em; and he divided
among the married ones the lands, houses, and cattle and everything
else that there was, to give them a start in life; and if the women
whom he thus gave in marriage asked for the houses which had been
in possession of their fathers or their husbands, he ordered that
these should be so given, and therein they found many jewels and
gold pieces which had been hidden underground and abandoned when
the city was captured.'[1]

[Footnote 1: Albuquerque's _Commentaries_, vol. iii. pp. 41, 42.]

This colonising policy was carried out by Albuquerque both for moral
and political reasons, but it was not approved by all the other
Portuguese officers in India. Some of the Catholic clergy objected,
in spite of his making baptism a preliminary to marriage, and Diogo
Mendes, when Captain of Goa, did all he could to discourage the
married men. Albuquerque dwells at length on this subject in the long
despatch which he wrote to the king on April 1st, 1512, after his
return from Malacca.[2] It was one of his favourite {155} schemes,
and was well suited to the inclinations of the Portuguese people.
Possibly no other nation is so willing to intermarry with alien races
as the Portuguese. In Portugal itself there remain many traces in the
physiognomy of the people of the intermarriage of the original stock
with descendants of the Moors and even of the negro slaves, who were
largely imported; in Brazil, an important division of the population
is descended from mixed marriages between the Portuguese settlers and
the aboriginal tribes; and in India the number of Portuguese
half-castes forms a recognised section of the Christian population.
These men and women resemble natives more than Europeans, and often
appear to have only a very small amount of European blood.

[Footnote 2: _Cartas de Albuquerque_, vol. i. pp. 29-65.]

But however desirous Albuquerque might be to create a body of
Portuguese colonists and half-castes, he knew he could not establish
a complete power in India by this means alone. The proportion of
Europeans must inevitably be small, and some means had to be devised
for governing the natives. This was one of the arguments employed by
the school of Almeida for abandoning Goa. At Cochin, for instance,
the Portuguese authority was only supreme within the limits of the
fortress, and the task of governing the city was left to the Hindu
Raja. But the conquest of the island and city of Goa produced a