THE
voyage which the Portuguese navigator Vasco Da Gama
made to India at the close of the fifteenth
century has frequently been mentioned in the
preceding volumes, especially in the sixth; a
brief selection from the contemporary accounts of
it may therefore be welcomed here. This
celebrated voyager, whom King Manuel of Portugal commissioned
with the command of a Portuguese fleet for an
expedition to the East, set sail from Lisbon in
the summer of 1497, and after rounding the Cape
of Good Hope, arrived on May 20, 1498, at Calicut
in Malabar, on the southeast coast of India. Through
the favor of the Zamorin, or native ruler of the
place, he was able to establish, between the
Indian states and his own country, a series of
friendly relations for trade and commerce, which
proved of the greatest importance to Portugal.
History of India, Volume 1, Sir William Wilson
Hunter, Editor: Abraham Valentine Williams
Jackson, The Grolier Society, 1907
On
the 20th May 1498 Vasco Da Gama, having in a
voyage of eleven months doubled the Cape of Good
Hope and coasted along East Africa, landed at
Calicut. It was a momentous event, second only to
the action of Columbus six years before. The
Pope, the worst of the whole line, Alexander
Borgia, had distributed the undiscovered world
outside of Christendom between Spain and Portugal
by his famous Bull, thus asserting the most
extensive practical missionary policy in all
history up to that time. The King of Portugal was
constituted by the supreme Christian authority of
his day " Lord of the Navigation, Conquest,
and Trade of Ethiopia, Arabia, Persia, and India."
What in two voyages Vasco Da Gama began,
Albuquerque and Almeida, the first viceroy,
gradually formed into an Eastern empire, which
had one justification to set against its
iniquities. It beat back the pressure of Solyman
the Magnificent from Constantinople, and of the
Sultan of Egypt from Alexandria, to keep sealed
up the trade of India which, for the eighteen
hundred years since Alexander the Great, had
enriched both powers, and Venice and Genoa as
their partners and middlemen. Portugal, all
unwittingly, prevented the destruction of
Christendom by "a colossal military empire
on the Bosporus commanding the avenues of Asiatic
trade,"1 which might have postponed for
centuries alike the Reformation of the Church and
the spread of the English speaking race
propagating the Reformed faith. Portugal, happily,
could not keep the trade which it was the first
to divert to the natural channel of the ocean,
because it did not prove worthy to be entrusted
with the faith, which it used for selfish ends
and degraded by unspiritual compromises. Absorbed
for a time in Spain, its decadence
1
Sir Alfred Lyall on The Rise of the British
Dominion in India. London (Murray), 1893.
went on, step by step, as
first the Dutch Republic and then the England of
Queen Elizabeth opened wide the doors of t he
East and the West, which Philip II. vainly tried
to shut again with an intolerance like that of
the Turk before him.
Portugal
had planted its trading forts on the shores of
Western and Southern India for forty years before
it became a proselytizing power. Its first
centre, at Calicut, was not far to the north of Cochin,
in the ancient town of which, now known as
Cranganor, first the Jews and then the
Christians, both apostolic and Nestorian, had
formed settlements. One of the many adventurers
who followed Da Gama—Pedro Alvares
Cabral—having seized the place became
acquainted with the Syrian Christians. Two of
them about to visit their Patriarch at Mosul,
named Matthias and Joseph, were taken by Cabral
to Lisbon, en route to Persia, and these
were the first Christians of India seen in Europe.
The elder died there, and the younger, when at
Venice on his further journey, wrote an account
of his co-religionists and of his travels in a
Latin work entitled Voyages of Joseph the
Indian?- and returned to India by Lisbon.
Though no more a missionary Church in the
aggressive sense than their fathers, the Malabar
Christians in the first half of the sixteenth
century were a prosperous and even powerful
community. For military and political services to
the rajas of Cochin they enjoyed all the
privileges of a protected caste. They even
aspired to sovereign nationality on their own
account at an early period, having a tradition
that Beliarte was the first of a line of
Christian kings who governed from Udiampoor, a
few miles south-east of Ernakolam, the Cochin
capital, where, alas! the Portuguese archbishop,
Menezes, was to destroy their spiritual
independence by the decrees of his Latin Synod of
Diamper in 1599.
The conversion of India: from Pantaenus
to the present time, A.D. 193-1893 Graves
lectures ; 1893. George Smith, John Murray, 1893