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re-edited for the Hakluyt Society by Mr. Edward Grey
and rumours of wars, but the commercial activities of
in 1891. Printed sources in Portuguese for the years
the Portuguese in the Persian Gulf during the period
1625-1635 are singularly few and far between, being under review, are adequately dealt with by Antonio
practically limited to a few paragraphs in the third 1 /
Bocarro, the official Chronicler of Portuguese India
volume of Faria y Sousa’s not too trustworthy Asia
from 1631-1643, a contemporary copy of whose i
Portuguesa (Lisbon, 1675) and some incidental notices 1 monumental Livro do Estado da India Oriental is to be
in rare missionary tracts, such as the Carta do Padre H found in the Sloane Library at the British Museum.
Vigairo da ordem de St. Agostinho etc. (Lisboa, 1628).
In this exhaustive review of the geographical, political •
An exception is formed by the narratives of the three and economic situation of the Portuguese possessions
hard fought battles in the Persian Gulf, between an 1
I . in Asia, which was completed at Goa in 1635, Bocarro
Anglo-Dutch squadron and a Portuguese armada under gives a detailed’ description of the Portuguese settle ;
Nuno Alvarez Botelho, in February, 1625 ; these fights ments and agencies at Muscat, Kung, Basra and all.
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produced quite a spate of pamphlet literature on the
other places frequented by the Lusitanians in the Gulf.
subject in Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch and English, one
Some of these (e.g., those on. Ormuz and Basra) were
of the latter tracts being edited by John Taylor, the
reproduced by W. de Gray Birch in the Hakluyt -
Water-Poet. Later and partly traditional accounts of
Society edition of the Commentaries of Affonso de
the Ormuz operations, such as those given by Father Albuquerque (London, 1880). The maps and plans fi :
Queiroz in his Historic da vida do verieranel irmdo Pedro
of the various fortresses which accompany the
de BastOy (Lisboa, 1689), are worth only a passing descriptions, are also of considerable interest, although
mention. i their artistic value is small.1
The amount of relevant material to be found in
Portuguese archives is disappointingly small, most of i I 1 Antonio Bocarro was born at Abrantcs in 1594, hi* brother being the
the contemporary documents and reports having celebrated physician and writer, Manoel Bocarro Francez. The family was
of Israelite origin, and Antonio Bocarro, after sailing to India in 1622, first
perished in the great fire which destroyed the building i settled in the Jewish community at Cochim. In 1624 he was a prisoner of
in which they were housed, the Casa da Indiay after the the Inquisition at Goa, but was appointed the official historian by the Conde
de Linhares (well-known as a protector of the Chris taos-novos) in 16^1.
disastrous Lisbon earthquake of 1755; whilst the white Mr. de Gray Birch and several other English writers err in ascribing
ant has been responsible for the destruction of many Bocarro’s magnum opus to Pedro Barreto de Rezende, private secretary of
the Conde de Linhares who was Viceroy of India from 1629-1635. Rezende
old documents in the Goa archives. The scarcity of did in fact co-operate in the work, but he explicitly state* in the prologue
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that he was responsible only for the actual plans of the fortresses, the whole
material in Portugal, is however compensated for to 1 of the text having been drawn up by Antonio Bocarro. The British Museum
some extent, (at least as concerns the Ormuz operations) copy, which is a later one of about 1646, includes some interesting
by a large number of contemporary Portuguese letters hydrographic charts of Asiatic waters from the pen of Pierre Berthelot, a
Norman who first came to the Indies as pilot of a French ship in 1619. In
and reports preserved amongst the Egerton manuscripts later years he rose to be Pilot and Cosmographer-major of India m the .
in the British Museum. These have not been consulted Portuguese service, and after becoming a Carmelite monk was martyred in
Achin in 1638. Contemporary copies of Antonio Bocarro’* work exist in
by historians up till now, and should not be neglected i Evora and Paris: whilst others are mentioned by the Portuguese bibliographer.
by any future writer on the subject.. Barbosa Machado, in Vol. I of his Bibliotheca Lusitana. Bocarro’s original
preface is dated Goa, 17th February, 1635 and Pedro Barreto de Rezende’s
All or most of the foregoing sources deal with wars ft copy in The British Museum, Anno de 1646.
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