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.
On all these occasions Castro kept a log or _roteiro_, from Lisbon
to Goa, from Goa to Diu, and from Goa to the Red Sea. They display
a strong scientific interest, a spirit thoroughly modern--nothing,
however small it might be, was to him necessarily unimportant or
negligible--or perhaps ancient, since he complains that in his day the
scientific investigations of the ancients were no longer in vogue. The
logs are written with that vivid directness which mark his letters,
“written,” he said, “not for the ladies and gallants of the Court and
royal palaces, but for the mariners of Leça and Mattosinhos.”
His descriptions are precise and accurate, which does not prevent
them from being often picturesque. He notices many birds, including
one white and grey which, he says, the sailors call _frades_ (monks).
“I pay great attention to eclipses of the moon,” he writes, as also
to longitudes and latitudes, fishes, seaweeds, currents, winds, the
colour of the Red Sea, and every detail that might concern the art
of navigation, to the delight of his friends Dr. Pedro Nunez and
Prince Luis, who had furnished him with special instruments and other
assistance for his voyage.
In the summer of 1542 he was back at Cintra, but in December of that
year he was appointed to the command of the coast fleet, the main
duties of which were to keep clear the coast of Portugal from pirates,
such as Mondragon, who perpetually hovered in wait for the priceless
spoils and cargoes of Portuguese ships homeward bound from India. He
seems to have gone to sea before the end of the year and held this
post for two years, with a brief interval in 1543 when he commanded
the Portuguese fleet sent to co-operate with the Spanish against
Barbarossa. They did not come to an engagement, and Dom João, after
visiting Ceuta, returned to Portugal.
He was at Cintra in the beginning of 1545 when the unwelcome news
reached him that he had been appointed Governor of India. Most
unwillingly he accepted this new post, the difficulties and disquiet of
which he had been able to gauge at first hand during his former sojourn
in Goa. His young sons were to accompany him.
A picturesque story of the Governor-elect cannot be better told than
in the words of the historian Couto, who served under him in India:
“Passing one day by the door of a tailor [in Lisbon] he noticed a
pair of very rich and fashionable velvet breeches, and pulling up his
horse asked to see them. After examining their curious workmanship he
asked whose they were. The tailor, not knowing whom he was addressing,
answered that they were for a son of the Governor who was going to
India. Dom João de Castro thereupon in a rage took up a pair of
scissors and cut them into shreds. “Bid that young man buy arms,” he
said to the tailor, and so passed on.”
At the end of March the fleet sailed. The number of men actually
enlisted was eight hundred, but many more who had been rejected for
some defect or were escaping from justice succeeded in embarking as
stowaways. In the Governor’s ship alone there were nearly two hundred
of them, and they required to be fed during a voyage of many weeks. The
Governor was advised to cast them adrift in the provision ship or to
maroon them in the Cape Verde Islands, but humanely and persistently
refused.
He had not been long at Goa when, in April 1546, news was brought
that a formidable attack was being prepared against Diu, the fort
commanded by the heroic Dom João de Mascarenhas. Castro sent his son
Dom Alvaro with a strong fleet to its relief. The fleet was delayed by
violent storms, and when it finally reached Diu there was little of the
fortress left. The walls and bulwarks were levelled with the ground,
most of the defenders dead, and those who remained either wounded or
ill. No one but Mascarenhas could have held on in such conditions, and
even so “six more days,” wrote Castro to the King, “and relief would
have come too late.”
Most of the nobles in Diu were dead, and among them Dom João de
Castro’s other son, Fernando, who had been blown up with many others on
a mined part of the wall on which they had rashly remained, although
warned by Mascarenhas of their danger. “He should have obeyed Dom
João,” wrote Castro stoically to the King, and he added: “Of what Dom
Fernando did till the time of his death I will say nothing to your
Highness, for it cannot be that men are so wicked but that some among
them will inform your Highness of the services and great exertions that
my sons undergo in your service.”
The King of Cambaya still boasted of victory, and Dom João de Castro
himself sailed north with a powerful fleet from Goa. After striking
terror into the enemy by ravaging the coast of Cambaya, setting it all
aflame and, in his own words, “sparing no living thing,” he left these
shores covered with dead and crossed to Diu.
The fortress was now again invested by an army of 60,000 Moors, and
in the battle with the besieging force the Governor was himself more
than once in the greatest danger before the enemy was routed. Indeed,
it was his personal exertions which largely decided the day, and with
pardonable pride he wrote to the King that it was “the greatest victory
ever seen in all the East.”
He sent the King a long list of those who had conspicuously
distinguished themselves, and for himself he asked for the reward or
_alviçaras_ which it was customary to give to a general who had won
a battle or taken a city. “And because your Highness may give me one
unsuited to my nature and mode of life, I will ask for it specifically,
and it is that you should grant me a chestnut-grove which you have in
the Serra de Cintra, by the King’s Fountain, bordering on my _quinta_,
that my servants, having chestnuts to eat on my estate, may not go
plundering what does not belong to them. Its value may be ten or twelve
thousand réis, but to me it will be worth many thousands of crusados.”
There may be something a little theatrical and fantastic (contemporary
historians call him _bizarro_ and _fanfarrão_) in some of Castro’s
actions in India, in his Albuquerquian prowess on the coast of Cambaya,
the pawning of his beard (again in imitation of Albuquerque), his
triumphal entry into Goa, his preparation of stakes on which to spit
the Sultan as Pacheco had prepared one for the Samuri of Calicut; but
there can be no doubt of the sincerity of his desire to obtain this
Cintra _castanhal_.
After his victory he besought the King not to prolong his term of
office beyond the ordinary three years, and to allow him to return to
the Serra de Cintra, and in his will he says: “I have near Cintra a
_quinta_, called the Quinta of the King’s Fountain, which I made, and
to which I am greatly devoted because I made it and because it is in
a country where my father and ancestors were born,” while his letters
contain several pathetic references of the same kind.[20]
After his victory over the Moors, Dom João de Castro set about
rebuilding Diu, and to obtain money sent an appeal to the citizens of
Goa with some hairs of his beard in pawn,[21] since it was impossible
to send the bones of his son, as he had first intended, his death being
but recent. The citizens of Goa responded nobly to the appeal, and when
the Governor returned to Goa in the spring of 1547 received him with
great rejoicing. His barbaric “triumph” has been often described.
“He was richly Cloath’d, giving the season its due, and became them
as well and sprightly as his Arms. He had on a French suit of crimson
satin, with Gold twist about the Slashes and Seams, and, not to forget
he was a Souldier, he put on a Coat of Mail wrought on Cloth of Gold
with Buttons of Plate [_i.e._ silver].
“The Magistrates of the City received the Governour under a Canopy and
presently a Citizen of Quality, reverently bowing, took his Hat from
his Head, putting him on a Crown of Triumph and in his Hand a Palm.
“The ladies from their Windows sprinkled the Triumpher with distilled
Waters of diverse Spices.”[22]
In Portugal, too, the news of the victory before Diu was received
with universal exultation. The King raised Castro to the dignity
of Viceroy--the fourth Viceroy of India--granted him ten thousand
crusados, and gave his son Dom Alvaro the command of the Indian Sea.
But instead of allowing him to return he prolonged his term of office
for another four years. Castro was ill at the time, and shortly
afterwards this “saint and hero,” as the modern Portuguese historian
Oliveira Martins calls him, died at Goa in the arms of his friend St.
Francis Xavier (June 1548).
Thus Albuquerque, whose ties with Portugal had been gradually replaced
by those that bound him to Goa, which he had made, as Castro his
_quinta_, died with the bitter knowledge that, if he lived, he must
spend his years in Portugal, a whale among minnows, and watch his work
being undone by others; Castro, with his thoughts ever turning to the
rocks and woods of Cintra and the study of philosophy in his beloved
_quinta_, died in a foreign grandeur at Goa. He died in poverty, for,
ever disinterested and humane and generous towards others, he had spent
his money on the soldiers whom the State neglected to pay, and himself
remained penniless.
The last scene of his life in which he addressed the chief officials
and magistrates of Goa is almost as famous as the pawning of his beard.
“I am not asham’d, gentlemen, to tell you that the Vice Roy of India
wants in this sickness those Conveniences the meanest Souldier finds
in the Hospitals. I came to Serve not to Traffick in the East, I would
to your Selves have pawn’d the Bones of my Son and did pawn the Hairs
of my Beard to assure you I had no other Plate or Hangings in the
House to buy me a Hen, for in the Fleets I set forth the Souldiers fed
upon the Governour’s Salary before the King’s pay, and ’tis no wonder
for the Father of so many children to be poor. I request of you during
the time of this Sickness to order me out of the King’s Revenue a
proportionable maintenance and to appoint a Person of your own who may
provide me a moderate allowance.”[23]
It may be said that for the Governor of a great Empire to leave himself
without the means “to buy me a Hen” was the height of extravagance, but
that is only the cavil of a more mundane spirit, incapable of attaining
so heroic a sublimity, and his countrymen, at least, have always
been grateful to Castro for ostentatiously proving that amid all the
prevailing corruption there remained one honest man.
Like Albuquerque and Gama, he died in harness. But, great as Castro was
as a soldier, he would in all probability have been no less celebrated
for his services to literature had it been granted him to spend his
old age in the quiet of his shady _quinta_.
Couto ends his portrait of the Viceroy thus: “And for his great
charity, temperance, disinterestedness, exceeding love of God, and
other qualities of a good Christian, it may be affirmed that he will be
receiving in glory the prize and guerdon of all his trouble and toil.”
By his energy, vigour of thought and action, by his splendid character,
humane and resolute, he closed the most brilliant half-century of
Portugal’s history with a key of gold.
FOOTNOTES:
[19] The Emperor, who was the Prince’s cousin and brother-in-law,
welcomed him with open arms at Barcelona. On one occasion, when neither
would go through a door before the other and the Emperor insisted on
Prince Luis being the first to pass, the latter seized a torch from one
of the pages and so preceded him.
[20] In a letter to King João III from India he recalls all his
services since the age of eighteen and says: “For the love of God and
in reward for these services I beg your Highness to allow me to return
to Portugal to live with my wife and children and end the few troubled
days that remain to me in the Serra de Cintra,” and in 1540 he writes
to Prince Luis that only the arrival of a Turkish fleet in India will
prevent him from returning to Portugal.
[21] Then, as in the Middle Ages, the beard was considered an
honourable pledge, and men swore by it as Zeus might swear by the River
Styx. Albuquerque in India had given some hairs of his beard to a
soldier and afterwards redeemed them by a payment of money.
[22] From Sir Peter Wyche’s picturesque seventeenth-century translation
of Jacinto Freire de Andrada’s _Life of Dom João de Castro_.
[23] Wyche’s version.
_Printed by Hazell, Watson & Viney, Ld., London and Aylesbury._
Transcriber’s Notes
A few minor errors in punctuation have been corrected.
The spelling of “King Diniz” changed to “King Dinis” in a few spots
throughout the text.