Canela, the Portuguese, and 'The Portuguese Encounter'

This article is a reply to Janaka Perera's "call for justice after 500 years"

by J.B. Muller

The lure of canela or cinnamon and cardamom, cloves, nutmeg and mace and all the fabulous riches of the medieval Orient brought the Portuguese to the coast of Malabar at the tail end of the 15th century and to the shores of the island of Sri Lanka in the first few years of the 16th.

Every unbiased authority on the Colonial Period of modern history agrees that the impetus was primarily trade and profit. A secondary object was the conversion of people to Catholicism-a highly organized form of European mainstream Christianity that did not tolerate or countenance any other form of belief, religious or otherwise.

The two European nations in the leading position in maritime exploration 500 year's ago were from the Iberian Peninsula-Spain and Portugal-which marshalled the resources to undertake what, in today's context, amounted to space exploration to, for example, Mars, because they set out to sail beyond the then known horizon, upon perilous seas, in uncharted waters and basically, to unknown destinations full of people, places, and things unfamiliar to their experience up to that time.

Just go back in time, to that time, if it is possible for you to journey in your imagination and consider the great unknown that lies before you as the voyager-and you'll get butterflies in your stomach and marshmallows in your knees!

Sometime in either 1517 or 1518 the Portuguese from Goa came to Colombo to seriously begin trading in cinnamon, other spices, and other things that this island had to offer by way of trade. And trade they did to the discomfiture of their hated rivals, the Muslim Arabs and South Indian Moors who had been controlling and virtually monopolizing the trade up to that time.

The trade in cinnamon, other spices, gemstones, sandalwood, gold, silver, porcelain, silks, and other commodities was not a recent phenomenon as some would imagine but something that had been going on in the ancient world for millennia.

This island and its ports from Kayts to Mantota to Kolon Tota to Galle to Hambantota (Sampantota) to Sammanturai (Sampanturai) to Trincomalee were famous to both the seafaring Chinese as well as to the Arabs and the sailors of Hiram and Solomon who visited the fabled port of Tarshish once in three years, taking advantage of the monsoon winds of the Indian Ocean to come and go.

The Portuguese were the most recent and the first Europeans to be followed by the Dutch and the British (and, of course the French and the Danish), who all came to trade and stayed to build empires. With a tremendous deal of white-hot heat being generated about the 500th anniversary of the first colonialist European arrival on these shores and vehemently vituperative statements in the media, on the Internet and at an international conference to study the impact from the perspective of the 'colonized' it seems that we also need to shed some light on the matter.

As a matter of fact, we need a lot of light to expose the faulty logic, the bias and prejudice, and the extremely subjective views that have so far been expressed. The private 'political' agendas of the several participants and their backgrounds must also be exposed in order to get the correct and a balanced perspective on the arrival of the first colonial power.

To begin, the Europeans who ventured upon uncharted seas possessed superior technology in order to begin their odyssey of worldwide exploration at the end of the 15th century. That technology also extended to and included the art of waging war and the weapons to do so that had been developed up to that time. Indeed, comparative advantage was on the side of the Europeans.

They entered the Indian Ocean to trade and monopolize that trade, wresting control of it from the Arabs and Moors who had monopolized it up to that time. Their object was not to create a sea borne empire, as that was a different game altogether.

Besides the motivation to trade in rare and expensive spices and other goods, the imperial or royal patrons wanted to ingratiate themselves with their spiritual head, the Pope who led the Roman Catholic Church that claimed suzerainty over all temporal monarchs with the implied title of 'Lord of Lords, and King of Kings.'

It should be clearly understood that the mindset of the medieval ruling classes was that they had a divine right to rule and that included the single strong belief that their religion [or mainstream denomination] was the only true system of belief that could be permitted their subjects to the exclusion of all others. They had no knowledge of Buddhism, Hinduism or other eastern religions except for Islam as the Arab and Muslim rulers of the Iberian Peninsula had oppressed them for over 400 years.

Within the Christian confession in that era there existed only two dominant contenders for supremacy: The Roman Catholic Church based in Rome and the Greek Orthodox Church based in Constantinople.

Judaism was tolerated, barely, and Islam was hated along with small apostolic Christian groups, some of whom kept the Sabbath and others that did not believe in the Trinity who were labelled 'heretics' because they did not conform to the official creed of either the Catholics or of the Orthodox.

Buddhism with its atheistic teaching and Hinduism with its polytheistic practice were at once strange and utterly abhorrent to the basically monotheistic Catholic Portuguese and equally, if not stranger to well-schooled Buddhists learned in the Tripitaka or Hindus equally well-versed in the Vedic scriptures.

Thus, the true believers in these contending systems of belief were adversaries in opposite camps and where the dominant party was hostile to the others as it sincerely believed that Buddhists and Hindus were pagans or heathens, and diabolic to boot. With such an extremely bigoted and conservative mindset it would have been possible for them to kill Buddhists, Hindus and Muslims without a qualm of conscience and further believe that such killing was meritorious as it was ridding the land of human beings that were perceived to be evil and dangerous.

A writer has described an international conference held in Colombo recently as a 'scholarly' odyssey. However, the words that follow in a vituperative chain are anything but 'scholarly' and instantly reveal a total lack of academic objectivity, scholarly impartiality, or professional integrity.

It is sensationalism ad nauseum et ad absurdum as it proceeds to describe the Portuguese as "conquerors of Ceylon between 1505 and 1658" as this is also a barefaced and deliberate distortion of history.

It is true that Dom Lourenco de Almeida, with his fleet of three caravels was blown off course to these shores in either 1505 or 1506 and that he finally landed at the open roadstead of Kolon Tota (today's Colombo). Lourenco died in 1508 at Goa in India.

The next visit by an flotilla of 17 caravels came 12 year's later and was, basically, a trade mission to consolidate the tenuous (at best) commercial relations that had been inaugurated by Lourenco. It was not an invasion to conquer the Island.

That 'conquest' actually never occurred! The relationship and influence of the Portuguese grew over the next 80 years until Dharmapala, the Island's first and only Catholic monarch died bequeathing his kingdom to the King of Portugal! The kingdom of Sri Jayavardhanapura-Kotte was willed through and by a legal document to the Portuguese! They did not have to invade.

The Island or whatever part of it controlled by the Kotte kingdom, was handed over on a platter to the Portuguese, who, in any event, never had more than 400 Portuguese soldiers on the Island of whom, 200 were in Jaffna.

The 'scholarly' odyssey has also blithely ignored the most compelling reason for the folk inhabiting the coastal littoral to convert so readily to Catholicism: Caste, with all its degrading, debasing, demeaning, dehumanizing and humiliating connotations and implications.

All arguments about barbaric brutality and cruel coercion fail in the face of a solid residue of Catholics who make up over seven per cent of the Island's population today! That block of converts has remained more or less constant down the centuries disproving the canard that the Portuguese came with 'sword in one hand and the Bible in the other.' That, actually, is a gross and entirely erroneous misquotation parented by two sources:

One, history tells us that Isl m was spread through the sword as anyone who refused to accept Mohammed as the 'Seal of the Prophets,' 'Allah as the One God,' and the 'Holy Qu'ran' as the authentic divine utterance, was put to the sword. The slaughter in Asia, Africa, and Europe, was immense.

Two, it has been said that in Africa that the British came with 'sword in one hand and the Bible in the other' during the heyday of British imperial colonial expansion in the 19th. Century.

The Portuguese didn't have to do so. Their primary focus was on trade-gathering in the cinnamon and other spices. Conversion was a secondary objective left to the Roman Catholic clergy and not to other Portuguese officials or the illiterate soldiery who couldn't care less about who was a Catholic and who wasn't. These were quite satisfied with food, drink, sex, and sleep and they also had a wholly normal and healthy abhorrence for work!

In armed confrontations, barbarism is the rule rather than the exception. Wars in those days were not fought according to the Queensberry Rules or the Geneva Convention. Extreme brutality was the norm and how could we, 500 year's on, judge the protagonists by our rules of today? In all wars, people are hacked to death, children are bayoneted, women and girls ravished, and the injured and aged, simply bludgeoned to death. The idea is to terrify one's opponents and compel them to surrender.

The treatment of prisoners, too, was extremely brutal and we have explicit descriptions of Sinhala and Tamil brutality against the Portuguese, the Dutch, and the British and vice versa. That's war for you. Weren't the military extremely brutal in 1971 against the insurgents? That was repeated with even more brutality in 1987-89, again, against the insurgents in the South.

Isn't there brutality between the military and the terrorists, each side trading accusations of barbarism against each other? Aren't these Sinhalese Buddhists and Tamil Hindus who both subscribe to a belief in ahimsa or non-violence? And, all this is today, not 500 years ago! Certainly, the Portuguese and their native or Malay lascoreens did not hold a patent on either barbarism or brutality-that's an indelible part of human nature common to mankind.

It is quite apparent that the proceedings were anything but 'scholarly' or objective or in pursuit of the plain truth about the first era of colonialism in this country. Therefore, the organizers stated aim to claim compensation from Portugal for reparations, begs the question as warped logic based on the modern concept of 'crimes against humanity' will not and cannot sustain a claim for compensation. It would only make Sri Lanka an international joke and, perhaps, a pariah, because of the crass stupidity and profound ignorance of some 'scholars.'

If such a claim were to be acknowledged by Portugal or any other former colonial overlord, it would open a veritable Pandora's Box or claims and counter-claims as the whole world would go to court-the International Court of Justice at the Hague.

For one, the People's Republic of China, the several 'Stans' in Central Asia, Iran, Russia, Ukraine, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania and Austria could claim billion in reparations for the Mongol depredations under Genghis Khan and his fearsome successors-they took over 20 million lives in the most diabolic fashion in the 13th. Century.

African nations could make claims against Britain, France, Portugal, Brazil, the United States, Belgium, and the Netherlands for the slave trade that flourished for about 300 years. Indeed, atrocities have been committed by most nations-the stronger against the weaker, since the beginning of recorded history.

Within Sri Lanka itself one does not have to look far: The plantation Tamils [of recent Indian origin] have worked on tea and rubber estates for over a century in near slave-labour conditions and have been treated as sub-human beings or worse and some are still treated that way even as this is written. Have any of these 'scholars' and 'eminent' academicians looked at the plight of these people or for that matter, at the Rodi at Kanatholluwa and Waduressa, the Kinnara, the Ahikuntaka, or the Veddhas? Or of the people who live around the Kunugoda down Bloemendhal Road?

Why are these bleeding hearts moaning and whining about the 'atrocities' committed by the Portuguese 500 years ago? What about the cruelties of the Dutch? And the genocide committed by the British to suppress the Kandyan Uprising, 1818-22 as detailed by the late Dr. Vimalananda Tennakoon?

Colonialism was cruel, inhuman, degrading, enslaving and everything else but it is long gone and we are a free nation today-57 year's free-and practice the same inhumanity amongst ourselves. Just go, not far and look at the shanty town sprawl in Colombo North.

If we were to adopt the logic of the 'Portuguese Encounter' group, the whole world would be at the International Court of Justice at The Hague, filing suit against each other for the depredations committed since men kept historical records.

My dear countrymen and fellow-citizens: They came for canela, for cinnamon; so did the others that followed in their wake. They have all gone now as others have come and gone doing both ill and good and leaving their legacies, and genetic footprints, behind. So it has been since time immemorial and so will it be as we pass from one era into another.