Page:History of India Vol 6.djvu/217

CHARACTER OF THE PORTUGUESE IN INDIA 165 shipped off from Lisbon with the dowry of an appoint- ment in India for the man who would marry them. One favoured damsel carried in her trunk the governor- ship of Cranganore. The multiplication of offices was pushed to an extent which would have been ludicrous, if it had not proved fatal, in Portuguese India. But even nominal posts could not be invented to keep pace with the demand. Each of the four outward ships of a single year " brought sixty persons, more or less, without pay." The ravenous hordes thus let loose on India made the race-name of Christian (Firingi) 1 a word of terror until the strong rule of the Moghul empire turned it into one of contempt. Their buccaneering in the narrow seas, their pirate nests on the Bay of Bengal, their plunder of the coast and island princes, lie beyond the scope of this sketch, which merely attempts to indi- cate the policy, without narrating the transactions, of the Portuguese in the East. Wherever they went they snatched at riches; and even in remote China, in the presence of a power which might have crushed them like nutshells, they could not abstain from pillage. In 1527 Diogo Calvo reported that " no land is so rich 1 Firing! represents, through Arabic and Persian, the "Francos, quo nomine omnes passim Christian! . . . dicuntur." Jarric, Thesaurus, iii. 217. " The Por- tugals which they call by the name of Fringes." W. Burton in Hakluyt, v. 32. Nom qu'ils donnerent aux Portugais, lorsque ceux-ci aborderent dans leur pays, et c'est un terme qui marque le souverain me"pris qu'ils ont pour toutes les nations de 1'Europe." Sonnerat, i. 58 (1782). In India it is a positive affront to call an Englishman a Feringhee." Elphinstone, quoted in Sir T. E. Colebrooke's Life of the Honourable Mountstuart Elphinstone, ii. 207 (1884). See, for a fuller history of the word, Yule and Burnell's Hobson-Jobson, pp. 352 - 354 (1903).