier in theory than in practice. In January 1641, the Dutch East India Company (henceforth Dutch Company) successfully took the crucial Portuguese stronghold of Melaka in Southeast Asia, and even though the intensity of their attacks eased somewhat thereafter (to resume in the 1650s), periodic episodes of violent conflict erupted even during the ten-year truce that was declared in 1642.Footnote 14 The viceroy who oversaw the transition of 1640–41 was Dom João da Silva Telo de Menezes, Count of Aveiras, who continued in that position until 1645 by quickly and enthusiastically shifting loyalties. Once news of the acclamation of Dom João IV as king had reached Goa in September 1641, Aveiras made it a point to send out envoys to the dispersed parts of the Estado da Índia, and even to some of the neighbouring monarchs (or reis vizinhos), to announce the change.Footnote 15 In a long letter written from Surat in late January 1642, the English factory chief William Fremlen noted that the Portuguese in Goa had recently been apprised of ‘their new King (…) whose commands were no sooner seen by the V[ice]Roy and Councell at Goa then obeyed, and generally received by the whole nation, who from him propound to themselves a generall reformation and repairation of their declining fortunes’.Footnote 16 Aveiras also took the opportunity to make repeated, by now somewhat formulaic, appeals to Lisbon to send more resources in terms of money, men, and shipping. But the Crown was caught between diverse pull factors, and in the 1640s, the attraction of Brazil appears to have become stronger.
As has been noted above, Aveiras was the last viceroy of the Estado da Índia named by the Habsburgs. The new regime in Portugal undoubtedly had a variety of different options to think about while choosing his successor, even assuming that there were multiple candidates eagerly vying for the post of viceroy. One solution would have been to choose a prestigious, titled aristocrat from a well-known family, of which a handful had controlled the position over the decades. How well this option worked, however, had been uneven in the previous half-century. The Count of Vidigueira had held the viceroyalty on two occasions, as a young man in the late 1590s and then for an extended period in the 1620s, but had ended his second government in disgrace.Footnote 17 The record of the Count of Linhares had been rather better, and in 1635 he had notably been able to secure peace with the English in the Indian Ocean, allowing the Portuguese some breathing space.
But there was also another solution available, namely, to choose someone with long experience in Asia, who could bring some form of local knowledge to bear on the task. However, as the chronicler Diogo do Couto remarked in the early seventeenth century (while discussing the vice-regal nominations of the 1560s), the Royal Council was not inclined to some very well-qualified candidates because they ‘were married in India (casado na Índia), something which the King disapproved of at that time, and even today continues to disapprove of’.Footnote 18 Two historians who more recently proposed an ambitious macro-analysis of the ‘social logic of recruitment’ of governors and viceroys in Portuguese India have noted: ‘The settling down of fidalgos in the Orient—the “indiáticos”, “casados”, or even the “fidalgos antigos da Índia”—was a cause of suspicion in Portugal (and could even be a sign of social disqualification), as they were always accused of serving the king less than themselves.’Footnote 19 But the advantages of someone who would not have to be taught the ropes, and who would also be cheaper to install in office from a logistical viewpoint, were considerable—especially as well-placed aristocrats in Portugal normally drove a hard bargain before accepting the post.
In any event, the man chosen to succeed Aveiras was precisely one of these ‘old India hands’—the captain-general of Portuguese Ceylon, Dom Filipe de Mascarenhas. He was the sixth or seventh son of a large family, whose father Manuel Mascarenhas had been wounded and captured in North Africa in the infamous campaign of 1578 and then ransomed, before going on to become governor of Mazagão between 1607 and 1610.Footnote 20 His eldest brother, Dom Fernando, would have a significant political and military career, serving as captain-general of Tangiers and then in Brazil; disgraced and imprisoned at the very end of Habsburg rule in Portugal, he was rehabilitated after the Restoration and played a significant role in politics until his death in 1651, holding the title of Conde da Torre.Footnote 21 Two older brothers, Dom João and Dom Francisco, went out to India in 1612 and served there in a military capacity: the latter was killed in an ill-conceived raid on the Gujarat port of Porbandar in 1614, while Dom João de Mascarenhas was one of the captains who accompanied the viceroy Dom Jerónimo de Azevedo on his expedition against Surat in January 1615, only to end his life in a skirmish with the English fleet of Nicholas Downton.Footnote 22 The chronicler António Bocarro informs us that, for his part, Dom Filipe was first sent to India in the fleet of 1614, accompanied by yet another brother, Dom Diogo, ‘who died on the voyage’.Footnote 23 It would seem that Mascarenhas was somewhat the beneficiary of all these misfortunes, as royal orders in 1616 gave him the opportunity to eventually take over the captaincy of Hurmuz, as well as the revenues of the commandery of São Martinho de Pindo (near Viseu, belonging to the Order of Christ), ‘taking into consideration [the death of Dom João] and the death of another of his brothers who was killed in the attack on the city of Pór’.Footnote 24
During the viceroyalty of Azevedo, and his successor, the Count of Redondo, Mascarenhas worked regularly on the coastal fleets that patrolled the Malabar coast, and in the process served under Dom Diogo Coutinho, an extremely powerful figure who also held the post of captain and vedor da fazenda (financial intendant) of Cochin, from at least 1611 to 1627.Footnote 25 Mascarenhas would eventually marry Coutinho's widowed daughter, Dona Maria, and thus come to inherit a substantial number of benefices that his father-in-law had been granted, including a series of captaincies as well as at least one commercial voyage to China. For his part, Coutinho was solidly rooted in Cochin and was known to have a sizeable fortune which he even used to mount small fleets at his own expense, intervening as far as Sri Lanka and the Coromandel coast.Footnote 26 He was also a well-connected man otherwise, proud of his proximity to the powerful Dom Frei Aleixo de Meneses, Archbishop of Goa and sometime governor of the Estado.Footnote 27 The family connection with Coutinho certainly enhanced Mascarenhas's profile and lent him status and legitimacy among the casados of Cochin. It would seem that in the early 1620s, Dom Filipe de Mascarenhas returned briefly to Portugal, because we find him in 1623 as captain of the galleon Santo André, which successfully made the voyage to India, unlike a number of other vessels at the time. Once in India, he was to have a difficult relationship with the new viceroy, Dom Francisco da Gama who, on flimsy grounds, initially attempted to deny Mascarenhas the charge of the fort that controlled the entrance to the port of Goa, but he eventually acquiesced.Footnote 28 Thereafter, he seems to have served as interim captain of Cochin after the death of his father-in-law in 1627, and for a brief term in 1630–31 as captain-general in Sri Lanka, after the killing of Constantino de Sá, in which post viceroy Linhares declared himself happy with Mascarenhas's performance.Footnote 29 Mascarenhas was then named captain-general of the Portuguese outposts in Mozambique (including Sofala) in 1633, but this was a difficult post, from which the previous occupant had been removed in disgrace. The threat from the allies of Sultan Yusuf bin Hasan (or Jerónimo Chingulia), former ruler of Mombasa, made it such that Mascarenhas was supposed to improve fortifications and take measures to protect Portuguese possessions in the area. However, things quickly turned sour—from the time of his arrival he was to complain bitterly that the position (which he had purchased) did not carry the financial advantages he had been given to understand it would, and that he was having to pay out of his own pocket for garrison expenses. His repeated complaints eventually led viceroy Linhares to allow him to leave the post in 1635 to a successor, Dom Lourenço Sotomaior, and return to Goa.Footnote 30
Abandoning a key strategic post midway through a term of office could have been damaging. But a change in viceroys ensured that his career was preserved, as Linhares's successor Pero da Silva seems to have had an exceedingly high opinion of Mascarenhas. In a letter to the king dated February 1637, he excused Mascarenhas's abrupt return from Mozambique, claiming that it was on account of ill health and lack of medicines, and shared with his superiors that he had even named Mascarenhas a state councillor at his own initiative; ‘this fidalgo’, he added, ‘has a great zeal for the service of Your Majesty, and employs himself in it with alacrity’. Further, in the face of the repeated Dutch attacks, he had decided to place him in charge of the defence of the port of Goa and, as a result, ‘he [Mascarenhas] has found himself in all the battles that have taken place with the enemy, with great risk to his person’.Footnote 31 The next year, Mascarenhas was sent by the viceroy as an envoy-at-large to visit the rulers of Kannur and Calicut, in order to ransom some prisoners held there, and to ask those kings to help control the movement in their region of small vessels (paráos) carrying pepper and other goods. Silva continued to heap praise on Dom Filipe in other letters, pointing out that he had worked tirelessly to prepare the cargo for outgoing ships to Europe, making use of his own resources, and indicating that he was one of his closest aides and advisers.Footnote 32
This career momentum was carried over into the following years. By the end of Silva's triennium, the situation of Portuguese Sri Lanka was looking increasingly precarious, with the killing of the captain-general Diogo de Melo de Castro by the Kandy forces at the battle of Gannoruwa in March 1638. Castro was succeeded by Dom António de Mascarenhas, brother of Dom Filipe, but by 1640, complaints against him were growing. These reached a crescendo with the loss to the Dutch of Negombo in February 1640 and Galle in the following month. The incoming viceroy the Count of Aveiras thus made up his mind to act decisively. As he wrote to the king in November that year,
since the principal [aspect] of this aid was a new captain-general, both because of the complaints that I had already heard against Dom António Mascarenhas and because of the order that I had brought from Your Majesty, which I had read out by the Secretary of State, it was decided [in Council] that Dom Phelippe Mascarenhas should go as general of Ceilão, because he was a person who had sufficient information and experience of those parts, and was acclaimed by the Island itself.Footnote 33
When Dom Filipe was informed of this decision, he agreed to leave in short order, but added a rather bitter critique of past policies; it was through negligence, he stated, that Negombo and Galle were lost. Setting out with a fleet, and reinforcements of men, arms, and resources, he at once attacked Negombo, which fell into his hands in that same November. This early success could not be replicated, however. Nevertheless, the following years did no real damage to Mascarenhas's reputation as a leader in a time of crisis.
An analysis of Dom Filipe's tenure as captain-general of Portuguese Sri Lanka would require a study of its own, bearing in mind its multiple political, diplomatic, military, and financial aspects.Footnote 34 Perhaps the key thing to bear in mind is the degree of autonomy he came to enjoy in decision-making, which allowed Mascarenhas to construct a reputation as a powerful actor within the Estado da Índia. Possibly building on the precedent of Dom Jerónimo de Azevedo earlier in the century, he thus saw this position as a springboard from which to launch himself further in his career, something that none of his immediate predecessors had been able to do (although two of them, Sá de Noronha and Melo de Castro, had met violent deaths in combat which interrupted their trajectories). The image of ‘Don Philippo’ in Dutch sources summarized in the Batavia Dagh-Register is an intriguing one. They present him as a cunning and unscrupulous politician, ever eager to suborn his opponents and win them over to his side, and with a willingness to expend sizeable sums of money towards this end with ‘means that no honourable soldier would ever consider employing (middelen die nooyt eerlyck soldaet plach te gebruycken)’. One of his chief allies and agents, in the Dutch view, was apparently a Frenchman by the name of Michel de Saint-Amand, who had been an employee of the Dutch Company in their fortress of Galle. However, he had turned traitor and fled to the Portuguese in October 1640, providing them with crucial intelligence regarding their opponents and their weaknesses.Footnote 35 The Dutch sources therefore frequently discuss messages sent by Mascarenhas to soldiers and commanders in their garrison at Galle, suggesting they desert, and offering them generous rewards, even as much as 100,000 reales de a ocho.Footnote 36 In these messages he also apparently referred to the Dutch Company as a tight-fisted and undignified set of merchants who were unwilling or unable to pay their soldiers and employees as they deserved. A particularly interesting exchange in this respect is the one between Mascarenhas and the Dutch commander at Galle, Jan Thyssen, in May–June 1641, in which the captain-general made an offer to his Dutch interlocutor that if he handed over the fort to him, Thyssen could continue to serve as its captain and he would also receive 20,000 cruzados in cash, several villages as a revenue-grant, as well as the hand of an aristocratic Sri Lankan woman (‘the daughter of Dona Mariana’) in marriage. Thyssen replied with righteous indignation, telling him that the fortress ‘could not be had for money, but through the force of weapons’; he also informed him contemptuously that the daughter of Dona Mariana ‘can be given away to a Portuguese horned beast or any turncoat, as you see fit’.Footnote 37
The two main Portuguese narrative histories for the period do present somewhat contrasting perspectives on his tenure. For the veteran soldier João Ribeiro in his Fatalidade Histórica, Mascarenhas's role in Sri Lanka was to be seen, for the most part, in a positive light, especially when compared to the disasters that had come before and which were to follow.Footnote 38 In point of fact, Ribeiro first went to Sri Lanka in Mascarenhas's fleet in 1640, and he considered him both intelligent and courageous, but equally—and this is significant—as a man who possessed appreciable private resources that he could draw upon. The other account, by the Jesuit Fernão de Queirós, is somewhat more ambivalent. Besides making a great deal of the psychodrama of the sibling rivalry between Dom Filipe and his brother Dom António (who was eventually killed defending Negombo against the Dutch), Queirós shows some grudging admiration for Dom Filipe's caution in resisting vice-regal orders to press forward with attacks to recover the fortress of Galle from the Dutch when he did not have the military resources to do so. He reports that there were some Portuguese in Sri Lanka who complained to Goa that the captain-general ‘delayed the war without reason, being more interested in private affairs than in those of the service of His Majesty’. However, he also suggests that these criticisms were somewhat misplaced. Nevertheless, he does bring up Mascarenhas's reputation as a great trading nobleman or fidalgo tratante: ‘on account of the liberality with which he spent his own [money] and because of the plenty he had, the Chingalas and the Hollanders used to call him “The King of Gold”’.Footnote 39
On the other hand, the Sri Lankan historian Tikiri Abeyasinghe points to the fact that behind Queirós's attitude lay the view that Mascarenhas was ‘outspoken’ in his hostility to the Society of Jesus and its extensive possessions and material interests in Sri Lanka and quotes him to the effect that the Jesuits were not greatly appreciated because ‘they put more effort into the cultivation of land than into winning souls, which ought to be their principal object (em cuio grangeamento se divertem muito da cultivação das almas que ouvera de seu principal fundamento)’. Abeyasinghe further adds: ‘Queirós makes the general statement that it was the captains and merchants who lost India. But in his attitude to individual officials, he is selective, singling out a few noted anti-clericals like Dom Felipe Mascarenhas for attack by name, reserving his venom for the vedores da fazenda and warmly defending Dom Jerónimo de Azevedo and Constantino de Sá.’Footnote 40 Whether the term ‘anti-clerical’ is not somewhat misplaced here is worth asking, but there is little doubt that Mascarenhas did not appreciate the deep inroads that the Jesuits and others had made into the material basis of the Portuguese possessions. For example, we may consider his comment on the situation in north-western Sri Lanka, as he found it in his years there:
They [the Jesuits] now ask Your Majesty to order that the Island of Calpety [Kalpitiya] be returned to them, and that they should receive compensation for the delayed revenues; this after the same Padre Francisco Barreto received an order from Your Majesty which confirmed him in [the possession of] all the villages that they have in the Island of Ceylão, which goes to show that they intend to keep possession of the island and port of Calpety; and together with Municirão [Munneswaram] which was given to them in its place and with the seventeen villages that they already have in place of Municirão, and many others that they have acquired by other means against the orders and prohibitions that there are in that Island, all of which I consider to be a great disservice to Your Majesty, and a great loss to the royal treasury, and a continuous perturbation for the officials of Your Majesty.Footnote 41
Besides the Jesuits, there were also some other members of the church hierarchy with whom Mascarenhas had difficult relations. These included the Bishop of Cochin, the Dominican priest Dom Frei Miguel da Cruz Rangel, and the vicar-general Frei Francisco da Fonseca, both of whom, he believed, persecuted one of his subordinates, a man of partly New Christian descent.Footnote 42 In sum, it can be said that Dom Filipe de Mascarenhas had his share of opponents and enemies in his years in Sri Lanka, both among clerics and laymen; they also included the Sri Lankan prince Vijaya Pala, who accused him in no uncertain terms of duplicity and greed.Footnote 43 But these enemies did not manage to gain the upper hand over him. Not only that, it also proved impossible to block him from further advancement, as in 1644 he came to be appointed the first viceroy of the Estado da Índia to be nominated after the Restoration. In this, he was to prove, ironically enough, to be the last member of a vanishing tribe. As Cunha-Monteiro, the duo of historians who have analysed the ‘social logic of recruitment’ into the upper echelons of the Estado's hierarchy, remark: ‘We can ascertain that until the middle of the seventeenth century, the majority [of viceroys and governors] tended to have not only experience in military or political matters, but a previous military presence in India. On the other hand, the crushing majority of the viceroys named after 1650 had never been in India at the time of their first nomination.’ To this they add that Dom Filipe de Mascarenhas ‘is possibly the last example of a second-born fidalgo who, after having had a long career and accumulated a great fortune in India, still managed to become viceroy’.Footnote 44 To succeed into the office was one thing, but the question would be: what to do once in the post. It is to this we turn in the following section.
French and British views
In the latter part of 1648, the French traveller François le Gouz de la Boullaye paid a relatively brief visit to the Portuguese enclave of Goa. Boullaye had set out from France in early 1647, apparently at his own initiative, to visit the Levant, having earlier spent time in the British Isles and various northern European countries.Footnote 45 After a short stay in Istanbul, he took advantage of a caravan that was leaving for Safavid Iran and, disguised as an Armenian, made his way first to Tabriz and then to Isfahan. From there he found his way to the port of Bandar ‘Abbas and boarded an English East India Company (henceforth English Company) vessel bound for the great Mughal port of Surat, arriving there in April 1648. While in Surat, he was persuaded by his compatriot, the Capuchin missionary Père Zénon de Baugé, to accompany him to Goa. Perhaps motivated by a sense of curiosity about how a Catholic power maintained an empire—albeit a rather limited one—in the context of the Indian Ocean, Boullaye took the opportunity to pen some pages regarding the Estado da Índia as he found it. Before arriving in Goa, Boullaye already had some experience of the small Portuguese community in Surat, with some of whom he was on friendly terms. He also spent time in Daman and Bassein on his way to Goa, in September and October 1648. It is also possible that he had read the accounts produced by his countrymen earlier in the century, notably those of François Pyrard de Laval and Jean Mocquet.Footnote 46
Boullaye was received almost immediately on arrival by Dom Filipe de Mascarenhas in the Casa da Pólvora, outside the city, and treated with great ‘civility and generosity’; he offered the traveller a return passage to Europe on the first carracks, an offer that Boullaye turned down. Boullaye seems at once to have set about collecting information on his hosts, which he distilled into a rather schematic account, beginning with the ‘militia and order of the Portuguese colonies’. He was clearly struck by the vertical divisions in this colonial society, between the nobles, over whom the viceroy had very little effective control, and the people of ‘low race and commoner status (…) whom the viceroy can have killed for a reason’. He also notes that ‘there are few foreigners in the militia of the Portuguese, because the soldiers are poorly paid’; there were apparently a handful of Frenchmen, but they were constantly suspected of being Lutherans. Portuguese religious intolerance and suspicion was such, he claims, that ‘they [the French] have more liberty for the Catholic religion with the Dutch than with the Portuguese’.Footnote 47 Here, he—like previous French travellers—insists on the ‘extraordinary rigour of the Inquisition, which arrests them on the least suspicion’. In a subsequent passage he would go on to state: ‘The power of the Inquisition is to indifferently seize and arrest all the Portuguese, whether gentilhommes, commoners, priests, religious, even the viceroy, on the basis of a secret order from Portugal, and once the prisoner has been jailed one can have no news of him, not even whether he is alive or dead.’Footnote 48
The rapid sociological sketch that Boullaye produces of Goan society is inevitably rather superficial. He lays out what are, for him, the principal social categories: the reinol, or recent arrival from Portugal, who holds the uppermost positions both in the secular and ecclesiastical hierarchy; the castiço, or second-generation Portuguese born in India; the mestiço, usually born of ‘a reinol who has taken an Indian as a wife’; the karanes, who he imagines have an even greater admixture of Indian ancestry; the Abyssinians, who ‘can never be leaders, or captains of the militia’; the native-born Christian Indians or ‘blacks of the land’ who include ‘Malavars’, ‘Guzerates’, and ‘Canarins’; other Africans and Indians who are slaves, and so on. The upper echelons of this colonial society appeared to him to be unbearably pretentious, and not only because they abused their slaves, but because they appeared ill-informed and poorly educated: ‘their entertainment and ordinary pastime is playing cards, or otherwise they recount some combat in which the valour of the nation is emphasized. The sciences are more or less banished by these New Argonauts, who consider it a sign of their nobility not to be able to write, in which matter they are imitated by the great part of our Frenchmen.’Footnote 49 In Boullaye's eyes, then, the Portuguese Estado da Índia was characterized overall by two deep and near-fatal flaws. The first was its intolerance, of which the Inquisition was a symptom, but not the only one: ‘All these persecutions that the Portuguese carry out on the Indou, Parsis and Muslims, may be thought to be the reason for which they abandon their lands, and prefer to reside in the lands of Schah Geann [Shahjahan], or the Adel Schah [‘Adil Shah], where they can freely exercise their religion, temples, sacrifices, bathing [ceremonies] et cetera.’ The second was the lack of elite solidarity, since ‘it happens frequently that the nobility comes together against the viceroy, and despises him’; here he refers in particular to an incident when a disgruntled group among the elite had ‘made a statue that had the size and appearance of the viceroy Don Philippe Mascaregnas’, carried it through the streets at night in a noisy procession, and then hanged this effigy in public.Footnote 50 These two flaws naturally rendered the Portuguese more vulnerable when, in the middle decades of the seventeenth century, they were no longer the sole Europeans who were attempting to maintain a maritime empire in the Indian Ocean.
Boullaye's views are somewhat echoed in the writings of another French traveller who, coincidentally, also visited Goa in 1648: the Huguenot jeweller Jean-Baptiste Tavernier.Footnote 51 Tavernier's account is in some respects more elaborate, although he does not appear to have spent a great deal of time in Goa either, with his first visit in 1641 having lasted just a week. On the other hand, he claims to have had a set of informants, often Frenchmen, who were in a good position to comment on life in Portuguese India; the most significant of these was Michel de Saint-Amand, who had returned to Goa from Sri Lanka along with Dom Filipe Mascarenhas and now apparently held the grandiose post of ‘Grand Master of Artillery and Inspector-General of all the fortresses’. Saint-Amand had also managed, through the viceroy, to marry the daughter of an Englishman settled in Goa, who had a substantial dowry. Besides, Tavernier also knew a series of other eccentric or dubious Frenchmen in Portuguese employ who had been in Sri Lanka, such as Jean de Rose, who soon returned from Goa to Colombo; Des Marests (‘a gentleman of Dauphiné’), who was appointed the captain of Mascarenhas's bodyguard; and the feckless Du Belloy, who claimed to be a baron from eastern France and was eventually killed by the Dutch in obscure circumstances. Opinion remains divided on the reliability of Tavernier as a witness, and there is little doubt that he loved to embroider his stories for dramatic effect, especially when they had a scandalous content.
The essential structure of the Estado da Índia, as Tavernier describes it, is in terms of a trading network, made up of a series of dispersed ‘governments’. He lists the five most important of these as having been Mozambique, Melaka (which had been lost in 1641), Hurmuz (also lost, but in 1622), Masqat, and the island of Ceylon. Before the Dutch and other Europeans arrived on the scene, he declares, ‘private soldiers as well as governors and captains acquired great wealth by trade’, but those days were now past and the Portuguese looked back on them with regret: ‘Before the Dutch had overcome the power of the Portuguese in India, nothing but magnificence and wealth was to be seen at Goa, but since these late comers have deprived them of their trade in all directions, they have lost the sources of their supply of gold and silver, and have lost much of their former splendour.’ Tavernier has his own simple diagnosis of what has gone wrong: ‘If the Portuguese had not been occupied with guarding so many fortresses on land, and if, owing to the contempt they felt for the Dutch at first, they had not neglected their affairs, they would not be today reduced to so low a condition.’ Of course he cannot resist throwing in a large dose of hyperbole into his discussion: ‘it is certain that if the Dutch had never come to India, not a scrap of iron would be found in the majority of the Portuguese houses; all would have been of gold and silver (…) [from] two or three voyages to Japan, to the Philippines, to the Moluccas, or to China’.Footnote 52 Thus, while Tavernier also has a moral critique to present of Portuguese Asian society, with its licentious women, the fraudulent titles and airs assumed by the men, as well as their ‘vindictive’ and ‘jealous’ nature, which leads them regularly into deadly feuds, he does not in fact consider these to be significant causes for the poor state of their empire by the late 1640s. Rather, the two crucial questions for him are strategic negligence, on the one hand, which has allowed ‘the English and Dutch (…) to cut the ground from under their feet’, and what we may, in a modern vocabulary, term ‘overstretch’, on the other hand.
A particular aspect of Tavernier's narrative is his rather ambivalent fashion of presenting the viceroy Filipe de Mascarenhas. On the one hand, he wishes to stress his closeness to him, since both were connoisseurs who enjoyed luxury objects such as decorated pistols and jewels—he claims that in the course of his stay in 1648, he was personally received by the viceroy five or six times in the Casa da Pólvora. He further describes Dom Filipe as a ‘gallant gentleman’, who was—as we have already seen—a particular patron to a number of Tavernier's French friends, who had accompanied him from Sri Lanka and even saved his life when their ship had been wrecked near Kalpitiya. At the same time, he describes Mascarenhas as a Machiavellian schemer, who—as governor of Portuguese Ceylon—had been in the habit of using ‘the most subtle poison’ to get rid of his enemies. He also notes maliciously: ‘there never was a Viceroy of Goa half so rich as Dom Philippe de Mascarenhas. He possessed a quantity of diamonds—all stones of great weight, from 10 to 40 carats; two notably, which he showed me when I was at Goa.’Footnote 53 This is in contrast to an earlier discussion where he noted that the viceroys at Goa (unlike those in charge of Mozambique, Melaka, and other fortresses) normally did not make great fortunes from trade, or if they did so, managed it ‘under the name of another’. Filipe de Mascarenhas thus seems somewhat unique—a viceroy who not only had made a large fortune from trade but was well known for it. One finds an echo of Tavernier's claims in the writings of the Venetian adventurer Nicolò Manuzzi (or Manucci). While discussing the career of the celebrated Golconda general and magnate of Persian origin Mir Muhammad Sa‘id (titled Mir Jumla), Manuzzi writes: ‘he kept up a great friendship with Dom Phelipe Mascarenhas, Viceroy of Goa. They sent each other presents. Dom Phelipe sent him several kinds of brocade and porcelain from China, accompanied by many curiosities from Japan. (…) He replied to these gifts by sending a number of jewels and diamonds which he extracted from the mines which are in the said province of Karnatik.’Footnote 54
The two French observers we have cited above were both inclined then to see Portuguese power in the Indian Ocean as already in a state approaching terminal decline by 1648. This was not a view that was necessarily shared by the English Company, whose factors were to write as late as 1652 that ‘it is certen that they [the Portuguese] are too potent for us in theis parts, by reason of their settlement and fortifications in divers parts; but their present poverty, and feare of a new warr with the Hollanders, will doubtlesse perswade them to hold amity with us’.Footnote 55 The English Company's Surat factor had naturally kept a fairly close eye on Mascarenhas from the time he took over as viceroy. Their earlier relations with the Count of Aveiras had been broadly cordial, and sometimes mediated by a curious personage called Luís Ribeiro—in reality an Englishman by the name of Lewis Roberts, who had left the Company's service and settled in Goa but still maintained dealings with his compatriots. Aveiras had periodically received English Company vessels in the Estado's ports, and sometimes had even used them to pass the Dutch blockade and to send letters to Lisbon. But no stable understanding existed regarding trade, leaving the Portuguese authorities free to flirt with organizations such as Courteen's Association, a rival of the Company, represented by captains like Jeremy Blackman.Footnote 56 In March 1645, the Surat factors reported that ‘at Columba [Colombo] Mr. Blackman (as Lewis Ribero adviseth us) had conference with Don Phillipo do Mascarenas, who is to succeede V[ice] Roy; with whome he hath made a contract to bring him shott and divers other things, to be repaid in cynamon, but wee cannot yet learne at what prizes’.Footnote 57 The English Company was naturally anxious to know what Dom Filipe's attitude would be to their periodic attempts to pick up cargoes of pepper and cinnamon in the Kerala ports, and they were not entirely reassured. In early 1646, the Surat factors reported one such negotiation with the ruler of Purakkad, in southern Kerala.
The Hynd and Seahorse left Tutta Coreen [Tutukkudi] the 5th November and went to Pourcatt [Purakkad] to receive the said pepper; where two daies after them, Don Phillippe de Mascarenhas, the new Vice Roy, unhappely arrived from Ceiloan; who, having notice of what passed, presently raised the price to 25 rials, at which rate he renewed their auncient contract for all the pepper in that place; as he had before done at Coilon [Kollam], and on his way did all the coast along to Cocheen, so obliging and awing those people that no future hopes are left of procuring any of that specie in those parts.Footnote 58
They also made note of a change in the policy with regard to issuing of cartazes in that region: ‘the Vice Roy hath inhibited all such of that nation as were quallified therto, to give the Mallavars any passes as formerly, without which it is probable they will not venter to sea’. But it turned out that this policy was not limited to Kerala alone, but was intended to cover the whole of the Indian west coast. Thus we hear in a letter written a few months later:
The new Vice Roy, since his enterance into place, hath already taken notice of an extraordinary abuse in the customes due by these Mores unto the Portugals upon goods laden upon Moores shipping, which for many passed yeares hath been neglected; wherof he now intends to take a strict accompt, and hath begun by inhibiting the Captaines of Dio and Damon to give them any more passes; which inhibition came when many of their ships were lading for Persia; wherupon, not daring to venture them to sea without passes, they have againe unladen and returned them into the river untill they see what wilbe the issue therof.
The English Company, for its part, saw this as a rather positive outcome, since they regarded the competition that Muslim shipping represented with trepidation: ‘In the interim they are very fearfull (not without good reason) that the Portuges, now they are at peace with us and the Dutch, will hold them, as they have done formerly, to very rigerous tearms. If they persist as they begin, few years will ruine the Moores shipping; wherby [English] trade wilbe much improved in these parts.’Footnote 59
In the following years, English contacts with Mascarenhas varied in their degree of cordiality. They complained bitterly to him about the Portuguese residents of São Tomé on the Coromandel coast, who they claimed harassed the Englishmen who had newly set up a fortified settlement—Fort St George in Madras—on the same coast. They also grumbled regarding the case of a certain Maximilian Bowman, who had converted to Catholicism and, in their view, was leading a licentious life under Portuguese protection, while boasting that ‘he intends to proceed for the bottome of the Bay of Bengala and there spend the rest of his misserably unhappy daies amongst the Portugez renegadoes’.Footnote 60 But they also attempted keep the viceroy happy with small gestures, including an unsuccessful venture to buy him some Persian carpets in Isfahan, as well as gifts of wine from Europe. Behind all this was an ulterior motive, namely the English Company's continued desire to procure pepper and cinnamon; however, as the Surat factors wrote: ‘of the latter we can enterteine but litle hopes, the Vice Roy haveing exceedeing strictly inhibited the sale of that commodity, whereof lately they can procure but very litle for themselves’.Footnote 61 Some hope on this front was held out by Jeremy Blackman, who had meanwhile passed from the employment of Courteen to that of the English Company. In October 1648, Blackman put in at Goa, to see whether he could revive the transaction exchanging armaments for cinnamon.Footnote 62 The Company factors at Surat report what happened in the following terms:
[A]t his first arrivall and delivery of your letter to the Vice Roy hee was by him respectively entertained, with many expressions of his obligacions both to you and to him, that had soe seasonably accommodated his occations with such amunition, whereof the State stood in greate want; and thereupon, without any shew of his intentions to desert his contract, enordered both the granadoes and shott to bee landed; which being in the major parte effected, hee pretended that the Kings offic[ers], without whose advice and approbation hee could not in such case doe ought, haveing seene both sortes, affirmed they were too deare; and soe unworthily denyed to take them at the rates agreed upon, presumeing (wee beleeve) that they were not commodities for any other place and that Captain Blackman, rather then reimbark them, would have parted with them upon any tearmes; wherein his expectacions were deluded by Captain Blackmans discreeter proceedings, who, discovering his ignoble dishonest intentions, caused them all to bee suddainly reshipt and brought both morter peece, granades, and shott hither [to Surat].Footnote 63
The viceroy Mascarenhas, it is stated, ‘being sencable [sensible] how much soe unworthy an act must of necessity detract from his honor, to vindicate himselfe hath exhibited many lame arguments, such as wee presume you will receive in his letter accompanying these, inscribed unto you’. Yet this failed transaction did not entirely put the English Company off, and they continued to have intermittent dealings with Dom Filipe until his departure for Lisbon in 1651, always with cinnamon procurement in mind. In late 1649, lacking ships to send back via the Carreira da Índia,Footnote 64 the viceroy proposed to one of the Courteen's Association captains, John Durson, that he could carry back Portuguese goods on freight to Europe in his ship Loyalty, a project that did not eventually materialize.Footnote 65 Still another Courteen captain, Humphrey Morse, visited Goa in his ship Friendship, and Mascarenhas promised him a licence for a voyage to Macao; at the same time, he suggested that he was ready to grant a similar privilege to the Surat factors, but they responded that had ‘not in a capassity to undertake it’, despite what they perceived as the slight improvement in trading conditions at Macao.Footnote 66
The last years of Mascarenhas's viceroyalty also saw a further complication, when, as a corollary of the English Civil War, the royalist fleet of Prince Rupert put into Lisbon in 1649 and asked for Portuguese protection. The ensuing blockade by a rival Commonwealth fleet under Robert Blake saw a considerable disruption to shipping sailing in and out of the Tagus, as well as an attack on a fleet returning from Brazil in September 1650, with sizeable losses.Footnote 67 Despite the rising tensions, it appears that the hostilities were not effectively carried over into the Indian Ocean. The English factors reported the arrival in Goa in May 1651 of the greater part of a fleet that had set out with the incoming viceroy, Count of Aveiras, even though the viceroy himself had died on the last leg of the voyage.Footnote 68 In spite of the death of his successor, Dom Filipe de Mascarenhas then departed for Lisbon, leaving the Estado da Índia in the hands of a three-man junta. Over six years in office as viceroy had obviously proved too heavy a burden for him.
Internal evaluations and judgements
The viceroyalty of Dom Filipe de Mascarenhas, which lasted from 1645 (when he informally assumed the post, while still in Sri Lanka) to mid-1651 (when he departed Goa for Portugal), has in general been judged a failure. The account of the transition between the Count of Aveiras and Mascarenhas, as it comes down to us in the Count of Ericeira's História de Portugal Restaurado (1679), is brief and laconic: ‘Mascarenhas entered [Goa] in the month of December [1645], he was received with much applause, and between him and the Count of Aveyras there were good relations until the Count embarked for Portugal, something that has rarely been seen in those parts on similar occasions.’Footnote 69 Ericeira's account of Aveiras's government is broadly complimentary, and he describes him as an energetic figure who dealt very competently with the many challenges in front of him. These included the defence of Ceylon, in which context the chronicler describes Mascarenhas as someone who possessed ‘many virtues worthy of esteem (muytas virtudes dignas de estimação)’. On the other hand, Mascarenhas's own viceroyalty is treated in a largely dismissive way, as a period when—beyond maintaining a peaceful relationship with most of the neighbouring kings (reis vizinhos)—the viceroy failed to achieve much and there was ‘no act worthy of memory (não houve acção digna de memoria)’.Footnote 70 The one signal political event was a negative one, namely the loss of the fortress of Masqat in January 1650 to the rulers of Oman, and the chronicler passes over it rather discreetly.Footnote 71 The treatment to be found in Ericeira's text has been carried over into modern-day historiography, in which one author (writing a rather old-fashioned, apologetic history of the Jesuits) states that after the administration of Aveiras, who had left ‘sorely disappointed that the reinforcements for which he had hoped had never arrived’, no real initiatives of any worth were taken; he adds that ‘the next half-dozen years [after 1645] represented the last opportunity for the Portuguese to resolve their most persistent internal problems in the Estado and to make effective preparations to repel the next enemy onslaughts’, but that this opportunity was squandered.Footnote 72 Perhaps the most extensive attack on Mascarenhas and his viceroyalty may be found in George Winius's account of the loss of Portuguese Ceylon, in which he accuses the viceroy of a potent mixture of greed, corruption, incompetence, and laziness (besides ‘utter disinterest’ and ‘recklessness and indifference’), drawing heavily on materials put forward against him by the Jesuits, as well as some anonymous pamphlets.Footnote 73 For his part, Charles Boxer states that ‘Mascarenhas was an arch-crook himself (…) but he was a very intelligent man who wielded a pungent pen’, and he suggests that his letters as viceroy are worth a closer look.Footnote 74
Let us turn to the most significant of his letters from 1648, then, to see how things appeared from the viceroy's desk as opposed to the various external perspectives we have taken so far. This is his letter dated 16 November of that year, and it begins on a suitably sombre note, setting the tone for what follows:
As the naos from that kingdom may not arrive, and given the lack of ships that have been going from this Estado they might not have departed [from Portugal], and with this shortage it may prove impossible to equip the two galleons that I have made ready, and which came from Japan, on account of a lack of capital for their cargo, and since maritime affairs are so uncertain, in order that Your Majesty should remain informed regarding the hardships and needs in which this Estado finds itself, it seemed to me I should prepare this brief account [to be sent] via England, so that Your Majesty might be well-served by looking into their remedy.Footnote 75
From the outset, then, the problem is posed of the Carreira da Índia which since the early sixteenth century had been the umbilical cord of the Estado. Even though hostilities with the Dutch had temporarily ceased, the Portuguese were still having difficulty keeping this connection in anything resembling a flourishing state, for reasons we shall examine below. Mascarenhas had reason to be concerned, for in April 1648 only two ships had left Lisbon for India: one could not complete the passage and instead went to Bahia, so that only the galleon São Roque eventually made it to Goa, after this letter was written. In the earlier years of Mascarenhas's viceroyalty, four annual departures from Lisbon were usual—and in one year, when some private vessels were brought in, it was as high as six. In view of these circumstances, in 1648 the viceroy had taken recourse to the English Company in order to secure the channels of communication with Europe.
The letter continues by describing the situation of the Estado, beginning in the Far East:
With the arrival of the two galleons from Japan, where Your Majesty's embassy—of which I will provide a particular account through the galleon or galleons to be sent from here—was not received, I came to hear of how the people of Macao, along with that city, had killed Dom Diogo Coutinho, their captain-general; and since I wished in his place to send Dom Brás de Castro, whom Your Majesty had named there, he refused in such a way that because of this and other instances of his bad behaviour, he left for the land of the Moors, where he resides awaiting another administration to remedy his affairs, drawing on the usual examples, which have [already] caused much damage to the affairs of this Estado, because of a lack of justice and its execution, with every change of administration.
This is a dense passage that needs to be unpacked somewhat. Coutinho, who had earlier played a controversial role as captain of Melaka in its last years under the Portuguese, was apparently killed in a dispute with the Macao garrison soldiers over unpaid wages, not long after his arrival there in 1646. This happened while the Portuguese were attempting a last throw of the dice to reopen their relations with Tokugawa Japan, through the embassy of Gonçalo de Siqueira. Although the initiative for this embassy did not come from Mascarenhas, he effectively threw his weight behind it and offered Siqueira considerable resources in the vain hope that this would help revive the somewhat moribund commercial economy of Macao. Though the embassy did make its way into Nagasaki, the Japanese Council of State refused to entertain them, and Japan remained closed to the Portuguese.Footnote 76 As a consequence, it may be noted that the post of captain-general of Macao was no longer deemed a desirable one at this time, and Mascarenhas presents this as the cause of his celebrated dispute with Dom Brás de Castro.Footnote 77 In many ways, this dispute was the defining problem of the viceroyalty and it requires some further explanation.
In some respects, Dom Brás had a parallel career to that of Dom Filipe de Mascarenhas. The two of them were younger sons of fidalgos who did not inherit an estate and were therefore called upon to seek out service in the Estado da Índia, in what was a familiar pattern from the mid-sixteenth century onwards, when many of the Portuguese outposts in North Africa had been abandoned.Footnote 78 We find an early trace of him in 1624, as one of the captains on the so-called Armada do Norte, an annual patrolling fleet sent out towards Gujarat from Goa.Footnote 79 He then also seems to have served in various capacities in the Província do Norte, and eventually found some favour during the Linhares administration. In 1630, he was appointed to head a fleet to attack the Dutch on the Coromandel coast, but this expedition turned out to be a signal failure.Footnote 80 Subsequently, in 1638–39, we find him in and around Daman, as capitão-mór do Norte, in which capacity he had some difficult dealings with the Mughals.Footnote 81 In the early 1640s, he also served in Sri Lanka, in the course of which he certainly had contact with the Mascarenhas brothers, not least of all because he refused to captain a fleet to bring help to Colombo in late 1640 and was reprimanded by the viceroy and council for it.Footnote 82 But it is equally worth noting that, unlike Dom Filipe, Dom Brás generally had good relations with the ecclesiastical hierarchy, and in particular with the Jesuits, some of whom (like Jerónimo Lobo) were his close associates. On the other hand, the viceroy's difficulties with the Jesuits, which had already commenced in Sri Lanka (as we have seen above), were only further aggravated when he returned to Goa. A good number of his letters to the king in his first triennium complain of how the Jesuits had usurped revenues and rights. He claimed that sometimes they had received extensive properties as gifts or inheritances from individuals and also showed a lack of financial transparency when taking over tasks such as the public works in the fortresses of Diu, Daman, and Bassein.Footnote 83 In one letter of December 1646, he writes:
My Lord, there is great suffering in the places where Your Majesty has made some grants to the religious for the colleges or usual expenses, while separating them from the royal treasury, as has been done with the religious of the Company [of Jesus], for not only do they place their collectors there, but they want to exercise normal justice over the natives, without permitting that of Your Majesty, terming these as seigneurial rights (direitos senhorios), and by this means they cause great oppression to the very natives.Footnote 84
For their part, the Jesuits found various means to retaliate, including lodging regular complaints against Mascarenhas at the court in Lisbon.Footnote 85 They may also have had a hand in producing a document entitled ‘Memorial against viceroy Dom Felipe Mascarenhas [which] was put into the hands of a certain religious by an official of Your Majesty's treasury’, which contained a long list of accusations, running from fraud and accepting bribes, to various forms of illegal private trade. It was also claimed that a lot of these activities were carried out through a certain Duarte da Costa Homem, accused of being a crypto-Jew, and of whom it is claimed that the viceroy ‘made him rich, and arranged two great and honourable positions for [the dowries of] two of his daughters, when he had performed no services, matters which caused a scandal because he was a man who when he was a boy was accused and found guilty [of sexual relations] with the King of Ormus, who was burnt in this city of Goa for this evil sin (pelo peccado mao)’.Footnote 86 Homem was, incidentally, named secretary of the failed embassy of Siqueira to Japan in the 1640s, but he acquitted himself with reasonable credit in the matter.
Matters came to a head in early 1648, in a series of violent and ugly incidents. The most significant was possibly this one, which is reported as follows in the papers of the Goa Relação (High Court):
On the 3rd day of the month of March 1648, the Lord Viceroy came to this High Court, in the presence of the judges who have signed below, and stated that as was well-known, on the night of 25th to 26th this last February, a statue was found at the public gallows of Mandovi, with an inscription in the form of a proclamation, in the name of His Majesty, by which it was stated that he was ordering the hanging of Dom Phelippe Mascarenhas, his Viceroy of this Estado, with very exorbitant words both against his person and his position as Viceroy; it was decided that an inquiry (devassa) should be made into this case, and that it should be carried out by the judge Sebastião Cardoso, the chief magistrate of crimes and juiz dos feitos for the Crown and Treasury, and that secrecy was essential in the matter.Footnote 87
Such an act had several precedents not only in general, but in the particular context of Goa. In 1600, an effigy of the departing viceroy Dom Francisco da Gama, Count of Vidigueira, had been hung from the mast of his ship, and in January 1601, the statue of his ancestor Vasco da Gama had been brutally broken up; ten years later, an effigy of another viceroy Rui Lourenço de Távora was also hung from a mast; then, in October 1635, an effigy of the viceroy Linhares was found hanging from the gallows, with an insulting mock proclamation attached to it; finally, in September 1641, it was the viceroy Aveiras who found himself at the receiving end of such treatment. In the different cases, the reactions varied, sometimes because the viceroys were themselves on the point of departure, or because—like Aveiras—they ‘chose not to react’.Footnote 88 But this was not Mascarenhas's way. Not long before, he had seen at close quarters what a lack of authority could lead to, when the turbulent friars of the Augustinian convent in Goa had defenestrated (after possibly having first drowned) the provincial of their order, Frei Alexandre de Noronha, in October 1647.Footnote 89 At any rate, the inquiry was vigorously pursued, and several persons were incriminated, including Dom Miguel de Souza, Dom Fernando Manuel, Dom Luís Martins de Sousa Chichorro, and Dom Brás de Castro, as well as the Jesuit Jerónimo Lobo. Since it proved too difficult to try several of these fidalgos in India, they were eventually sent back to Portugal in irons; the Jesuits refused to give up Jerónimo Lobo, so that he was confined in a Franciscan convent for the next few years.Footnote 90 The exception was the man presented as the ringleader in the affair, Dom Brás de Castro, to whom we will return below.
The rights and wrongs of the affair were never quite clear, even to contemporaries. This is how the chronicler Ericeira, for example, sums it up in his História:
This year [1648], there grew up a conflict between Dom Filipe Mascarenhas, and Dom Brás de Castro and other fidalgos of that Estado, who by their nature did not live very peacefully, and added to this was the lack of urbanity with which Dom Filipe treated them, since he lacked that courtesy with them which those who govern ought to use in order to be more respected and better obeyed. Irritated by this discourtesy, they carried out an unusual and imprudent revenge, creating a statue with vituperative emblems, which was found at dawn in Goa, at the Mandovi Gate in front of the viceroy's house. The viceroy, rightly annoyed with this disorder and want of respect, tried to identify its authors. He seized some of the delinquents who were sent back to this kingdom, among whom was Francisco (sic) de Sousa Chichorro, who later died when he was returning from the government of Angola. Dom Brás de Castro, finding that peril was too close, absented himself on the mainland (terra firme), where he remained so long as the government of Dom Filipe Mascarenhas endured.Footnote 91
Some letters that survive from Dom Brás explain his stance. In one of these, written from the village of Pomburpa in the region of Bardez in December 1649, he explains that he had returned there briefly at the suggestion of the Franciscan Archbishop Francisco dos Mártires, whose word he entirely trusted. It would seem that he had crossed the border into the Bijapur sultanate and in fact usually lived there. He complains bitterly of the ‘excesses of the viceroy against me, and the great extremes of calumnies and rigours that can be imagined’. He also claims that the Archbishop had told him of the ‘dealings with and pressures on the native residents of that land [Bijapur] to either capture me or kill me’.Footnote 92 In another later complaint, written a few months later, he states that ‘the said viceroy because he was his enemy had invented false charges (culpas falças) against him, so that out of fear of his unjust proceedings he was obliged to pass to the mainland, where he is at present, absent from his house, wife and children, suffering unjustly’.Footnote 93 Later events in the 1650s would show, however, that Dom Brás was an inveterate troublemaker who, after the viceroy Count of Óbidos was expelled in a mutiny in which he participated, seized the government at Goa in an extraordinary act and held it from 1653 to 1655.Footnote 94
Let us return now to Mascarenhas's letter of November 1648. Having briefly rehearsed the issues linked to Japan, Macao, and the falling out with Dom Brás, he enters into his main narrative. The captain-general of Macao who eventually took the place of Dom Brás was a certain António Vaz Pinto who was preparing to leave Goa with two vessels on 24 April:
Wishing to set sail with another ship accompanying, both carrying large amounts of capital from the residents of this city [Goa], on the previous night there was such a harsh storm from the north, that even though it lasted barely a whole hour, it overturned twelve ships from the Armada da Collecta which had arrived at that time, and were anchored below the Morro da Aguada along with the supply convoy (cáfila de mantimento), in which process many people drowned, and the two pinnaces that were being sent as aid to China were nearly lost. After that, it immediately started blowing from the south-southwest for eight days, at the end of which there was such a storm that when the two ships made for sea, they were at once swallowed up because it was impossible to navigate with sails unfurled. And the weather was such that on this island and in Salcete and Bardes, the trees were so damaged, that many properties were razed, and in every one of them at least a third was lost, with the damage being estimated at more than two million. Such a tempest has never been seen at such a time [of year], and it was of a quality such that the ships being sent as aid to Ceilão, which were all ready to leave and laden and sheltering in the Nelur [Nilavara] river, were shattered to pieces over there, and nothing was saved from them, and once more many people drowned, something that will seem strange and even impossible for those who have seen that river at this time [of year].
Added to these heavy losses was the bad news from the Carreira da Índia: the galleon Santo Milagre had run aground in East Africa due to a pilot's error; the ship Patta also had sunk near Mozambique on its way to India; the ship Nossa Senhora da Atalaia do Pinheiro (or Atalaia) and the galleon Santíssimo Sacramento for their part had been lost further south, near the Cape, in June 1647.Footnote 95 Each of these disasters is described at some length by Mascarenhas, who consoles himself that, if nothing else, some of the precious stones (pedraria) on board had been saved. But he also rails against the incompetence of pilots and masters, as well as their greed; the captain-major of the fleet, Luís de Miranda Henriques, had on his voyage out from Goa seized and robbed a friendly ship from the port of Masulipatnam, despite the fact that it had a Portuguese pass (or cartaz), and from this act ‘there immediately arose hatred, and dissension’.Footnote 96 Nor was the news closer to home that much better, because of the Omani attacks on Masqat and its subsidiary fortresses ‘which have put them in such straits that they have given me great concern’. At much the same time, Mascarenhas was to send a message to the captain-general at Masqat, Dom Gilianes de Noronha, warning him that peace was desperately necessary ‘given that the Estado is in no condition to pursue such extended wars, because it is exhausted in its treasury and from a lack of men’.Footnote 97 This takes him, in his letter of November 1648, to some final considerations regarding the situation in general:
The lack of men is not only just the same as I have repeatedly communicated to Your Majesty, but with these issues it is so great that it causes concerns with regard to everything else, and with the lack of shipping, trade has totally come to a halt; the customs-houses yield nothing; everything is delayed; the neighbours have little esteem for us which could cause very great ruin, which might be irreparable, because [the Estado da] India cannot produce a remedy for any need. And I believe I already wrote to Your Majesty how important it would be to send large amounts of capital in the trading ships, and keep increasing them, and if they cannot be raised in that kingdom, they should come from outside it. My Lord, this seems to me necessary because with [the injection of] large amounts of capital (groços cabedaes), Your Majesty's customs-houses will begin to yield [revenues] and your vassals will breathe again in the midst of all these predicaments and necessities.
For his part, even in late 1648 Mascarenhas continued to hope that his negotiations with the Dutch would yield some results, so that they might pull back in Sri Lanka and even decide to ‘return Malaca [to us] which is of no profit to them’. As we know, the Portuguese Crown responded in a lukewarm manner to his plea, sending a meagre number of ships every year during the rest of his viceroyalty, and instead of his ‘large amounts of capital’, proposed vague and utopian schemes for the creation of new trading companies.Footnote 98 Meanwhile, in neighbouring Spain, a pamphleteer produced a text—the Relación de las grandes pérdidas—that was the very embodiment of Schadenfreude, embroidering on Mascarenhas's misfortunes in 1648–49, from the shipwrecks to the antics of Dom Brás, darkly noting ‘that the judgment of God is inscrutable’.Footnote 99 The viceroy thus finished his term in the knowledge that the Estado da Índia was no better prepared to defend itself than it had been in 1645. Two of his main diplomatic initiatives had failed: in Japan (as noted above) and in the Thai kingdom of Ayutthaya, to which he had sent an envoy in 1646 to open official Portuguese trade there and to persuade the ruler Prasat Thong (r. 1629–56) to expel the Dutch Company.Footnote 100 His ploy to keep the Southeast Asian port-principality of Makassar in play as an interlocutor for Portuguese trade was still in effect, thanks in part to the tireless Francisco Vieira de Figueiredo.Footnote 101 But his efforts in 1650–51, after the fall of Masqat, to persuade the Safavids to let the Portuguese back into Hurmuz and its trade were destined to fail, leaving the Estado with only a fragile presence in the region at Bandar Kung.Footnote 102
Conclusion
Dom Filipe de Mascarenhas embarked for Portugal in 1651, apparently already in rather poor health, as we gather from a letter from Francisco Vieira de Figueiredo.Footnote 103 He did not survive the return voyage, and died at Luanda in 1652, where he was buried, somewhat ironically in the college of his inveterate enemies, the Jesuits. The chronicler Ericeira, recounts the end of his viceroyalty in the following terms:
Dom Filipe Mascarenhas had finished his government of India, and received permission from the King to leave for this kingdom, which he manged to do in an unhappy manner, because his life ended on the voyage, leaving behind the large amounts of capital that he had acquired in India to his niece Dona Ilena da Silveyra, with whom he was engaged to be married; and he created an entailed estate (morgado) for the younger son of the household of his older brother, the Conde da Torre, which is today enjoyed by Dom João Mascarenhas, Marquis of Fronteira, and which will in turn be inherited by his second son Dom Francisco, Count of Cocolim. The king named as the successor of Dom Filipe, the Count of Aveiras, in a second term, and he embarked for India weighed down by years and ailments and ended his life on the coast of Africa at Cape Chilimane [Quelimane].Footnote 104
The Dutch Company's council in Batavia noted his departure and the somewhat chaotic succession process, adding: ‘With these changes, many Portuguese who had fled to the Moorish lands on account of the hard rule of the said viceroy have returned to Goa, where everyone goes about armed and great murders take place every day with no justice ever being carried out.’Footnote 105
We know that Dom Filipe had been contemplating this second marriage with his young niece, who was in a convent, from at least 1646, and that he had pleaded in vain with his brother, the Conde da Torre, to send her to India.Footnote 106 Tavernier, whose feelings towards Mascarenhas were ambivalent, claims that he ‘died at sea’, but also adds fancifully that ‘the Viceroy was poisoned on the vessel, and that it was said that it was a just punishment for his having made away with many persons in the same manner’.Footnote 107 But what is of particular significance here is the fact that Mascarenhas not only left behind a liquid fortune but had managed to create a substantial estate (morgado) of over 1,300 hectares of rice- and coconut-growing lands in India, and that in 1676 his powerful family was able to endow it with the title of ‘Count’, a unique instance of its kind in the Estado da Índia.Footnote 108 This was at Cuncolim (sometimes distorted as ‘Coculim’, and deriving from the Kannada term ‘Kumkumahalli’), located in Salsette in south Goa, and it was organized in the very region that had seen a major dispute between local communities and the Jesuits in 1583, leading to the killing of several priests.Footnote 109 Already a flourishing centre of commerce and artisanal activity before the 1580s, Cuncolim still appears regularly in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as a nodal point of the tobacco trade in south Goa. But what is equally interesting is a complaint lodged in February 1622 by the magistrate (ouvidor) of Rachol regarding this area. He writes:
Dom Diogo Coutinho, proprietor (senhorio) of the villages of Cuculim, has built a fortress in the said villages with a Portuguese captain, where he seizes and leaves [goods and people], and administers his own justice, and makes private fortifications, and orders that the officials of justice of Your Majesty should not be allowed to enter the said villages; and these villages which border those of the Moors, are populated by many murderers who have [committed] serious crimes, and it has become an Arrochela [La Rochelle] of thieves.Footnote 110
It is easy enough to conclude, then, that Dom Filipe de Mascarenhas actually inherited this property from his father-in-law, Coutinho, and consolidated it over a quarter of a century, with the intention of founding a landed estate in India.
The years from 1651 to 1663, after the end of Dom Filipe de Mascarenhas's term as viceroy, set the seal on processes begun in earlier decades, when the Estado da Índia had lost so many of its key outposts. First the Kanara fortresses were lost to the Sivappa Nayaka of Ikkeri; then the Dutch renewed their attacks in Sri Lanka in alliance with the rulers of Kandy and expelled the Portuguese from the island; finally, key Portuguese possessions in Kerala, including Cochin, were lost in 1663. The Estado da Índia, such as it was in the last decades of the seventeenth century, emerged as a very different creature from what it had been in 1600. This new version, much reduced in its dimensions and ambitions, was made up essentially of a series of dispersed ‘niches and networks’, in which commercial nodes like Macao managed to flourish by rebuilding their own semi-autonomous strategies; other settlements such as São Tomé on the Coromandel coast did so by negotiating a tense but fruitful relationship with nearby English settlements like Madras.Footnote 111 The links to Portugal via the Cape fell off in terms of their importance, never to recover properly.Footnote 112 Even the American historian Glenn Ames, who has claimed that there was a ‘significant volte-face’ in the creation of a ‘renascent empire’ after 1663, was obliged to end his study of the period with a rather lukewarm claim: ‘the years from c. 1663–1683 represented an era of reawakened Crown interest in the Asian empire, of periodic policy innovation, sustained reform, and the creation of a degree of stability that permitted Portugal to remain a power in the Asian trade and an imperial power in the Indian Ocean basin well into the present century’.Footnote 113 However, Ames continued to overstate the extent to which these outcomes were controlled by acts of deliberate policymaking in Lisbon, rather than by the complex workings of dispersed actors, many of them located in the Indian Ocean littoral, such as those responsible for consolidating crucial links between India and Mozambique.Footnote 114 Again, rather than re-emphasizing the significance of the imperial metropolis, it may also be worthwhile to point to the growing importance after about 1680 of direct trade between Brazil and the Indian Ocean, especially East Africa.Footnote 115
To conclude, the view from Goa in 1648 was—to quote a picturesque formulation by a historian of the Portuguese empire—the view from atop ‘a great iceberg that had broken up into fragments that each sailed its own way’.Footnote 116 To imagine that ‘large amounts of capital’ would be mobilized somehow and somewhere in order to be injected into the Estado da Índia was profoundly unrealistic, especially because the primary investments needed in 1648 were military ones, which by definition could not yield quick returns. A spurt of diplomatic activity, and the making of new alliances (or the revival of old ones) could conceivably have helped at least to paper over the cracks, but this proved beyond the capacities of the viceroy and his diplomatic envoys, with the sole exception of the neighbouring Bijapur sultanate.Footnote 117 Under these stresses and strains, the fragile networks of solidarity that held even the class of fidalgos together began to break down, with accusations and counter-accusations, which culminated in the political breakdown at Goa of 1653–55.Footnote 118 In a meeting of the Conselho de Guerra in 1649, two important fidalgos—one of them Mascarenhas's own brother—advised the king: ‘We should give up in Asia as much as we need to, in order to leave us free in Brazil (…) besides which, Asia, by its distance and its size, is more difficult and costly and less useful to conserve.’Footnote 119 After three decades and more of experience in Asia, it could have taken little more to persuade Dom Filipe de Mascarenhas that investing in familial fortunes was a sounder proposition than investing in unstable imperial adventures. Such attitudes contributed to defining a different Portuguese empire in Asia that had less to do with the dyad of conquest and monarchic capitalism and more to do with the Estado da Índia as an umbrella under which a variety of private interests found a place.
