A foreign look at the “implicit ethnography” of the Portuguese in sixteenth-century Goa

Abstract

After working as a merchant in Seville and in Lisbon for a few years, the Dutchman, Jan Huygen van Linschoten (1563-1611), was named book-keeper and secretary to the newly appointed archbishop of Goa, the Dominican Vicente da Fonseca, in 1583. Upon his return to Europe almost a decade later, having lived in Goa for more than five years, Linschoten started publishing travel accounts and sailing instructions that met with extraordinary success. His foremost publication, the Itinerario, published in Dutch in 1596 by Cornelis Claesz (an advance copy being given one year earlier to the first Dutch fleet sailing to the East Indies), was promptly translated into English (1598) upon the counsel of Richard Hakluyt, who recommended the book to the British East India Company. Latin, German and French editions followed suit. Its wide circulation and invaluable navigational instruction turned it into one of the books that did the most to spread knowledge about the situation of the Portuguese State of India throughout Europe, having had direct impact on Dutch, British, French and Danish ventures into Asia. Being somewhere between a travel account and a compendium of Indian natural history, the Itinerario is also, however, a long meditation with moral overtones on Portuguese manners and attitudes toward Goans – the formers’ “implicit ethnography” – and about their failure in keeping a safe distance from the latter, what represents a negative evaluation of the very “colonial knowledge” system of the Portuguese.