INTRODUCTION

Summary

The author has chosen to make his arrival at Goa the dividing point of his two volumes. He might have closed the first with his escape from the Maldives, and thus comprised in the second the whole of his description of Portuguese India. While he was on the Malabar coast, at the pirate ports and at Calicut, he was within the sphere of Portuguese action and diplomacy, while at Cochin he was a Portuguese prisoner. But the scheme of division is nevertheless a reasonable one. At Chittagong and on the Malabar coast he was still at a distance from the centre of action, and not till he arrived at Goa was he able to take a comprehensive view of the first great European dominion in the East. Moreover, it was not till he arrived at the Portuguese capital, at which regular communication was maintained with Europe, that he began to take hope of once more returning to his native country.

The two volumes are composed on the same method. In the first the narrative proceeds down to the arrival of the author at the court of the Maldive king. It is then suspended while he gives a detailed view of the island kingdom in all its departments, and is not resumed until the arrival of the hostile fleet which conveyed him to India. The story of four-and-a-half years' residence is only to be gleaned from occasional personal references.