The horses were soon saddled, and the Señor was with some difficulty persuaded to mount. En route his appearance afforded no small amusement to his fellow townsmen, who grinned from ear to ear seeing him clinging to the saddle, and holding on by the bridle, with his back hunched, and his shoulders towering above his ears like those of an excited cat. The little Maharatta “man-eater”[11] was dancing with disgust at this peculiar style of equitation, and the vivacity of his movements so terrified the Señor, that, to our extreme regret, he chose the first moment to dismount under pretext of introducing us to Albuquerque.
The statue of that hero stands under a whitewashed dome, in a small square opposite the east front of the Barracks. It is now wrapped up in matting, having lately received such injuries that it was deemed advisable to send to Portugal for a new nose and other requisites.
The library disappointed us. We had heard that it contained many volumes collected from the different religious houses by order of the government, and thus saved from mildew and the white ants. Of course, we expected a variety of MSS. and publications upon the subject of Oriental languages and history, as connected with the Portuguese settlements. The catalogue, however, soon informed us that it was a mere ecclesiastical library, dotted here and there with the common classical authors; a few old books of travels; some volumes of history, and a number of musty disquisitions on ethics, politics, and metaphysics. We could find only three Oriental works—a Syriac book printed at Oxford, a manuscript Dictionary, and a Grammar of the Concanee dialect of Maharatta.
Arrived at the palace, we sent in our card, and were desired to walk up. We were politely received by an aide-de-camp, who, after ascertaining that we could speak a few words of Portuguese, left the room to inform the Governor of that prodigious fact, which, doubtless, procured us the honour of an interview with that exalted personage. It did not last long enough to be tedious, still we were not sorry when his Excellency retired with the excuse of public business, and directed the aide-de-camp to show us about the building. There was not much to be seen in it, except a tolerably extensive library, a private chapel, and a suite of lofty and spacious saloons, with enormous windows, and without furniture; containing the portraits of all the Governors and Viceroys of Portuguese India. The collection is, or rather has been, a valuable one; unfortunately some Goth, by the order of some worse than Goth, has renewed and revived many of the best and oldest pictures, till they have assumed a most ludicrous appearance. The handsome and chivalrous-looking knights have been taught to resemble the Saracen’s Head, the Marquis of Granby, and other sign-post celebrities in England. An artist is, however, it is said, coming from Portugal, and much scraping and varnishing may do something for the De Gamas and de Castros at present so miserably disfigured.
And now, thank Goodness, all our troubles are over. We can start as soon as we like for the “ruin and the waste,” merely delaying to secure a covered boat, victual it for a few days, and lay in a store of jars of fresh water—a necessary precaution against ague and malaria. Salvador is to accompany us, and John Thomas has volunteered to procure us a comfortable lodging in the Aljube, or ecclesiastical prison.
A couple of hours’ steady rowing will land us at old Goa. As there is nothing to be said about the banks which are lined with the eternal succession of villages, palaces, villas, houses, cottages, gardens, and cocoa-nut trees; instead of lingering upon the uninteresting details, we will pass the time in drawing out a short historical sketch of the hapless city’s fortunes.
It is not, we believe, generally known that there are two old Goas. Ancient old Goa stood on the south coast of the island, about two miles from its more modern namesake. Ferishteh, and the other Moslem annalists of India allude to it as a great and celebrated seaport in the olden time. It was governed by its own Rajah, who held it in fief from the Princes of Beejanugger and the Carnatic. In the fifteenth century it was taken by the Moslem monarchs of the Bahmani line. Even before the arrival of the Portuguese in India the inhabitants began to desert their old seaport and migrate to the second Goa. Of the ancient Hindoo town no traces now remain, except some wretched hovels clustering round a parish church. Desolation and oblivion seem to have claimed all but the name of the place, and none but the readers of musty annals and worm-eaten histories are aware that such a city ever existed.
The modern old Goa was built about nineteen years before the arrival of Vasco de Gama at Calicut, an event fixed by the historian, Faria, on 20th of May, 1498. It was taken from the Moors or Moslems by Albuquerque, about thirty years after its foundation—a length of time amply sufficient to make it a place of importance, considering the mushroom-like rapidity with which empires and their capitals shoot up in the East. Governed by a succession of viceroys, many of them the bravest and wisest of the Portuguese nation, Goa soon rose to a height of power, wealth, and magnificence almost incredible. But the introduction of the Jesuits, the Holy Tribunal, and its fatal offspring, religious persecution; pestilence, and wars with European and native powers, disturbances arising from an unsettled home government, and, above all things, the slow but sure workings of the short-sighted policy of the Portuguese in intermarrying and identifying themselves with Hindoos of the lowest castes, made her fall as rapid as her rise was sudden and prodigious. In less than a century and a half after De Gama landed on the shore of India, the splendour of Goa had departed for ever. Presently the climate changed in that unaccountable manner often witnessed in hot and tropical countries. Every one fled from the deadly fever that raged within the devoted precincts, and the villages around began to thrive upon the decay of the capital. At last, in 1758, the viceroy, a namesake of Albuquerque, transferred his habitual residence to Panjim. Soon afterwards the Jesuits were expelled, and their magnificent convents and churches were left all but utterly deserted. The Inquisition[12] was suppressed when the Portuguese court was at Rio Janeiro, at the recommendation of the British Government—one of those good deeds with which our native land atones for a multitude of minor sins.
The descriptions of Goa in her palmy days are, thanks to the many travellers that visited the land, peculiarly graphic and ample.