Dutch blockades of Goa

During the long Portuguese-Dutch Wars of the 17th century the city of Goa, as capital of the Portuguese domains in Asia, was periodically subjected to annual naval blockades carried out by the Dutch East India Company, or V.O.C.. These blockades, however, cannot be said to have been frequent, if account is taken of the duration of the conflict, which dates back to the 16th century and formally lasted, with interruptions, until 1669. In this period, the only blockades there are to speak of took place in the years 1622-1623, 1636-1644 and 1656-1663, numbering a total of seventeen. It is true that in 1604, 1607 and 1608, three of the earliest fleets sent East by the V.O.C. temporarily blocked Goa's bar, but they only did so for a few weeks, and their actions cannot be compared, therefore, with those of later fleets, which remained at the bar for most of the sailing season. The first proper blockade only occurred in 1622, when an Anglo-Dutch fleet came to station itself before Goa in the autumn, remaining there for the whole winter of 1623, which made it impossible for the carracks scheduled to leave for Portugal to do so that year. Nevertheless, the cooperation between the Dutch and the English parts of the fleet proved very difficult and later attempts on part of the Dutch to persuade the English to repeat the enterprise were unsuccessful (also, 1623 saw a significant worsening of Anglo-Dutch relations in the East, as a result of the "Ambon massacre" of the same year, in which a number of English were executed at Ambon by V.O.C. servants). The fact that they did not want to mount an expedition on their own reflects the relative scarcity of naval means of the V.O.C. then, as well as the little importance it gave the Western Indian Ocean region. Both these things were to change in the following decade, after a considerable improvement of the Company's finances, which provided it with the resources necessary to intervene forcefully in the area, by mounting the annual Goa blockades of 1636-1644, which, from 1638 onwards, were complemented by the entrance in the war in Ceylon that opposed the Kingdom of Kandy to the Portuguese, in support of the former. This anti-Portuguese offensive was completed with the continuous blockade and siege of Malacca, which finally fell into Dutch hands in 1641. Although the Goa blockades did not have much effect on the coastal navigation, which the great deep-sea Dutch ships were unable to check, the intercontinental traffic with Portugal was deeply affected by them: only one carrack of the Carreira da Índia was lost to the Dutch blockading fleets, in 1641, coming from Portugal, but more were barred from returning to Europe, or were forced to do so at inconvenient and dangerous times. In 1644 the ten-year truce between Portugal and the United Provinces signed two years before in Europe was belatedly proclaimed in Asia. In 1652, the war was promptly restarted in Ceylon, but the Dutch only resumed the Goa blockades in 1656, stopping them for good in 1663, when their conquest of the Portuguese position of Cochin, in Malabar, put an end in practice to the conflict between the two powers.

Bibliography:
BARENDSE, René, "Blockade: Goa and its Surroundings, 1638-1654", in VEEN, Ernst van, BLUSSÉ, Leonard (eds), Rivalry and Conflict - European Traders and Asian Trading Networks in the 16th and 17th Centuries, Leiden, pp. 232-266. BOXER, C.R., Portuguese India in the Mid-Seventeenth Century, Oxford, 1980. MACLEOD, N. De Oost-Indische Compagnie als Zeemogenheid in Azië, 1602-1650, 2 vols, Rijswijk, 1927. MONTEIRO, Saturnino, Batalhas e Combates da Marinha Portuguesa, vols. IV-V, Lisbon, 1993-1994. SOUSA, Alfredo Botelho de, Subsídios para a história militar e marítima da Índia, 1585-1669, 4 vols, Lisbon, 1930-1956. SOUSA, Alfredo, Subsídios para a história das guerras da Restauração no mar e no além-mar, 2 vols., Lisbon, 1940.

Author: André Murteira