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Updated: June 26, 2025
Then, when Columbus declared he had sailed west and not south, that Spain herself had warned him to keep clear of Portugal's possessions, and that the lands he had discovered were merely Atlantic islands, they all insisted that "the Indies were the Indies, and belonged by papal authority to Portugal!"
The commander of a Portuguese man-of-war anchored near assumed a bullying attitude and ordered Columbus to come aboard the warship and explain why he had dared to cruise among Portugal's possessions. Columbus, more tactful than usual, replied that, being now an Admiral of Spain, it was his duty to remain on his vessel.
Macao's claim to renown rests chiefly upon the fact that Portugal's greatest bard, Camoens, there wrote in part or its entirety the immortal "Lusiad," which in epic form details the prowess of the sons of ancient Lusitania in Eastern discovery and oversea feats of daring, and in which work the voyages and discoveries of Vasco da Gama are recorded with the fidelity of a history prepared by a sympathetic admirer.
She was bound from Flanders to Lisbon with a freight extraordinary rich as I know after a fashion by my own eyesight, as well as from the inventory drawn up by Master Francis Porson, an Englishman, travelling on board of her as the King of Portugal's factor. I have a copy of it by me as I write, and here are some of Master Porson's items:
They began their fight for freedom from Spain in 1579; in 1595, as a war measure against Spain, who at that time was dominating Portugal, they made their first voyage to Guinea. By 1621 they had captured Portugal's various slave forts on the west coast and they proceeded to open sixteen forts along the coast of the Gulf of Guinea.
It is the chef-d'oeuvre of the Manoelino style, and although a foreigner may be inclined at first, from its very strangeness, to call it Eastern, it is really only a true development in the hands of a real artist of what Manoelino was; an expression of Portugal's riches and power, and of the gradual assimilation of such Moors as still remained on this side the Straits.
The people of those parts have little to do now-a-days, and must have had still less during the Pontificate of His Holiness Pope Clement XIV.; and we can imagine how all the windows of the unplastered houses, all the black and oozy doorways, must have been lined with heads of women and children; how the principal square of each town, where the horses were changed, must have been crowded with inquisitive townsfolk and peasants, whispering, as they hung about the carriages, that the great traveller was the young Queen of England going to meet her bridegroom; a thing to be remembered in such world-forgotten places as these, and which must have furnished the subject of conversation for months and years, till that Queen of England and her bridegroom had become part and parcel of the tales of the "Three Golden Oranges," of the "King of Portugal's Cowherd," of the "Wonderful Little Blue Bird," and such-like stories in the minds of the children of those Apennine cities.
The merits of direct and indirect taxation, even of the Henry George program for raising the public wind, have never been seriously considered by Portugal's administrators in the East, nor has municipal ownership of utilities been discussed, you discover.
A small nation raising itself in a short time to the power of a great empire, reaching a height which to gain was incredible, to keep impossible, and at the first relaxation of effort suddenly falling with a disastrous crash, that is the drama of Portugal's greatness. There was no gradual rise or decline: it mounted and fell.
Then he went down the coast, passed Cape Roxo, and afterwards sailed up the Rio Grande, but, from want of any knowledge of the language of the people, was unable to prosecute his explorations among them. Some time between 1460 and 1464, an expedition went out under Pedro de Cintra, one of the King of Portugal's gentlemen, to make further discoveries along the African coast.
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