United States or Panama ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
To each of the pilots, in the presence of the King, Vasco da Gama gave fifty cruzadados to leave with their wives, with which the King was greatly pleased, and still more so when the Captain-Major judiciously presented him, in a handkerchief, with ten golden Portugueses.
Having appointed Digo Diaz to act as factor, and Pedro da Braga as clerk, to be assisted by Joao Nunez, Davane, and one of the pilots from Melinda, he sent on shore for the purpose of trading, a chest of unwrought branch coral, the same quantity of vermilion, a barrel of quicksilver, fifty pigs of copper, twenty strings of large cut coral, and as many of amber, five Portugueses of gold, fifty cruzados, and a hundred testoons in silver; as also a table with a green cloth, and a pair of wooden scales.
The Saint Antonio, for example, which is venerated in one church in Madrid, called La Florida, is much more popular than the Saint Antonio venerated in another, called the Church de los Portugueses. In Burgos there is a crucifix to which infinitely more solemn worship is paid than to one in any parish church, or even in any chapel of the same city.
In the latter year began the "sixty years' captivity," when Portugal became merely a Spanish province; yet there is no recollection of this except the ingrained hatred of Spaniards and of everything Spanish or of the shaking off the yoke in 1640, and of the battle of Amexial in 1663, where the English contingent bore the brunt of the battle, and the "Portugueses," as they are called by the author of An Account of the Court of Portugal, published in 1700, claimed the principal part of the honour.
He rewarded the Castilian for his services by giving him five Portugueses of gold and a piece of cloth and several red caps, and he signed a paper to the effect that he was a sincere friend to the Portuguese, a faithful Christian, and that all confidence might be placed in him.
Word Of The Day