En prenant son service, le 25 janvier 1520, à bord du Santa Maria do Monte, dans le port de Goa, l'escrivão de cette nau portugaise, Cristóvāo Afonso, était porteur d'un registre de cent pages. Conservé aujourd'hui à l'Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo, à Lisbonne, sous la cote Núcleo Antigo 609, ce Lyvro da receyta e despesa da nao Santa Maria do Monte em que vay por capitam e feytor Paris Corbinell pera Ormuz com arroz delRey nosso senhor pera s'entregar ao feytor e oficiaes da feytoria no dito Ormuz nous est parvenu dans un état incomplet. Le texte ne comporte que 27 feuilles écrites, avec la numérotation originale de I à 8, 11 à 16, 24 à 27, 36 à 42, 50 et 51. La perte est loin d'être aussi importante qu'il semblerait. II restait toujours dans les ‘cahiers’ (cadernos) de cette sorte un bon nombre de pages blanches. La comparaison entre les títulos du sommaire établi par l'écrivain au feuillet Iv et l'état présent du manuscrit permet de constater que manque seulement la liste de ce que le capitaine avait reçu au magasin d'Ormuz pour le voyage de retour (fol. 60: ‘As cousas que recebeo o capitam no almazem per'a nao te Goa’), que nous pouvons d'ailleurs connaître en partie par divers items d'autres títulos. Tout à la fin du cahier avaient été transcrits deux alvarás, fol. 97 ‘Alvara da demasya da carga’, et fol. 99 ‘O alvara da capitania de Paris Corbynell’.

The object of this paper is to comment and analyse some passages of Correia's Lendas da India, Book III, Year 1534, relating to Mughal diplomacy and diplomatic letters immediately before the Gujarat campaign by the Mughal emperor Humayun, against Bahadur Shah Gujarati in 1534–35.

The merchant who arrives in a locality unknown to him must also carefully arrange in advance to secure a reliable representative, a safe lodging house, and whatever besides is necessary, so that he is not taken in by a slow payer or by a cheat.

If the establishment of the Estado da India in the early sixteenth century owed much to indigenous aid, its survival in the ensuing two hundred years owed even more. The centuries after 1600 were indeed sad ones for imperial Portual. The mother country itself was under Spanish rule until 1640, whilst its colonies and colonial trades were everywhere attacked, and more often than not annexed by European rivals. Nowhere was the picture more depressing than in Asia where the heirs of da Gama and Albuquerque had to contend frist with the English and the Dutch and then with a whole host of indigenous opponents ranging from the ever formidable Japanese to the Mughals and the Marathas under the redoubtable Shivaji, once innocently hailed as another Ceaser, but soon identified as the ‘new Attila’. Portuguese correspondence is full of eloquent descriptions of the lamentable condition of the Estado. Trade was at a standstill; war was ubiquitous; food was at the mercy of enemies; manpower was inadequate; the funds inevitably exhausted. In fact, under competent management, the surviving fragments of empire might well show a profit, as was the case in 1680. But not for long. Four years later there was talk of quitting Goa, too large and vulnerable to defend, and by the end of the century it was gloomily reported that all that remained of the erstwhile imperial glories were Goa, its local seaborne commerce, and what was described as ‘the convoy of the China boats’.

A decade has passed since there appeared the fourth and latest edition of that great classic of travel literature, the Relaçāo do Novo Caminho Que Fez por Terra e Mar Vindo da India para Portugal no Ano de 1663 o Padre Manuel Godinho da Companhia de Jesus. It is a very methodical and elegant composition, the work of a man of culture who was also a keen observer. As the censor's certificate of approval in the first edition says, it can provide ‘useful recreation’ and also serve as ‘a guide-map for similar journeys, as in the case of navigations the experience of others has left us sailing charts.’

The Coromandel port of Masulipatnam, at the northern extremity of the Krishna delta, rose to prominence as a major centre of maritime trade in the last quarter of the sixteenth century. Its growing importance after about 1570 is explicable in terms of two sets of events: first, the consolidation of the Sultanate of Golkonda under Ibrahim Qutb Shah (r. 1550–1580), and second, the rise within the Bay of Bengal of a network of ports with a distinctly anti-Portuguese character, including the Sumatran centre of Aceh, the ports of lower Burma, of Arakan, as well as Masulipatnam itself. Round about 1550, Masulipatnam was no more than a supplier of textiles on the coastal network to the great port of Pulicat further south, but by the early 1580s its links with Pegu and Aceh had grown considerably, causing not a little alarm in the upper echelons of the administration of the Portuguese Estado da Índia at Goa. The ‘Moors’ who owned and operated ships out of Masulipatnam did so without the benefit of carlazes from the Portuguese captains either at São Tomé or at any other neighbouring port, and while developing an intense trade within the Bay of Bengal, strictly avoided the Portuguese-controlled entrepot at Melaka. The Portuguese in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries were heavily involved in it in western India and a recent study has marshalled evidence from Portuguese sources on the mechanics of that trade in a port on the Kanara coast.2 In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with the entry into the Indian Ocean of the large Chartered Companies, evidence on the grain trade is substantially increased, enabling us to see it in sharper focus in the broad canvas of Asian trade. the port was no more than a minor nuisance, and in the engagements that ensued, the Portuguese frequently had the worst of it, subsequently negotiating to recover prisoners lodged at Masulipatnam or at the court in Golkonda.2 However, by about 1590, the tenor of the relationship between the viceregal administration at Goa and the court at Golkonda had begun to show signs of change

The historical literature on Indian Ocean trade has now come to recognize the importance of food-grains as an ingredient of that trade. In the western part of the Ocean (the Arabian Sea), its eastern part (Bay of Bengal) and within the Southeast Asian mainland and islands, there is every evidence of a substantial movement of food-grains from surplus areas to deficit areas. Though the scale and frequency of this trade may not be relatively as important in the regional economy as Braudel has outlined for the Mediterranean (with the assistance, it must be admitted, of superior quantitative evidence), it was nevertheless one of the commodities that entered into the commercial processes of different regions of the Ocean. The evidence for the study of the grain trade is, as with all Asian trade in the early modern period, fragmentary and episodic. As intrinsic to the sector of trade embracing Asian merchant shippers and consumers, it shares the disadvantages of paucityof evidence of that whole sector. Again, as with Asian trade as a whole, the grain trade comes into view only when Europeans have entered into that trade and have left glimpses of it in their records.The Portuguese in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries were heavily involved in it in western India and a recent study has marshalled evidence from Portuguese sources on the mechanics of that trade in a port on the Kanara coast.2 In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with the entry into the Indian Ocean of the large Chartered Companies, evidence on the grain trade is substantially increased ,enabling us to see it in sharper focus in the broad canvas of Asian trade

Pieter Laurens Phoonsen, son of Bernard Phoonsen, a distinguished servant of the Dutch East India Company, was born at Gale in Ceylon in 1691 and probably never saw the Netherlands in his life. He was enrolled as a common sailor on a ship of the Dutch Company at Batavia in the year 1707. The peak of his career in the service of the Company was reached when he succeeded Herman Bruinink as the directeur of the Dutch council at Surat late in the year 1728. The papers produced at the Dutch lodge at Surat throughout the 1730s show Phoonsen as an efficient servant of the Company, an upright man keen to uphold the honour of the white race in an alien environment and, on the whole, aloof from the fearful complications of these years in the city of Surat. Phoonsen's colleagues in the council at Surat carefully emulated their chief and the official papers give no ground to suspect that the Indian world enmeshed in any way with life as it went on behind the walls at the Dutch lodge or that the Company, whatever the directors might say, had any well-founded reason for complaint. True, such upright men were not universally admired even at the time. Apart from the distant suspicion of Amsterdam, there was scepticism closer at hand. Writing an ordinary business letter in the early 1730s, Henry Lowther, the chief of the English factory at Surat, noted: ‘The Dutch have sold their cargo, that is the Chief and Council have bought it underhand but at what price no one knows.’ The prolix correspondence from the Dutch lodge at Surat was not, however, tainted with such meanness.

India has had a remarkable tradition in cotton textiles, but that in silk is not of an equivalent order. The purpose of this article is to define the different categories of silk worms and determine their regional diffusion in India within some chronological framework. The question also needs to be raised whether silk was brought to India from China or whether it was indigenous to this country.

A new chapter was opened in the history of the Portuguese overseas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with the publication of Professor Boxer's Mary and Misogyny(1981). It dealt with the relations between the Portuguese men, freshly arrived from their homeland and the local women, their relationships, adventures and the formation of Mestizo communities. As Dr Geneviève Bouchon in her review article of the book says, it ‘served as a source of inspiration and of indispensable sources’:

The numerous and voluminous reports and letters which the Jesuits wrote on the Moro mission, as on all their missions in Asia, are perhaps of less interest to us now for what they reveal of the methods adopted by the Society of Jesus in this remote corner of their mission field or the details they contain about the successes and failures of individual missionaries, than for the wealth of information they provide on the islands where the Jesuits lived and the indigenous societies with which they came into contact through their work of evangelization. In other words, it is not theprimary purpose of this essay to analyse the Jesuit documents with a view to reconstructing the history of the Moro mission in narrative form but rather to glean from them some of the informationthey contain about the social and political conditions in Moro during the forty years or so in the sixteenth century when both the Jesuit missionaries and the Portuguese were active in the regio Because the Jesuits were often in close touch with local rulers and notables, whether or not they succeeded in converting them to Christianity, and because they lived among their subjects for long periods, depending upon them for the necessities of life and sharing their hardships, their letters and reports often show a deeper understanding of the social, economic and political conditions of the indigenous societies and, one suspects, give a more accurate and measured account of events and personalities than do the official chroniclers and historians of the time, most of whom never ventured further east than Malacca and who in any case were chiefly concerned to glorify the deeds of the Portuguese and justify their actions to the world.

The city of Melaka, owing to her occupation by the Portuguese, has the privilege of being the most thoroughly described sixteenth and early seventeenth-century Southeast Asian urban centre, both in textual and iconographic sources. There are some ten to twelve known Portuguese sketches depicting various aspects of the city; ground plans of the fortress, plans of the whole city, maps of the city and its surroundings, or else panoramic views representing specific events in Melaka's history, such as the sieges by Aceh in 1568 or in 1629.

Relations between the sexes are one of the areas in which a distinctive Southeast Asian pattern exists. Even the gradual strengthening of the influence of Islam, Christianity, Buddhism and Confucianism in their respective spheres over the last four centuries has by no means eliminated this common pattern of relatively high female autonomy and economic importance. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the region probably represented one extreme of human experience on these issues. It could not be said that women were equal to men, since there were very few areas in which they competed directly. Women had different functions from men, but these included transplanting and harvesting rice, weaving, and marketing. Their reproductive role gave them magical and ritual powers which it was difficult for men to match. These factors may explain why the value of daughters was never questioned in Southeast Asia as it was in China, India, and the Middle East; on the contrary, ‘the more daughters a man has, the richer he is’ (Galvão, 1544: 89; cf. Legazpi, 1569: 61).

The real issue at stake is the following: Since 1595 merchants from Holland and Zeeland have sent ships for trading purposes to several islands of the Indies that are not dependent upon Portugal. Now when the crews of these ships as well as the natives that were friendly to them had suffered great losses of lives and possessions due to the mischief of the Portuguese and their henchmen—unreliable and violent people who did not shrink from openly attacking the Dutch with force of arms—only then did the Dutch at long last fit themselves out to take revenge. After several hostilities from both sides Jakob van Heemskerck received command over an Amsterdam fleet of eight sails and with it he forced into submission on February 25th 1603 in the Strait of Singapore (that is, one of the two straits that separate Sumatra and Malacca) a Portuguese vessel, a so-called caracca, named Catarina and loaded with merchandise. merchandise. He released the crew and carried off the ship as a prize. Others have performe such exploits before and afterwards, yet because this feat of arms has caused the greatest stir, have decided to emphasize it in my enquiry so that one can easily judge the other events on basis of it.