The Portuguese In India: Being A History of the Rise and Decline of Their Eastern Empire (Set of 2 Volumes)

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The Portuguese territories in India now consist of Goa, Daman and Diu. The settlement of Goa is due to fine harbor, from by the promontories of Bardes and Salsette. Goa is considered an integral part of Portuguese Empire and with Daman and Diu for administrative purposes. At the time when Portuguese first reach India, the Indo-European commerce was entirely in the hands of Arabs About the time that the Portuguese arrived in India, the Empire of Brahmani Musalman became dismembered into five separate Kingdurn. The political position of Portugal, engrossed as it was by its wars with Spain, rendered the thought of an application for an expensive feet of discovery worse than useless.

Frederic Charles Danvers (1833-1906), often Frederick, was a British civil servant and writer on engineering. The Superintendent of the India Office Records between 1884 and 1898, he was also a historian and wrote works on India. Danvers published History of the Portuguese in India (2 vols. 1894), an ambitious work. Sydney Ernest Fryer wrote in the Dictionary of National Biography that it "was marred by want of perspective and incomplete reference to authorities.

THE movements of trade from the East to the West must have been coeval with the migrations in that direction of the earliest ancestors of our race. In process of time, and as the more distant westward parts of the extensive continent of the Eastern Hemisphere were reached, this commerce developed into the great and important Indo-European trade of the present day.

Chaldæa undoubtedly owed its wealth and influence to the trade from the East which passed through that country, and, according to certain Chinese historians, as interpreted by Pauthier, there was a direct personal communication by the Chaldaeans with China so early as the 24th century B.C. This communication was, no doubt, entirely by land, as were also the principal trade routes in much later times. The legend of the arrival of the fish-god "Ea-Han," or "Oannes," in Chaldæa, probably refers to the first advent to that country of trading people from the East by sea and the Persian Gulf.

The position of Chaldæa rendered that country peculiarly favourable to commerce. Situated at the head of the Persian Gulf, and intersected by the rivers Tigris and Euphrates, it was admirably adapted for easy commercial intercourse with Persia, India, and Ceylon on the one hand, and with Arabia Felix, Asia Minor, Palestine, Ethiopia, and Egypt on the other. In his migration from Ur of the Chaldees, Abraham undoubtedly followed a well-established trade route. Haran was at this time a great centre of trade, lying, as it did, immediately in the high-way between Arrapachitis and Canaan, at a point where that highway was crossed by the great western road connecting Media, Assyria, and Babylonia with the Cilician coast. Babylon and Nineveh both owed their greatness principally to the fact of their being entrepôts of trade passing from the East to the West.

At the dawn of history the Indo-European trade was carried on by the Arabians and Phœnicians; the former in the Red Sea, Persian Gulf, and Indian Ocean, and the latter in the Mediterranean. Between the Red Sea and Persian Gulf routes, there existed a continual rivalry, and on the Red Sea there was also a sharp competition for the trade between the Gulf of Akaba and the Gulf of Suez.

Whilst the Arabs, in a great measure, maintained their por-tion of the trade until the discovery of the route to India by the Cape of Good Hope, the Phœnicians and their Colonies were forced to succumb to the rivalry of Assyria, Greece, and Rome. The principal trading stations of the Phœnicians were Tyre and Sidon, from which ports their commerce was distributed along the coasts of the Medi-terranean. The distance from the Arabian Gulf to Tyre was, however, so considerable, and the conveyance of goods thither by land carriage so tedious and expensive, that the Phœnicians at a later date took possession of Rhinokoloura (El Arish), the nearest port in the Mediterranean to the Arabian Gulf, to which place all the commodities brought from India by the Red Sea were conveyed overland, and were transported thence by an easy navigation to Tyre, and distributed throughout Europe. The wealth that the merchants of Tyre enjoyed by reason of this trade incited the Israelites to embark on a similar enterprise during the reigns of David and Solomon. By extending his possessions in the land of Edom, King David obtained possession of the harbours of Elath and Eziongeber on the Red Sea, whence, with the assistance of Hiram, King of Tyre, King Solomon dispatched fleets which, under the guidance of Phoenician pilots, sailed to Tarshish and Ophir, securing thereby a control over the trade of the eastern coast of Africa, and, no doubt, a not inconsiderable portion of the maritime trade with India brought to the Red Sea by Arab vessels. By the establishment of "Tadmor in the Wilder-ness," Solomon was also enabled to command a not inconsiderable portion of the Eastern trade that found its way up the Euphrates river from the Persian Gulf, as it passed towards the shores of the Mediterranean Sea.

In course of time, Tyre sent out colonists who established themselves on the southern coasts of the Mediterranean, and founded the city of Carthage, which soon rose to con-siderable importance as a great trading mart; and, when the glory of Tyre began to decline, Carthage was in the zenith of her commercial prosperity and greatness. Byzantium, a Greek settlement, happily situated at the terminus of the great caravan system, by which it was placed in communication with the Ganges and with China, at an early date also became an entrepôt for the commerce of the known world.