India Run (1500-1640)

The Carreira da Índia, usually called in translation the India Run, was the name given to the fleet system responsible for the annual sailings that took place between Portugal and Asia by the way of the Cape Route during the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. Almost homonymous with the better-known Spanish Carrera de las Indias, it remained, however, a smaller-scale affair, at least in purely quantitative terms. Its fleets did not consist of huge convoys of merchant-ships guarded by armed escorts, as with the Carrera, but of much smaller groups of carracks, which, for the most part of the voyage, travelled without protection. Nevertheless, as the Portuguese Euro-Asian trade was based on high-value commodities of small bulk such as spices, the economic importance of the smaller fleets of the Carreira was still very significant. 1. After the well-known exploratory voyage of Vasco da Gama in 1497-1499, the Portuguese quickly set up a regular maritime connection with India. The basic patterns of the Carreira were established during the formative first decades of the 16th century. There was only one annual fleet (armada) to India, although the ships that formed it departed often in different dates and were at times divided in sub-fleets with different commanders (Capitães-Mor). This fleet would preferably leave Lisbon in March, but late departures in April and even May were frequent, no matter how criticized (ships departing outside this period were exceptional and its main function was to warn Portuguese India of important news). The problem with these late departures was that they put the ships at risk of reaching the Indian Ocean too late to take advantage of the Southwest monsoon, thereby forcing them to winter for months at Mozambique Island, the only regular stopover on the outward voyage. When things went well, however, the vessels tended to arrive around September, either at Goa or at the Kerala port of Cochin, both on the Western coast of India. In the 17th century, Portuguese Indiamen ceased to call at Cochin and, from that date onwards, the Carreira confined itself to the Lisbon-Goa and Goa-Lisbon routes. After a stay of a few months in the East, the fleet would start its way back, often with the ships putting to sea at separate dates, like it was the case in the outward voyage. The recommended months for starting the homeward voyage were December and January, but again late departures in February and even March were far from unusual. During the 16th century, the Atlantic island of Saint Helena was a regular stopover for returning Portuguese Indiamen, but they started to avoid it around 1600, when the English and the Dutch, newcomers to the Cape Route, begun to use it themselves. In the second half of 17th century, the Portuguese started to call regularly at Salvador, in Brazil, but for about half-a-century, their homeward voyage took place without the comfort of a regular stopover. This must have increased considerably the human sufferings of a journey that was already a month longer in average than the outward voyage. The arrival would usually be in the summer, putting an end to a voyage that, without any delays, lasted about a year-and-a-half, counting from the original date of departure from Lisbon. 2. Traditionally, the Carreira da Índia has enjoyed something of a bad reputation, owing mainly to the literary fame of the História Trágico-Marítima, a collection of impressive 16th century accounts of shipwrecks involving almost exclusively Portuguese Indiamen. It is true that its shipping losses, at least in the 16th and 17th centuries, were considerably higher than, for instance, those suffered by the Dutch East India Company, or V.O.C., on the Cape Route. As there has been little research on the subject, the reasons for this difference remain unclear. It is worth noting, however, that the majority of the shipwrecks of the Portuguese Indiamen took place nearer or on the Southern and Eastern Africa coast, mainly in the dangerous regions of Natal and of the Mozambique Channel. These were areas which Dutch ships usually did not need to pass, as most of them sailed to and from Batavia, in Java. That might have been one of the causes behind the bad record of the Carreira when compared to the one of the V.O.C. But we must also bear in mind that in the 17th century Dutch ships repeatedly proved themselves militarily superior to the Portuguese, which makes it seem reasonable to assume that they should also be safer and less prone to shipwreck. On this subject of shipping losses, some other intriguing facts and figures still await to be properly explained. For instance, the fact that while the losses remained high for most of the time, its general pattern went through some important changes, as pointed out by Paulo Guinote, Eduardo Frutuoso and António Lopes: in the first half of the 16th century, most of the ships were lost on the outward voyage, by a large margin, but during the second half the reverse happened; in the first half of the 17th century, on the other hand, things were more equal, with both parts of the voyage contributing with an approximate share of the total. It has been suggested that the high number of losses on the homeward voyage in the second half of the 16th century might have been a consequence of recurrent problems of overloading in the period,. Also worthy of note are the exceptionally low losses of the 1560's and the 1570's decades: the causes behind this brief drop are obscure, but it does seem to have lasted too long to be seen as accidental, suggesting that there was nothing inevitable about the usual high rate of shipwrecks of the Carreira. 3. By the 1630's, the Carreira had been reduced to a relatively marginal affair, and the movement of its ships dwindled to a trickle. The chronology and motives for this decline have been subjects of debate. Traditionally, it was believed to have been caused mainly, on the one hand, by the outbreak of first English and later Dutch privateering, and, on the other, by the onset of English and Dutch competition on the Cape Route. But at least the onset of the competition problem, which took place around 1600, was preceded by a serious crisis of the Carreira that was actually instrumental in bringing it about: the 1590's decade saw a considerable drop in the number of Portuguese ships returning from Asia and the resultant shortage of spices in the European market was a strong incentive for Dutch and English merchants to try their luck in the Cape Route. It is true that Portuguese Indiamen had been suffering the effects of the privateering wave unleashed by the onset of the Anglo-Spanish War of 1585-1604, but the English privateers account only for a small part of the high losses of the 1590's, a period which deserves to be studied further. Paradoxically, the Carreira seems to have managed to recuperate at least partially from the crisis in the 1600's and the 1610's, despite having then to face the competition of the Dutch and English East India Companies. A period of gradually increasing difficulties followed, in the 1620's, after which came what seems to have been the rather brisk decline of the 1630's, apparently motivated by the combined effect of the spectacular failure of the Portuguese East India Company of 1628-1633 (a disastrous attempt to replicate the Dutch and English examples by entrusting a Portuguese company with the running of the Carreira), the onset of the Luso-Dutch Brazilian wars in 1630 (which meant that the Crown, pressed to defend Brazil, had less means to spend on the Carreira and on the Portuguese Asiatic positions in general) and the series of Dutch blockades of Goa that started in 1636 and lasted until 1644. These blockades can be said to be the last significant attacks suffered by the Carreira during the Iberian Union period (1580-1640), in which Portugal was temporarily joined to Spain. The first series of attacks had taken place during the already mentioned Anglo-Spanish War of 1585-1604, during the course of which English privateers managed to capture seven Portuguese Indiamen, some near the Portuguese coast, some in the Azores archipelago. In more distant waters, however, the carracks of the Carreira continued to be safe from human threats until the Cape Route ceased to be sailed exclusively by Portuguese ships. When that started to happen around 1600 the privateering activities of the English and, specially, the Dutch East India Company were a threat, and Saint Helena, Mozambique Island and the vicinities of Goa proved to be at times particularly dangerous places for the Portuguese Indiamen. Nevertheless, it has been pointed out by Ernst van Veen that the blockades of 1636-1644 were the first sustained effort against the Carreira by any of the companies, and after the end of the war with England in 1604 the losses of Indiamen to the Dutch and the English were actually few and sporadic. The economical effects of the real or perceived menace of privateering attacks on the Carreira need, however, to be properly studied in order to measure with more certitude the impact of the Dutch and English privateering activities in the history of Portuguese.navigation between Europe and Asia.

Bibliography:
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Author: André Murteira