Joaquim Magalhães de Castro
Tomé Pires and Duarte Barbosa are the first to give us news of the kingdoms of Bengal populated by “people of war and of trade,” that is, warriors and merchants, highlighting the riches such as cotton, sugar, ginger and the “painted and fine cloths.” It was only a matter of time before the Portuguese began to arrive. First, at the main river port; then, going up the river bed for two days until the port of Satgaon, which would pass on to be designated as “Porto Pequeno” (small harbour), to differentiate it from Chatigão, also known as “Porto Grande de Bengala” (big harbour of Bengal), where the Portuguese community was installed since 1518.
In 1533 Afonso de Melo arrived there captaining a fleet of five ships and a hundred men with gifts for the local sultan. Apparently, the local monarch did not appreciated the gesture because he arrested the visitors, an act which would motivate the sending of a new Portuguese fleet, headed by Diogo Rebelo, who succeeded in opening the port of Satgaon to Portuguese commerce. Thus, in 1535 the Portuguese saw their presence consolidated in those places, although with ups and downs and not always managing to maintain their permanence. It was nature that imposed its rules, with the sedimentation of the river bed that would end that ancestral port. As an option, the Portuguese settled five kilometers to the south, and in Bandel (from the Arab word “bandar”) – forty miles from present-day Calcutta – they would, in 1537, establish a trading post.
Both ports were long frequented by Arabs, Persians, Abyssins and Hindus, who traded a vast array of products there, among them the much-needed rice of Malacca. It was to fill this lack that Afonso de Albuquerque, following a concerted strategy, and aimed at the four cardinal points, had previously sent his emissaries.
Duarte Barbosa calls attention to an activity that was apparently preferred in those places, and which was the purchase (or robbery) of young boys who “after being neutered and educated” sold themselves as guardians of the farms and the women of the lords. Dated in 1518, a letter written in Cochin by a certain Joao de Lima, drawing attention to the cheapness of local products, proves that by then the Portuguese were trading there.
In 1579, the merchant Pedro Tavares succeeded in Agra, where the court of the Mughal emperor Acbar was established, authorization for a commercial concession – firman – and thus a city was raised that came to get the name of the river that bathes it, Hooghly (to be known among the Portuguese as Hugli or Uglim). On that same date there is news of the existence of a port, as well as a fort, this being considered the founding moment of this city that was the germ of the gigantic city that is known today as Calcutta.
The “casados” (so-called Portuguese) were an autonomous power in Goa, although they owed it in theory to the captain-general of Ceylon, and it was they who appointed the captains of the city. In 1598, the Catholics in Hugli totaled about five thousand, among natives and mestizos. The Portuguese thus had exclusive trade, bringing all products that the peoples of the most diverse origins from Europe to Bengal.
The region was under the dominion of local Muslims who ruled in the name of the nabob who had his court in the city of Rajmahal, on the west bank of the Ganges.
Some kilometers farther south, on the east bank of the same river, stood the city of Gaur (or Gour) visited a few years earlier by António de Brito and Diogo Pereira, who left Chatigão in October 1521.
Gaur, an important city of the old medieval Hindu empire of Sena, was at the time the maximum exponent of the Bengali civilization. Brito and Pereira were amazed at the size of the place, very fertile and abundant in agricultural products, having compared the streets and alleys with the ones of the cities where they grew up, because they were made of brick “similar to Rua Nova, in Lisboa.”
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