This Governor, the fear of whose name extended far into China, to whom the Kings of Narsinga and Persia, Siam, Cambaya, Turkey, and Cairo sent gifts, the conqueror of Ormuz and Cananor, Goa and Malaca, who dispatched his agents even to the remote Moluccas, and who was determined to destroy Mecca (five hundred Portuguese were to ride swiftly inland from the coast, take it by surprise and burn it to ashes) and thought of altering the course of the Nile, did not disdain to occupy himself with the alphabets for teaching children to read, the missals and pontificals for churches, pearl-fisheries, the horse trade, the colour of the Red Sea, how to pack quicksilver, and a hundred other matters of great diversity, while on the question of arms and merchandise to be sent from Portugal to India[17] no modern official report could exceed his letters in accuracy and minuteness.
For instance, he declares that lances are sent out unsharpened, as they come from the Biscay factories, to the care of a barbeiro inchado in India, and in 1513 says that he now has workmen in Goa who can turn out better guns than those of Germany. Unfortunately in Portugal India was regarded merely as a mine to be exploited, not as a field that required farming in order to continue productive. Albuquerque, when, as he says, over his neck in work, had to answer great bundles of letters from the King, often filled with carping criticisms of his actions or containing contradictory projects. He complains that there is a new policy for each year, almost in the words of Dante in the Purgatorio:
fai tanto sottili
Provvedimenti ch’ a mezzo Novembre
Non giunge quel que tu d’Ottobre fili.
It must be confessed that Albuquerque in these letters, filled with the eloquence of the Old Testament, gave as good as he got: the pity is that the King probably only saw them in the official summaries. “Sir, the soldiers in India require to be paid their salaries,” he says on one occasion, or “Your Highness is not well informed,” and he warns him that should matters continue as in the past the empire will come crumbling about the King’s ears.
Again he writes that he is not amazed that the accusations should be made, but amazed that the King should believe them. The names of his accusers were withheld, as later in trials before the Inquisition, but he knew whence the trouble came and does not mince his words in telling the King of the corruption, greed, carelessness, and incompetence of the officials in India appointed by the King. “And if I were not afraid of Your Highness I would send you a dozen of these mischief-makers in a cage.”
In five days he writes nineteen letters to the King, some of them of considerable length, this task occupying him till dawn, after a long day’s work. On a single day he wrote the King eight letters, one of which contains a splendid general account of the state of India, another is a little masterpiece describing the misdeeds of one of his captains.
No doubt his critics believed him to be harsh and insensible. That this was far from being the case is shown by the fact that on receiving, amid a shower of blame and criticisms, a sympathetic letter from his old friend, the historian Duarte Galvão, he shed tears, and also by the deep feeling he displayed when a whole batch of letters came from the King full of dispraise. “Your Highness blames me, blames me, blames me,” he wrote, and again, “My spirits fell to the ground and my hair turned twice as white as it was before.”
When, therefore, a few months after he had written of his intention to return from Ormuz to India in order to see the King’s letters and know if he had sent ships and men for the expedition against Aden, he heard that his successor was appointed, it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that the news killed him.
Albuquerque’s crime was to have thought of India and Portugal first, before personal interests and ambitions. “They call me a harsh man,” he said; and “these officials of yours do not love me.” But if he could vigorously show his dislike of the false and slovenly, he always liberally rewarded good service, was loyal, generous, and unselfish, and showed a most delightful pleasure in any thorough work or workman. “The best thing I ever saw,” he says of a map; and of a good carpenter, “he is a marvellous man.”[18]
No sooner was Albuquerque dead than his greatness was felt, and posterity has never sought to deny it. If we consider the conditions under which his great work was accomplished in six years—his ships often so rotten that they sank of sheer old age, his men few and ill-armed (before he received reinforcements in October 1512 he says that the whole number of Europeans under his command in India were but 1,200, of whom barely 300 were properly armed), the fact that all his projects were liable to be upset by orders dictated in ignorance at home, and that as soon as his back was turned (for instance, when he went to attack Aden) all the officials in India treated him as dead and his instructions as a dead letter—we will not deny that posterity has done well to honour and admire this man in his lonely magnificence. Fannomi onore e di ciò fanno bene.