No. 59. — 1907.] Portuguese in ceylon. 



307 



Chanoca* and Nuno Vaz Pereiraf were amongst the captains 

 appears certain, however. J 



That Dom Francisco should have supposed that at the end 

 of the south-west monsoon sailing vessels from the Malabar 

 coast could make the Maldives displays a strange ignorance 

 on his part of the navigation of the Indian Ocean ;§ and it is 

 stranger still that no one at Cochin seems to have warned him 



in a good ship captained by Lopo Cabral, and Manuel Telles in another, 

 Goncalo de Paiva and Pero Rafael in caravels, Andre da Silveira in a 

 galley, and Andre Galo in a newly made brigantine, and that these 

 vessels carried some three hundred men. Unfortunate y, as Theal says 

 \Beg of S. A. History 156), Correa was, " with respect to events previous 

 to the government of Affonso d'Alboquerque," "a novelist rather than 

 a historian," and " neither his statements nor his dates are to be relied 

 upon." 



* This man, as we have seen, was one of the captains of caravels in 

 the fleet of Dom Lourenco de Almeida in 1505. He and Nuno Vaz 

 Pereira are referred to several times by Gaspar Pereira in his letter of 

 December 1505-January 1506, as being sent on expeditions along the 

 coast. It will be seen from B 2 that his temper cost him his command. 



f As mentioned above, when Joao Homem was deprived of his com- 

 mand, his caravel, the S. Jorge, was given to this man, whom Cast, 

 describes as " a valiant knight, and judicious." We shall hear more of 

 him later (see p. 313). 



% My reasons for supposing this are as follows : — (1) Cast, mentions 

 them as accompanying Dom Lourenco on his expedition ; (2) Bar. 

 mentions Nuno Vaz as one of the captains who accompanied Dom 

 Lourenco ; (3) the sequence of the paragraphs in the viceroy's letter of 

 27 December 1506 (see B 2) seems to imply that it was on his return 

 from Ceylon that Lopo Chanoca was deprived of the command of his 

 caravel, and that he was sent back to Ceylon in the ship Santo 

 Espirito ; (4) from the extracts C 3, C 4, C 5, it will be seen that in 

 September 1508 Nuno Vaz Pereira was sent by the viceroy in this 

 same ship to Ceylon to get the tribute cinnamon. 



§ Lieut. Brown says (Handbook to the Ports on the Coast of India 115): 

 — " The foreign traders from Chittagong, Malabar, Maskat, and else- 

 where, generally arrive and leave between January and May. The 

 boats for Calcutta and Chittagong, belonging to the islands, usually 

 leave in September, and return in December and January." Bell says 

 (Maldive Islands 102): — "The foreign traders call regularly, generally 

 arriving about March, and leaving with the south-west monsoon in 

 July or August. The part of the trade which is conducted by the 

 natives themselves is carried on chiefly with Calcutta, [Madras and 

 Ceylon] in boats of from 100 to 200 tons burthen, which leave for the 

 coast late in August or early in September, annually, having the 



