FOOTNOTES:
[12] Albuquerque’s father, Gonçalo de Albuquerque, was in favour at Court. His grandfather João Gonçalvez had been secretary to King João I and King Duarte, but was hanged for murdering his wife in 1437.
[13] In 1461 or 1462. In one of his letters (April 1, 1512) he says that he is fifty. Correa, who calls him old in 1509, says that he was over seventy at the time of his death. Despite the very definite assertion in his letter, perhaps the last word has not been said as to his age. Misprints in these matters are common. Couto, for instance, says that Albuquerque’s nephew Naronha is nearly seventy in 1538 and eighty in 1540. All the historians call Albuquerque old, yet the captain of a fortress was considered too young for the post because he was under forty (Correa III, 687). On the other hand not Borrow merely but Couto (VI. 2. ix) calls Castro old, although he did not live to be fifty. Perhaps in Albuquerque’s letter we should read LX instead of L (for indeed why should he speak so fatherly to King Manoel (1469-1521) if he was not considerably older than the King?), and sesenta for setenta in Correa.
[14] Goa is thus described by an early traveller: “La città di Goa è la più fresca delle Indie e la più abbondante di tutte le cose da.... È detta città molto grande, con buone case e grandi e belle strade e piazze, murata d’intorno con le sue torri e fatta in una buona fortezza. Fuori di detta città vi erano molti horti e giardini copiosi e pieni d’infiniti arbori fruttiferi, con molti stagni di acque; eranvi molte moschee e case d’ orationi di gentili. Il paese d’intorno è molto fertile e ben lavorato.”
[15] The same traveller says: “Questa città di Malaca è la più ricca scala di più ricchi mercatanti e di maggior navigatione e traffico che si possa trovare nel mondo.”
[16] The story, maliciously recorded by Barros, that Albuquerque sent ruby and diamond rings to the historian Ruy de Pina to jog his memory in relating the events of India, may or may not be true. In a way it is characteristic, for Albuquerque, if he wished for Pina’s praise, which one may be inclined to doubt, was not a man to beat about the bush. Perhaps after all it was more honest to plump down the rubies than to indulge in elogio mutuo.
[17] In one letter he bids the King plant all the marsh-lands of Portugal with poppies, since opium is the most welcome merchandise in India.
[18] Estimava muito os homens cavalleiros, says Correa, who knew him personally and insists more than once that he was very accessible. To cope with what Albuquerque himself calls the “mountains of petitions” that beset him he employed six or seven secretaries, but he dealt with them unconventionally, signing them or tearing them up in the street as they were given him, thereby expediting his business but offending the vanity of the petitioners.
JOÃO DE CASTRO.
VII
DOM JOÃO DE CASTRO
(1500-1548)
Era tambem de sua pessoa tam esforçado como em letras insigne.—Pedro de Mariz, Dialogos de Varia Historia.
In that low shady quinta, embowered amongst those tall alcornoques, once dwelt John de Castro, the strange old Viceroy of India.—George Borrow, The Bible in Spain.
Castro was still a schoolboy when Albuquerque died. Born in 1500, the son of D. Alvaro de Castro, in high office under Kings João II and Manoel, and a daughter of the Count of Abrantes, he studied with the famous mathematician, Pedro Nunez, and had a scientific as well as a classical education. There is every reason to believe that he was a promising and fervent scholar, but the victories of Dom Duarte de Meneses in North Africa appealed to him even more than did the figures of Euclid, and in 1518 he “took the key of the fields” and fled to Tangier. There he served with the greatest distinction for nine years, and stood high in favour with the Governor, Meneses, who knighted him and on his return to Portugal in 1527 furnished him with a glowing recommendation to the King.
Of the next few years of his life comparatively little is known. He received a comenda from the King, was employed on various service, and married D. Leonor de Coutinho, of noble family but poor. Probably he was able to devote considerable time to quiet study. In 1535 he commanded one of the twenty-five Portuguese ships in the Emperor Charles V’s victorious expedition against Tunis. It was on this occasion that Castro’s lifelong friend, the gallant poet Prince Luis, followed his example of 1518 and ran away to join the expedition against the wishes of his brother King João III.[19]
In the autumn Castro was back in his favourite Cintra. There he himself planted a quinta, to which his thoughts, later in India, constantly turned. Those who go along the delightful shady road of orchard and running streams, rock and woodland from Cintra to Monserrate and Collares come in a few minutes to an archway and green door on the right. It is here, in the quinta now known as Penha Verde, overlooking the fertile plain of Collares to the sea, that Castro, like Pitt planting by moonlight or Garibaldi in his island, indulged his love of husbandry.
“Here,” says one of his early biographers, “he entertained himself with a new and strange kind of agriculture, for he cut down fruit-bearing trees and planted wild woods, perhaps to show that he was so disinterested that not even from the earth would he expect reward. Yet it is no wonder if one who disdained the rubies and diamonds of the East should think little of the products of Cintra’s rocks.” It was to the matos of the Serra de Cintra that he longed to return in 1546. But he certainly did not despise the fruits of the soil, and probably occupied himself with grafting experiments.
In the spring of 1538, as perhaps previously in the spring of 1537, he sailed to India as captain of a ship. The fleet arrived at Goa in September 1538 and went on to the relief of Diu. In March of the following year he returned to Goa, and two years later accompanied the new Governor, Dom Estevão da Gama, to the Red Sea.
On all these occasions Castro kept a log or roteiro, from Lisbon to Goa, from Goa to Diu, and from Goa to the Red Sea. They display a strong scientific interest, a spirit thoroughly modern—nothing, however small it might be, was to him necessarily unimportant or negligible—or perhaps ancient, since he complains that in his day the scientific investigations of the ancients were no longer in vogue. The logs are written with that vivid directness which mark his letters, “written,” he said, “not for the ladies and gallants of the Court and royal palaces, but for the mariners of Leça and Mattosinhos.”
His descriptions are precise and accurate, which does not prevent them from being often picturesque. He notices many birds, including one white and grey which, he says, the sailors call frades (monks). “I pay great attention to eclipses of the moon,” he writes, as also to longitudes and latitudes, fishes, seaweeds, currents, winds, the colour of the Red Sea, and every detail that might concern the art of navigation, to the delight of his friends Dr. Pedro Nunez and Prince Luis, who had furnished him with special instruments and other assistance for his voyage.
In the summer of 1542 he was back at Cintra, but in December of that year he was appointed to the command of the coast fleet, the main duties of which were to keep clear the coast of Portugal from pirates, such as Mondragon, who perpetually hovered in wait for the priceless spoils and cargoes of Portuguese ships homeward bound from India. He seems to have gone to sea before the end of the year and held this post for two years, with a brief interval in 1543 when he commanded the Portuguese fleet sent to co-operate with the Spanish against Barbarossa. They did not come to an engagement, and Dom João, after visiting Ceuta, returned to Portugal.
He was at Cintra in the beginning of 1545 when the unwelcome news reached him that he had been appointed Governor of India. Most unwillingly he accepted this new post, the difficulties and disquiet of which he had been able to gauge at first hand during his former sojourn in Goa. His young sons were to accompany him.
A picturesque story of the Governor-elect cannot be better told than in the words of the historian Couto, who served under him in India: “Passing one day by the door of a tailor [in Lisbon] he noticed a pair of very rich and fashionable velvet breeches, and pulling up his horse asked to see them. After examining their curious workmanship he asked whose they were. The tailor, not knowing whom he was addressing, answered that they were for a son of the Governor who was going to India. Dom João de Castro thereupon in a rage took up a pair of scissors and cut them into shreds. “Bid that young man buy arms,” he said to the tailor, and so passed on.”
At the end of March the fleet sailed. The number of men actually enlisted was eight hundred, but many more who had been rejected for some defect or were escaping from justice succeeded in embarking as stowaways. In the Governor’s ship alone there were nearly two hundred of them, and they required to be fed during a voyage of many weeks. The Governor was advised to cast them adrift in the provision ship or to maroon them in the Cape Verde Islands, but humanely and persistently refused.
He had not been long at Goa when, in April 1546, news was brought that a formidable attack was being prepared against Diu, the fort commanded by the heroic Dom João de Mascarenhas. Castro sent his son Dom Alvaro with a strong fleet to its relief. The fleet was delayed by violent storms, and when it finally reached Diu there was little of the fortress left. The walls and bulwarks were levelled with the ground, most of the defenders dead, and those who remained either wounded or ill. No one but Mascarenhas could have held on in such conditions, and even so “six more days,” wrote Castro to the King, “and relief would have come too late.”
Most of the nobles in Diu were dead, and among them Dom João de Castro’s other son, Fernando, who had been blown up with many others on a mined part of the wall on which they had rashly remained, although warned by Mascarenhas of their danger. “He should have obeyed Dom João,” wrote Castro stoically to the King, and he added: “Of what Dom Fernando did till the time of his death I will say nothing to your Highness, for it cannot be that men are so wicked but that some among them will inform your Highness of the services and great exertions that my sons undergo in your service.”
The King of Cambaya still boasted of victory, and Dom João de Castro himself sailed north with a powerful fleet from Goa. After striking terror into the enemy by ravaging the coast of Cambaya, setting it all aflame and, in his own words, “sparing no living thing,” he left these shores covered with dead and crossed to Diu.
The fortress was now again invested by an army of 60,000 Moors, and in the battle with the besieging force the Governor was himself more than once in the greatest danger before the enemy was routed. Indeed, it was his personal exertions which largely decided the day, and with pardonable pride he wrote to the King that it was “the greatest victory ever seen in all the East.”
He sent the King a long list of those who had conspicuously distinguished themselves, and for himself he asked for the reward or alviçaras which it was customary to give to a general who had won a battle or taken a city. “And because your Highness may give me one unsuited to my nature and mode of life, I will ask for it specifically, and it is that you should grant me a chestnut-grove which you have in the Serra de Cintra, by the King’s Fountain, bordering on my quinta, that my servants, having chestnuts to eat on my estate, may not go plundering what does not belong to them. Its value may be ten or twelve thousand réis, but to me it will be worth many thousands of crusados.”
There may be something a little theatrical and fantastic (contemporary historians call him bizarro and fanfarrão) in some of Castro’s actions in India, in his Albuquerquian prowess on the coast of Cambaya, the pawning of his beard (again in imitation of Albuquerque), his triumphal entry into Goa, his preparation of stakes on which to spit the Sultan as Pacheco had prepared one for the Samuri of Calicut; but there can be no doubt of the sincerity of his desire to obtain this Cintra castanhal.
After his victory he besought the King not to prolong his term of office beyond the ordinary three years, and to allow him to return to the Serra de Cintra, and in his will he says: “I have near Cintra a quinta, called the Quinta of the King’s Fountain, which I made, and to which I am greatly devoted because I made it and because it is in a country where my father and ancestors were born,” while his letters contain several pathetic references of the same kind.[20]
After his victory over the Moors, Dom João de Castro set about rebuilding Diu, and to obtain money sent an appeal to the citizens of Goa with some hairs of his beard in pawn,[21] since it was impossible to send the bones of his son, as he had first intended, his death being but recent. The citizens of Goa responded nobly to the appeal, and when the Governor returned to Goa in the spring of 1547 received him with great rejoicing. His barbaric “triumph” has been often described.
“He was richly Cloath’d, giving the season its due, and became them as well and sprightly as his Arms. He had on a French suit of crimson satin, with Gold twist about the Slashes and Seams, and, not to forget he was a Souldier, he put on a Coat of Mail wrought on Cloth of Gold with Buttons of Plate [i.e. silver].
“The Magistrates of the City received the Governour under a Canopy and presently a Citizen of Quality, reverently bowing, took his Hat from his Head, putting him on a Crown of Triumph and in his Hand a Palm.
“The ladies from their Windows sprinkled the Triumpher with distilled Waters of diverse Spices.”[22]
In Portugal, too, the news of the victory before Diu was received with universal exultation. The King raised Castro to the dignity of Viceroy—the fourth Viceroy of India—granted him ten thousand crusados, and gave his son Dom Alvaro the command of the Indian Sea. But instead of allowing him to return he prolonged his term of office for another four years. Castro was ill at the time, and shortly afterwards this “saint and hero,” as the modern Portuguese historian Oliveira Martins calls him, died at Goa in the arms of his friend St. Francis Xavier (June 1548).
Thus Albuquerque, whose ties with Portugal had been gradually replaced by those that bound him to Goa, which he had made, as Castro his quinta, died with the bitter knowledge that, if he lived, he must spend his years in Portugal, a whale among minnows, and watch his work being undone by others; Castro, with his thoughts ever turning to the rocks and woods of Cintra and the study of philosophy in his beloved quinta, died in a foreign grandeur at Goa. He died in poverty, for, ever disinterested and humane and generous towards others, he had spent his money on the soldiers whom the State neglected to pay, and himself remained penniless.
The last scene of his life in which he addressed the chief officials and magistrates of Goa is almost as famous as the pawning of his beard. “I am not asham’d, gentlemen, to tell you that the Vice Roy of India wants in this sickness those Conveniences the meanest Souldier finds in the Hospitals. I came to Serve not to Traffick in the East, I would to your Selves have pawn’d the Bones of my Son and did pawn the Hairs of my Beard to assure you I had no other Plate or Hangings in the House to buy me a Hen, for in the Fleets I set forth the Souldiers fed upon the Governour’s Salary before the King’s pay, and ’tis no wonder for the Father of so many children to be poor. I request of you during the time of this Sickness to order me out of the King’s Revenue a proportionable maintenance and to appoint a Person of your own who may provide me a moderate allowance.”[23]
It may be said that for the Governor of a great Empire to leave himself without the means “to buy me a Hen” was the height of extravagance, but that is only the cavil of a more mundane spirit, incapable of attaining so heroic a sublimity, and his countrymen, at least, have always been grateful to Castro for ostentatiously proving that amid all the prevailing corruption there remained one honest man.
Like Albuquerque and Gama, he died in harness. But, great as Castro was as a soldier, he would in all probability have been no less celebrated for his services to literature had it been granted him to spend his old age in the quiet of his shady quinta.
Couto ends his portrait of the Viceroy thus: “And for his great charity, temperance, disinterestedness, exceeding love of God, and other qualities of a good Christian, it may be affirmed that he will be receiving in glory the prize and guerdon of all his trouble and toil.” By his energy, vigour of thought and action, by his splendid character, humane and resolute, he closed the most brilliant half-century of Portugal’s history with a key of gold.