Preface

Not seven, nor seventy, names exhaust the tale of Portugal’s great men. The reader need but turn to the fascinating pages of Portuguese history. There he will find a plentiful feast set out before him—the epic strife between Portuguese and Moor, Portuguese and Spaniard, and deeds of high emprise in the foam of perilous seas and the ever-mysterious lands of the East. His delight will be impaired unless he can follow the events in detail in the chronicles and histories of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and for this a knowledge of Portuguese is requisite, since there are few satisfactory translations. But it is as easy to acquire a sufficient knowledge of Portuguese to read it withpleasure as it is difficult to write or speak it.

There is a whole literature, often not less attractive in style than in subject, of histories, memoirs, travels, accounts of wrecks and sieges, recording the deeds of the Portuguese on and beyond the seas. Of the battle of Ourique (1139) Portuguese historians have loved to tell how the Moors numbered 600,000 (since to say 900,000 were an exaggeration) and how, heavy rain having fallen after the battle, the streams that flowed into the far-distant Guadiana ran red with blood. But there were scrupulous and moderate chroniclers like Fernam Lopez and Azurara, and many of the historians of India were sober writers whose narratives (those, for instance, of Fernam Lopez de Castanheda, Diogo do Couto, and Gaspar Correa) bear the stamp of truth while they delight the reader by their wealth of detail and personal anecdote.

They may be pardoned for declaring that their heroes’ achievements outshonethose of Greek and Roman. For indeed the half-century (1498-1548) between the voyage of Vasco da Gama and the death of Dom João de Castro is thick with names; the great men tread on one another’s heels in the halls of fame, worthily continuing the work of their predecessors during four centuries in Portugal. Sousa, Mello, Meneses, Cunha, Castro, Noronha, Mascarenhas, Coutinho, Pereira, Pacheco, Almeida, Azevedo, Sá, Silva, Silveira—these are names the very catalogue of which must be music to a Portuguese, and which would require a large volume to chronicle in detail.

And many women hold a high place in Portuguese history, as the Queen-Saint Elizabeth (or Isabel),[1]the stout-hearted bakeress of Aljubarrota, Brites (Beatrice) de Almeida, who slew, if we are to trust thetradition, seven Spaniards with her wooden baker’s shovel, or the heroines of Diu.[2]

Among the men there is Affonso Henriquez, first King of Portugal, half French by birth, and grandson of the Spanish King of Leon, but in heart and action wholly Portuguese; loyal Egas Moniz; Gualdim Paes and other legendary heroes in the conflict with the Moors which transformed Portugal from a dependent province into a free kingdom; and later, if not less legendary, Fernão Rodriguez Pacheco, the astute defender of Celorico, who in starvation by a miracle obtained a fish and sent it to the besieger to show that plenty reigned in the town; or the defender of Coimbra, Martim Freitas, heroically, almost quixotically loyal to the deposed King Sancho II.

On the sea the first to signalise himself was Fuas Roupinho, in the twelfth century; and thenceforth Portugal never failed to produce hardy if obscure seamen, tofish for cod in the Northern Seas or to discover the west coast of Africa till Bartholomeu Diaz rounded the Cape of Storms in 1487, and King João II rechristened it the Cape of Good Hope.[3]

João II (1481-95), “the Perfect Prince,” or as Queen Isabella of Spain more bluntly called himel hombre, “the man,” was one of a series of great kings of the House of Avis, founded by João I (1385-1433) “of good memory,” darling of the Lisbon people. João I was succeeded by his eldest son, the noble but unfortunate student-king Duarte (1433-8). Other brothers of Prince Henry the Navigator, scarcely less famous, were the Infante Pedro, statesman and author, who travelled through “the seven parts of the world,” and the Infante Fernando, who died slowly with saintly patient heroism as a prisoner of the Moors in Africa.

Under Manoel I (1495-1521) the Great,the Fortunate, and his son João III (1521-57), Gama, Albuquerque and Dom João de Castro are the most conspicuous names; but Dom Francisco de Almeida, first Viceroy of India, Pedro Alvarez Cabral, discoverer of Brazil, Fernão de Magalhães, the harsh and fiery navigator[4]who first penetrated by sea to the North Pacific and was slain in the hour of his triumph—his name lives in the Straits of Magellan—and many more were almost equally celebrated. But especially among the discoverers and early adventurers in India the men of fame are but types of hundreds of less fortunate heroes who perished. Men left Portugal with their lives in their hands, and for every one who (like Fernam Mendez Pinto) survived to tell the tale scores sailed away who were never seen or heard of afterwards.

Yet the population of Portugal in the first third of the sixteenth century may have been but 1,500,000, and certainly did not reach twice that figure. That is afact that must uplift and inspire those who study Portugal’s history or consider her future. For the Portuguese of the sixteenth century fought not against or not only against hordes of undisciplined savages, but against Moors and Turks highly civilised and well equipped with artillery.

Perhaps the secret of their success is that their motto was “God, King, and Country,” and that each man among them relied, under Heaven, on himself, not on this or that sect or party or philosophy, election promises or political programmes. They did not wait and watch for some wonderful Ism, like a brazen serpent, to change the face of the world: they as individuals simply, persistently set to work and—changed it. In less than fifty years after the Portuguese first reached India they were in Japan, converting and civilising the Japanese, and had made possible that tremendous saying of Camões:

E se mais mundo houvera lá chegára.

And had there been more world they would have reached it.

That is, of course, a terrible condemnation as well as an undying honour, for unless each generation were to produce an Albuquerque there could be no hope of maintaining conquests so wide, and Albuquerque had had his hands tied by his own countrymen, so that, like the blinded Samson, he achieved the ruin of his enemies by his unaided strength and at the expense of his own life. But if Portuguese statesmanship was at fault in India, there never failed a sprinkling of individuals who spent their lives in ungrudging service and heroic effort to counterbalance errors committed, and often died heartbroken for their pains.

Two anecdotes will give an idea of the spirit that animated the Portuguese in the sixteenth century. During the siege of Diu a soldier, Fernão Penteado, seriously wounded in the head, went to the surgeon, but, finding him busy with other wounded and hearing the noise of a Turkish attack, he returned to the fight and came back with a second serious wound in the head, only to find the surgeon busier than before.Again he went to fight, and when the surgeon was finally able to attend to him he had a third wound, in his right arm.

The second incident occurred in North-West Africa. During a fight Dom Affonso da Cunha, aiming a mighty cut with his sword at a Moor, missed him, and the sword leapt from his hand. “Go fetch it, you dog!” roared Cunha, and the terror-stricken Moor obediently picked it up and gave it to him, trembling. Cunha thereupon spared his life.

Such were those Portuguese of old, persistent, brave, proud, magnificent. And something of their spirit survives in the Portugal of to-day, ready to reappear at a crisis—more of it, perhaps, than is generally imagined.

FOOTNOTES:[1]Antonio Coelho Gasco in hisConquista, Antiguidade e Nobreza da mui insigne e inclita Cidade de Coimbra(Lisboa, 1805) drew the following rash picture of her from an ancient portrait at Coimbra: “This very saintly lady was of gigantic frame and very stout, very white and very red, with a long face and large serene green eyes, nose rather low with wide nostrils, head long and beautiful.”[2]Isabel Fernandez, Barbara Fernandez, and Isabel Madeira. Later heroines at home were Isabel Pereira in the defence of Ouguella against the Spanish in 1644 and Elena Perez in the similar siege of Monção in 1656.[3]The Portuguese accounts of these discoveries are most vivid and minute, a fascinating introduction to the geography of what is now largely part of the British Empire.[4]Garcia da Orta introduces him with the words “The Devil entered into a Portuguese.”

[1]Antonio Coelho Gasco in hisConquista, Antiguidade e Nobreza da mui insigne e inclita Cidade de Coimbra(Lisboa, 1805) drew the following rash picture of her from an ancient portrait at Coimbra: “This very saintly lady was of gigantic frame and very stout, very white and very red, with a long face and large serene green eyes, nose rather low with wide nostrils, head long and beautiful.”

[2]Isabel Fernandez, Barbara Fernandez, and Isabel Madeira. Later heroines at home were Isabel Pereira in the defence of Ouguella against the Spanish in 1644 and Elena Perez in the similar siege of Monção in 1656.

[3]The Portuguese accounts of these discoveries are most vivid and minute, a fascinating introduction to the geography of what is now largely part of the British Empire.

[4]Garcia da Orta introduces him with the words “The Devil entered into a Portuguese.”

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