The prison at Daman is described as a most horrible place; hot, damp, fetid, dark, and crowded. The inmates were half starved, and so miserable that forty out of fifty Malabar pirates, who had been imprisoned there, preferred strangling themselves with their turbans to enduring the tortures of such an earthly Hades.
The first specimen of savoir faire displayed by the Doctor’s enemies was to detain him in the Daman jail till the triennial Auto da Fé at Goa had taken place; thereby causing for him at least two years’ delay and imprisonment in the capital before he could be brought to trial. Having succeeded in this they sent him heavily ironed on board a boat which finally deposited him in the Casa Santa.[16] There he was taken before the Mesa, or Board, stripped of all his property, and put into the chambrette destined for his reception.
Three weary years spent in that dungeon gave Dellon ample time to experience and reflect upon the consequences of amativeness and disputativeness. After being thrice examined by the grand Inquisitor, and persuaded to confess his sins by the false promise of liberty held out to him, driven to despair by the system of solitary imprisonment, by the cries of those who were being tortured, and by anticipations of the noose and the faggot, he made three attempts to commit suicide. During the early part of his convalescence he was allowed the luxury of a negro fellow-prisoner in his cell; but when he had recovered strength this indulgence was withdrawn. Five or six other examinations rapidly succeeded each other, and finally, on the 11th of January, 1676, he was fortunate enough to be present at the Auto da Fé in that garb of good omen, the black dress with white stripes. The sentence was confiscation of goods and chattels, banishment from India, five years of the galleys in Portugal, and a long list of various penances to be performed during the journey.
On arriving at Lisbon he was sent to the hulks, but by the interest of his fellow-countrymen he recovered his liberty in June, 1677. About eleven years afterwards he published anonymously a little volume containing an account of his sufferings. By so doing he broke the oaths of secrecy administered to him by the Holy Tribunal, but probably he found it easy enough to salve his conscience in that matter.
The next in our list stands the good Capt. Hamilton, a sturdy old merchant militant, who infested the Eastern seas about the beginning of the eighteenth century.
The captain’s views of the manners and customs of the people are more interesting than his description of the city. After alluding to their habits of intoxication he proceeds to the subject of religion, and terms both clergy and laity “a pack of the most atrocious hypocrites in the world;” and, at the same time, “most zealous bigots.” There were not less than eighty churches, convents, and monasteries within view of the town, and these were peopled by “thirty thousand church vermin who live idly and luxuriously on the labour and sweat of the miserable laity.” Our voyager then falls foul of the speciosa miracula of St. Francis de Xavier. He compares the holy corpse to that of “new scalded pig,” opines that it is a “pretty piece of wax-work that serves to gull the people,” and utterly disbelieves that the amputated right-arm, when sent to Rome to stand its trial for sainthood, took hold of the pen, dipped it in ink and fairly wrote “Xavier” in full view of the sacred college.
The poverty of Goa must have been great in Capt. Hamilton’s time, when “the houses were poorly furnished within like their owners’ heads, and the tables and living very mean.” The army was so ill-paid and defrauded that the soldiers were little better than common thieves and assassins. Trade was limited to salt and arrack, distilled from the cocoa-nut. The downfall of Goa had been hastened by the loss of Muscat to the Arabs, a disaster brought on by the Governor’s insolent folly,[17] by an attack made in 1660 upon the capital by a Dutch squadron, which, though it failed in consequence of the strength of the fortifications, still caused great loss and misery to the Portuguese, and finally by the Maharatta war. In 1685, Seevagee, the Robert Bruce of Southern India, got a footing in the island, and would have taken the city had he not been—
“Foiled by a woman’s hand before a broken wall.”
The “Maid of Goa” was one Donna Maria, a Portuguese lady, who travelled to Goa dressed like a man in search of a perfidious swain who had been guilty of breach of promise of marriage. She found him at last and challenged him to the duello with sword and pistol, but the gentleman declined the invitation, preferring to marry than to fight Donna Maria.
A few years afterwards the Maharatta war began, and the heroine excited by her country’s losses, and, of course, directed by inspiration, headed a sally against Seevagee, took a redoubt, and cut all the heathen in it to pieces. The enemy, probably struck by some superstitious terror, precipitately quitted the island, and the Donna’s noble exploit was rewarded with a captain’s pay for life.