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.