CHAPTER I
Early Portuguese Voyages of Discovery of a Sea Route to China
It is in no spirit of idle boastfulness that this modest volume is introduced to its readers with a quotation from the famous Portuguese poet Camoens:
“E se mais mundo houvera, lá chegara.”
(“If there had been more of the world, they would have reached it.”)
When it is remembered that the foregoing lines were written in the third quarter of the XVIth century, it will be granted that Camoens was not exercising the privilege of poetic licence but was recording what he honestly believed to be the possible achievement of the Portuguese in their search for new lands under the enthusiastic inspiration of the famous Prince Henry, the Navigator, who sponsored and encouraged the voyages of the Portuguese pioneers to “seas never before navigated”. He was a contemporary of the great heroes of that time and it was given to him to bequeath to the world the priceless legacy of an epic writing which is acclaimed by the world as one of its most famous poems of lands and scenes which he himself saw and peoples with whom he made himself personally acquainted.
Old Portuguese documents record that when in 1508 Diogo Lopes de Sequeira went to discover Malacca he carried elaborate instructions to enquire about the Chinese, their country, religion, trade, etc.1 It was Prince Henry, whose grandiose imagination, kindled by the torch of Faith, raised high the fire of Hope in the breasts of his fellow-countrymen, casting a brilliant searchlight into the darkness of the great unknown world, till then spoken of only in bated whispers by even the most adventurous spirits amongst the navigators of mediaeval times.2
Sequeira arrived at Malacca on the 11th September, 1509. It is recorded that in Malacca he collected cloves from the Moluccas, nutmegs from Banda, sandalwood from Timor, camphor from Borneo, gold from Sumatra and Loo Choo, and gums, spices, and other precious commodities from China, Japan, Siam, Pegu, etc. The conquest of Goa in November, 1510, led Affonso de Albuquerque to adopt measures for the proper administration of the city with a view to making Goa the capital of the eastern empire of Portugal.
The first Portuguese to land on Chinese territory was one Jorge Alvares, reputed to have been one of Albuquerque’s most distinguished officers; this was in the year 1514. To commemorate the landing Alvares erected a stone pillar, called a padrão, at Tamão. The pillar, one of many similar ones, had carved on it the arms of Portugal. The Portuguese of the time were in the habit of taking with them the engraved pillars on their voyages of exploration. These pillars were set up wherever it was thought expedient to erect them upon every new Portuguese discovery, to avoid, so it might be presumed, disputes arising from any unscrupulous claimant to the discovery of land that had previously been discovered by the Portuguese. And because, in the early days, there was a great lack of men and materials to protect their trade routes and to guard their newly acquired possessions, the discoverers did not always assert their claims to several newly found lands. Thus it was that their right to some of their new discoveries sometimes lapsed in favour of others with neither moral nor legal claims.3 Hence, it will be seen that there was good reason for the erection of the padrões with clearly distinctive markings for the purpose of defeating the non-existent rights of unworthy claimants.
“Exploration”,4 according to Prof. Edgar Prestage, “was also carried on by land and for the sake of knowledge, not of trade or dominion, and in this the Jesuits won the palm.”
“The dominion he (Albuquerque) established consisted of the overlordship of the ocean, the shores of which were dotted with fortresses in a huge semi-circle from the coast of East Africa to the Moluccas, and his successors did but develop the policy he had laid down. In less than a century and a half from his death in 1515 this dominion crumbled. Portugal had not the resources to maintain her monopoly against the attacks of the Dutch and English. But that she should have held it so long against the Mahommedan world was, in the words of Sir William Hunter, a lasting glory to her and Christendom. With Admiral Ballard we may say that the name of Albuquerque is still the greatest, not only in the history of the Portuguese in the East, but in the annals of the Indian Ocean. His captains and men also deserve to be remembered, for, to quote again from Hunter, the achievements of the Portuguese in the East would have done credit to a great Power, and when carried out by a small kingdom they read like a romance.”
From the Chinese magazine, the “Tíen Sha”, Shanghai, May, 1939, pp. 424 and 425, the following note is taken from a contribution to that publication by Mr. J. M. Braga whose articles on the ancient historical monuments of Macao have appeared:
“The name of Jorge Alvares deserves well of the Portuguese. It was in 1514, quite possibly even in 1513, that Jorge Alvares erected the padrão on an island at the mouth of the Pearl River and on the same occasion buried his son, probably the first Portuguese to be buried on Chinese soil. Seven or eight years later, Jorge Alvares himself died at the same spot and was buried next to the spot where he had buried his son. João de Barros, the Portuguese chronicler-in-chief and Historian, records the event and states:
“Though his flesh will be consumed by the soil of that land of idolatry, where for the honour of his fatherland he placed his padrão to mark his discoveries at the very ends of the earth, the memory of his tomb will not be consumed so long as this our writing endures…”
“A glorious epitaph forgotten by nearly every one!” exclaims Louis Keil.5 “Let us hope that the Portuguese in Macao will remember him, and engrave in letters of gold the undying words of João de Barros, on a new padrão, where the sphere, and the castles and coat-of-arms of the Portuguese may commemorate, in the Island of Ta-Mang, the arrival of the first Portuguese who landed on China’s shore”. the very “ends of the earth” the Portuguese went seeking the Prester John, who, they considered, would be a desirable Christian ally for the great crusade against the Infidels. The search began as a vision in the prophetic mind of Prince Henry and the prosecution of that search stimulated the creation of modern nautical science, for though cut off from Asia by the Moslems in the Holy Land by the land route, the Portuguese, who had just succeeded in the 14th century in ridding their land of the Moors, under Prince Henry looked towards the sea and there they found their destiny.
To reach that Prester John, however, better ships, more seaworthy and higher out of the water were required, the primitive knowledge and rules of navigation had to be improved, the equipping and provisioning of ships had to be changed, and the science of astronomy had to be subordinated to the navigators needs. For the application of the knowledge of latitude and longitude, it became necessary to determine the position of ships at sea, and the map of the world had to be drawn, where no maps had existed before, the use of instruments had to be learned, and the tides and currents studied as had never been thought necessary before. Nautical science was being created and the search for Prester John went on, while the fears of mythical monsters and supernatural forces, which were believed to exist in the unknown spaces of the earth, had to be overcome.
Slowly but surely the Portuguese pressed on with their objective. The sea was made to give up its secrets to these hardy sailors and navigators who sailed from the port of Sagres and went farther and ever farther out onto the seas beyond the end of Europe and shores of Africa. Finally the day came when Bartholomeu Dias returned to Lisbon and reported that the continent of Africa was not an impassable mass of land, that the way to India lay open to discovery, that the search for Prester John, to help the Portuguese in their campaigns against the enemies of the Cross, would be all the easier when the Portuguese ships could reach the shores of Asia and bring the wonders of the East within the reach of Western nations.
So well did those Portuguese ship-builders and navigators do their work that the whole course of history was changed when Vasco da Gama came back to Lisbon and dropped anchor in the Tagus in the year 1499. The route which he followed by the Western fringe of the Atlantic could not be improved upon even by the sailing vessels of the XIXth century on their way from Europe to the shores of India and China and other parts of the Asiatic continent.
“To find the sea-path to the Thesauris Arabum et divitis Indiae, till then known only through faint echoes of almost forgotten tradition, was the object to which Prince Henry devoted his life. The goal which he thus set before himself was at an unknown distance, and had to be attained through dangers supposed to be insurmountable and by means so inadequate as to demand a proportionate excess of courage, study and perseverance.”6 “Although the son of a king, he relinquished the pleasures of the court, and took up his abode on the inhospitable promontory of Sagres, at the extreme south-western angle of Europe. It was a small peninsula… Another spot so cold, so barren, or so dreary, it were difficult to find on the warm and genial soil of sunny Portugal.”7 (On the wall of the main stairway of the Governor’s Palace, on Praia Grande, Macao, will be found a life-size painting in oils of Prince Henry in a characteristic pose on the barren rocks of Sagres calmly contemplating the sea).
“The glory of Prince Henry,” Mr. R. H. Major writes, “consists in the conception and persistent prosecution of a great idea, and in what followed therefrom… That glory is not a matter of fancy or bombast, but of mighty and momentous reality – a reality to which the Anglo-Saxon race, at least, have no excuse for indifference” In order to arrive at an approximate estimate of the wonderful successes in the field of noble enterprise, we turn to Mr. Major’s book in English, The Discoveries of Prince Henry the Navigator; for a conscientious student’s view of the apparently “insurmountable” difficulties and dangers that have been successfully overcome.
To be duly appreciated, the Navigator’s achievement “must be viewed in relation to the period in which it was conceived.’ The last of the dark ages,’ the fifteenth century has been rightly named, but the light which displaced its obscurity had not yet begun to dawn when Prince Henry, with prophetic instinct, traced mentally a pathway to India by an anticipated Cape of Good Hope. No printing press as yet had given forth to the world the accumulated wisdom and experience of the past. The compass, though known and in use, had not yet emboldened men to leave the shore and put out with confidence into the open sea; no sea-chart existed to guide the mariner along those perilous African coasts; no lighthouse reared its friendly head to warn or welcome him on his homeward track. The scientific and practical appliances which were to render possible the discovery of half a world had yet to be developed. But, with such objects in view, the Prince collected the information supplied by ancient geographers, unweariedly devoted himself to the study of mathematics, navigation, and cartography, and freely invited, with princely liberality of reward, the co-operation of the boldest and most skilful navigators of every country.
“If it be the glory of Great Britain that by means of her maritime explorations the sun never sets on her dominions, she may recall with satisfaction that he who opened the way to that glory was the son of a royal English lady and of the greatest king that ever sat on the throne of Portugal.” Such is the reflection with which Mr. R. H. Major permitted himself, with just pride, to conclude the preface to his historical work. Prince Henry, the Navigator, was the fifth child and fourth son of King John I, “of good memory,” (also surnamed “the Great”, and “Father of his Country,”) and of Queen Philippa, daughter of “old John of Gaunt, time-honoured Lancaster.” He was thus the nephew of Henry IV of England and great-grandson of Edward III.
Prince Henry, unfortunately, did not survive to enjoy the earliest fruits of his life-long devotion to his country, for his untimely death took place at Sagres in 1460. It was in 1498 that the voyage to India was accomplished, when Vasco da Gama landed at Calicut, and Camoens records in his great epic the exclamatory wish of Vasco da Gama: “We seek Christians and spices!” From India the next stage of Portuguese expansion was when Lopes de Sequeira, as has been already stated, landed at Malacca in 1509. The Portuguese first landed in Canton in 1517, when Thomé Pires reached the place as the first Portuguese ambassador to China. Unfortunately, through mutual misunderstandings due to the language difficulty the attempt to found a settled trade in China ended disastrously. However, a clandestine trade of sorts was carried on subsequently along the southern coasts of Kwangtung, Fukien and Chekiang. From the year 1518 the Portuguese trafficked in various ports of this Kingdom, and ultimately in the port of the island of Sanchuan, whence the earliest beginnings of this City originated, and where St. Francis Xavier, second Apostle of India and guardian saint of this city, died in 1552.
This is related by Antonio Bocarro, in his description of Macao, translated by Major C. R. Boxer, in his great History, Macao Three Hundred Years Ago.8
The exact date of the “permanent” settlement of Macao cannot be established with certainty. Major Boxer, in whom confidence was expressed that he might establish the authority for a precise date, definitely states that the date is still “a matter of dispute”. As to the grounds which enabled the Portuguese to form a settlement at Macao, in 1557, Major Boxer quotes “the most commonly accepted version of a recognition of the Portuguese services in expelling a pirate band that made the place their stronghold”. Nevertheless, this story is made with the reservation that it “has yet to be confirmed by a reliable contemporary Chinese source”. “But there is nothing inherently improbable in it,” he adds.
It may be pertinent to interpose here the views of another writer,9 C. A. Montalto de Jesus, who wrote: “At the same time an adjacent island, Lampacao (Lang-peh-kau), was assigned as a resort for carrying on foreign trade. By agreeing to pay duties, it is said, the Portuguese obtained leave to settle there as well as to trade at Canton. At bottom, however, this rapprochement may have been mostly due to the fact that a formidable piratical incursion at this epoch rendered it advisable for the Chinese to centre their foreign trade at Canton instead of at the offing. Soon the community at Lampacao rose to over five hundred Portuguese, carrying on a flourishing trade, mostly in pepper bartered for silk and musk. Thenceforward they lived in peace and without the casualties which in former times befell their vessels, for, cleared out of every harbour, they moored at the offing, exposing themselves to typhoons which few survived. The compromise was effected by Leonel de Sousa, the commodore of a fleet bound for Japan, who in a letter dated 1554 to the Infante Dom Luiz, remarked that the Portuguese, it would seem, were then only for the first time known as such to the Chinese, having been up to this period denominated Franks – term among Orientals for Europeans in general. According to Gaspar da Cruz, the Portuguese were now styled “foreign people”, instead of “foreign devils” as they had been yclept since the days of Andrade’s escapades”.
On the subject of the deliverance of the South China coast from the marauding incursions of piratical hordes, Montalto de Jesus is more specific. He writes on page 24 that “The China Sea was infested by pirates and insurgents who wrought havoc on the trade and shipping, when, after due preparation, the Portuguese assailed the marauders, and soon cleared the sea of the scourge, to the great relief and joy of the Chinese. The Portuguese then bore down upon Heungshan, where large tracts were held by a powerful pirate chieftain. After staunch resistance he was vanquished, and the island taken by vassals of the crown of Portugal; whence it results that the sovereignty in question is founded on the right of conquest, acquired by the arms of Portugal and at the cost of Portuguese blood. The island occupied, and Macao being best adapted for trading purposes, the city was built on that peninsula“.