Chapter III - THE PORTUGUESE PERIOD.

When Portugal rose to fame and suddenly founded an Eastern empire, destined suddenly to decline, she began a new chapter in the history of East and West and prepared the way for Dutch and British colonial development. During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, she took her flag, the Cross of Christ, into almost every sea, the main incentives of these voyages of discovery being missionary enterprise and a desire to tap some of the rich trade of the Orient. In 1488 Bartolomeu Dias doubled the Cape, in 1498 Vasco da Gama landed at Calicut, the pioneer of the sea route to India. By the capture of Goa the great Governor Affonso d' Albuquerque secured not only a splendid fortress and harbour but an ideal centre for administering his country's new possessions. And in 1511 he sailed from Cochin and wrested Malacca from the hands of the bewildered Malays.

Lacking until 1580 the men to found a land empire Portugal had at first to be content with trading stations of small area, whose safety depended on her fleets, so that all she could hope to establish in the Malay Peninsula was a fortified port of call where ships trading from India to China and the Spice Islands could water and provision and store merchandise. Even after 1580 when Spain, had she not been absorbed in other interests, might have helped her new dependency with men, the only garrisons maintained by Portugal in the whole of the Malayan region were Malacca, Amboyna and Tidore, a poor protection for a trade then at its zenith among Asiatics whom Portugal regarded as enemies at once of herself and of Christ and who detested Portuguese bigotry. Though the loss in a foray of twelve men from the garrison was a disaster of the first magnitude, yet for one hundred and thirty years after its capture by d'Albuquerque, Malacca remained the greatest Portuguese trading centre in Malayan seas. Writing just before 1638, a few years before the Dutch wrested it from the Portuguese, Barretto de Resende describes it as " a city containing a fortress and surrounded by a stone and mortar wall twenty feet high, twelve palms thick at the foot and seven at the top. It contains six bastions, including the breastwork (couraca), each one called by the name engraved on it. All the walls have parapets and each bastion occupies a space of twenty paces and the one named Madre de Deos double that space. The circumference of the whole wall is five hundred and twelve paces, including the space occupied by the bastions. From the bastion de Ospital to that of St. Dominic there is a counterscarp, as also from that of Sanctiago to Madre de Deos, with a ditch in the centre, the whole being fourteen palms wide. The bastions contain forty-one pieces of artillery of twelve to forty-four pounds iron shot. All are of bronze, with the exception of nine iron pieces,

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Page 14 A History of Perak.

and there are sufficient powder and ammunition in His Majesty's magazines for their supply……. The fort within the town where the Captain resides is five storeys high: the Captain lives on the second storey, which is square like the tower, each wall being twenty paces wide. The other apartments are set apart for the Captain's guests and for storing ammunition. On the first floor four thousand candys of rice were stored but are no longer there... . There are in the town," beside the garrison, " two hundred and fifty married whites who would possess two thousand black captives of different races, all competent to carry arms of which there is a sufficient supply." d'Eredia notes that " after the fortress had been finished and stood complete with its artillery and garrison of soldiers, it created among the Malayos a feeling of intense dread and astonishment which lasted permanently to the great credit of the Crown of Portugal." It was from this small fastness that the Portuguese organized their trade with the Malay Peninsula and Archipelago. And by Portugal, as afterwards by the Dutch and the English, the Malay state of Perak was found to be a great mart for tin.

In 1511 Perak connoted the dying kingdom of Bruas and was hardly more than a fief of the Bendaharas or Prime Ministers of Malacca. Twenty years later, ousted from the throne of Johor by his step-mother, a lady of the same Bendahara family, Sultan Muzaffar Shah, eldest son of the last ruler of Malacca but by a Kelantan mother, sailed north and founded the modern Perak dynasty. Of the relations of his newly founded state with Portugal little at present is known, whatever may await discovery in the archives of Goa; and what is known can be told in a few pages.

In 1537 the king of Acheh had dared to attack Malacca, and in 1547 the rulers of Perak and Pahang with their "brother" Sultan 'Ala'u'd-din of Johor assembled 300 sail and 8,000 men in the Johor river for an attack on Patani and, when negotiations had settled the dispute, Johor took its fleet to Malacca to help Portugal fight the Achinese: the fleet lay in the Muar river far several days that seemed to the Portuguese years but whether the Perak contingent formed part of this formidable flotilla is not stated. In 1551 Perak and Pahang must have helped Johor at a siege of Malacca, which lasted from June till September, because it was by harrying the ports of Perak, Pahang and Johor that the Portuguese compelled the Malays to raise the siege.

Writing between 1597 and 1600 the Portuguese historian Godinho de Eredia alludes to Perak's wealth in tin as follows:— " Perat is much frequented and is the principal port for the trade in tin or calayn in large slabs. ... Here have been discovered, in the ranges of mountains within its jurisdiction, such large mines of tin or calayn, that every year more than three hundred bares of tin are extracted to supply the factory of the Captain of Malacca and the trade of the merchants from India."

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In 1610 Mr. Samuel Bradshaw, merchant of the East India Company, reported that " at Queda and Pera is great store of tin and lead to be had: who usually truck it for cloth of Surat or other places." But the Indian merchants were in difficulties between Portuguese and Achinese monopolies. In 1613 Thomas Best met in Acheh a " Moor " ship which had fled from Perak " scared by the Portingals who before had taken two of their ships there " : on arrival at Acheh ship and goods were confiscated and the crew enslaved " for going to Peracke being the enemies of the King of Achin."

After Nuno Alvarez Botello, Governor of Malacca, had repulsed at the end of 1629 a vigorous Achinese attack on that port, an embassy arrived from the King of Perak, who had been tributary to Acheh, offering to pay tribute in future to Portugal and to deliver up wealth left in Perak by the Achinese. Botello sent Dom Hierome de Silveyra with eleven ships to receive this treasure and to establish peace with Perak.

Barretto de Resende, writing as has been said just before 1638, describes how every May a fleet of three, four or five jaleas carrying fifty or sixty soldiers from the Malacca garrison, would cruise past the Perak coast to Penang to await and escort the ships from Goa, and how every September they would go to Junk Ceylon to await the Portuguese ships from Negapatam. " The sailors, who receive their pay on shore at rare intervals, embark with much good-will, because at times, when they put in at a certain place such as Pera and other ports, they can earn a quartel from the merchants." When in 1647 Governor-General van Lijn sought permission from Acheh for the Dutch to trade with Perak " as the Portuguese had done in the time of Mahkota 'Alam," the Queen replied that it was only by stealth and bribery that the Portuguese had traded with Acheh's vassal, and, had her redoubtable ancestor discovered their doings, he would have attacked them. This must have been bragging; for de Resende evidently refers to merchants at a Portuguese factory and fortress in Perak. He continues:—

" From Malacca to Pera is a distance of forty leagues of coast to the east. The King of this place was for many years a vassal of His Majesty and paid in tribute a large quantity of tin. Three years ago he refused the tribute, saying that only if His Majesty would deliver him from the King of Achem (== Acheh) he would be His Majesty's vassal and pay tribute. He said that the numerous fleets from Achem which throng these seas, frequently attacked his lands, devastating them and taking the people captive. He well knew, he said, how much more important it was to be His Majesty's vassal than to be vassal of the King of Achem. He said that he had no power however to resist the tyrant and his great forces, and that if His Majesty did not supply the means, he himself must seek a remedy in his own kingdom by becoming a vassal of the

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King of Achem and paying to him the tribute he formerly paid to His Majesty. In spite of this he was able to resist our fleet when it was sent to chastise him.

" There are great tin mines in his kingdom and five or six quintals of tin are yearly extracted from them. The greater part of it formerly came to Malacca, but now not a third part is sent there. The rest is taken by the Dutch to Achem, and thence they carry it to India with great profit.

" The factory possessed by the Captain of Malacca at Pera was one which at one time yielded greater profit than any other. But now it yields nothing, and for this and other reasons the fortress has become so ruined that in the year 1633 no one could be found willing to fill the post of captain; and a captain was appointed and sent by the viceroy."

" No one could be found willing to fill the post of captain! " The strong hand of d'Albuquerque had gone. " At the time when the Dutch first appeared in the Far East, the power of Portugal was already on the decline. Jan Huygen van Linschoten, when visiting Goa (1583-1589), had found carelessness, incapacity, neglect of duty and corruption prevailing among the colonial officials who owed their appointments chiefly to high rank, nepotism and influence rather than to their own merits. Linschoten thought it a miracle that their ships did not all perish through want of care in stowage and navigation. Their losses on this account were enormous." In Malacca, at first, trade had been the monopoly of the government, whose costly establishments could not be defrayed merely by taxes and tolls and port dues levied on imports and exports and even on ships that did not break cargo. But the Portuguese government failed, as Dutch and English failed later, to keep its monopoly intact, and it had to allow private trade on payment of high duties. So came many permanent settlers, who as Governor-General Anthony van Diemen reported to his Directors in 1642, " thought no more of Portugal but sustained and enriched themselves as if they were natives and had no fatherland." Coen put the capital invested in the East by Spain and Portugal at 50 million guilders but as early as October 1606 when Admiral Matelief won command of the sea, the days of Portuguese empire were already numbered. In 1637 a fleet under Cornells Symonsz van der Veer captured one fusta, burnt three and blockaded five in the Dinding river, taking prisoner Admiral Don Francisco Cotinho de Viveres, a priest, nine Portuguese and a hundred others. As late as 1638, de Resende tells us, the fort on the Ilha das Naos off Malacca was not finished, twelve big pieces of artillery destined for it lay unmounted in a field and the fort where the Captain lived no longer had its store of rice. On 14 January 1641, after a siege that had lasted five months, the famous fortress fell before the final assault of six hundred and fifty Netherlander aided by the Malays of Johor.

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For a little while some of the Malay States continued relations with the " white Bengalis," the first Europeans they had ever encountered. The Dagh-Register, that wonderful daily journal of the doings of the servants of the Netherlands East India Company, records how in March 1642 the king of Kedah was still refusing trade in tin and elephants to Coromandel ships that had not got Portuguese passes and how as late as 1665 the Dutch had to prevent Portuguese vessels from entering Johore to trade in tin and gold and Sumatra pepper. But in effect the capture of Malacca closed the Portuguese chapter in Malayan history for ever.