Diogo do Couto: the soldier who helped Camões home and kept Goa's archive

Diogo do Couto died in Goa on Saturday 10 December 1616. He was 74, a long life for the time, and he had spent almost all of his adult life there: first as a soldier, then as a married citizen of Goa, and for his last 21 years as the king's chronicler and the keeper of the city's state archive.3 sources3 sources

He was still writing. His last known text, a letter to King Philip dated Goa, 28 January 1616, complained that two of his books of history had been stolen from him. In Lisbon that same year, the printer Pedro Crasbeeck brought out his seventh Década da Ásia, the last of his histories to be printed in his lifetime.3 sources3 sources

His correspondent and first biographer, Manuel Severim de Faria, described him as cheerful, hard-working and, unusually for someone who had lived so long in India, not greedy. Under his printed portrait went a Latin couplet: he handled history with the pen and arms with the hand.1 source1 source

Couto is remembered for two things. He continued, from Goa, the great history of the Portuguese in Asia that João de Barros had begun in Lisbon. And in 1569, on the Island of Mozambique, he found Luís de Camões, the poet of Os Lusíadas, stranded and penniless, and sailed home with him.3 sources3 sources

Couto was born in Lisbon in 1542, the son of Gaspar do Couto and Isabel Serrão de Calvos, a noble family. His father served the Infante D. Luís, a younger son of King Manuel I, and the boy entered the Infante's household as soon as he was old enough.3 sources3 sources

D. Luís paid for a fine education. At 11 Couto began Latin grammar at the Jesuit college of Santo Antão in Lisbon, under Manuel Álvares, author of the Latin grammar used in Jesuit schools, and studied rhetoric with Cipriano Soares. He then read philosophy at the Dominican house in Benfica with Frei Bartolomeu dos Mártires, the future Archbishop of Braga, as a fellow student of the Infante's son António, later Prior of Crato.2 sources2 sources

Then his patrons died. The Infante died in 1555 and Couto's father about two years later. With no protector at court, he gave up his books for a soldier's career in the East, as many Portuguese of noble but modest birth did.2 sources2 sources

In March 1559 he sailed with a fleet of nearly 3,000 men of arms, aboard the Flor de la Mar with D. Jorge Temudo, the new Bishop of Cochin. Writing in 1603, Couto said he was then 15 and had already served King João III for two years as a moço da câmara, a chamber page. Born in 1542, he was more likely 17.1 source1 source

He served as a soldier for about ten years, and his own Décadas, especially the seventh and eighth, draw on that experience. In 1603 he wrote that he had spent the years since in “other services of more risk and danger”, and that his present task, the history, brought so few favours that the pen often fell from his hand in disgust.2 sources2 sources

In early 1569 Couto set out for Portugal to ask the king for a reward for his service, a normal step for a veteran. He sailed from Cochin on 2 February in the fleet of the outgoing viceroy, D. Antão de Noronha, with a group of fidalgos and cavaleiros who all ate at the viceroy's table.2 sources2 sources

They left too late in the season. Only one ship rounded the Cape of Good Hope; the rest were driven back by storms to the Island of Mozambique, the Portuguese fort and port on the East African coast. Before they reached the Angoxe Islands the viceroy died at sea.1 source1 source

On the island Couto found an old friend. Luís de Camões had been in the East since 1553 and had reached Mozambique on his slow way home. Couto told what he saw in a short passage of the abridged eighth Década he finished in 1616.2 sources2 sources

Couto added that Camões was also writing a book of “much learning, doctrine and philosophy” that he called his Parnaso, and that it was stolen from him. Couto searched for it in Portugal and never found it. The same passage ends with Camões dying “in pure poverty” in Portugal. Camões died in 1580, so these lines were written long after the voyage.2 sources2 sources

When the season came, in November 1569, the ships left Mozambique together. The Santa Clara, captain Gaspar Pereira, with Couto and Camões aboard, got ahead of the others and kept going. Couto named his messmates on the voyage as Heitor da Silveira and Fernão Gomes da Grã; Camões, too, he called “my messmate”.3 sources3 sources

The Santa Clara called at St Helena, waited 20 days for the rest of the fleet in vain, and anchored at Cascais in April 1570; José Manuel Garcia dates the arrival to 7 April. Lisbon had plague, and the king's orders were that India ships should anchor outside and send a man ashore with the letters. Couto was the man sent, and he went to Almeirim, where King Sebastião arrived two days later and questioned him about India. Heitor da Silveira died on the day they sighted the Rock of Sintra. The other ships did not arrive until the end of May or June.3 sources3 sources

Os Lusíadas, the epic of Vasco da Gama's voyage to India, was printed in Lisbon in 1572. Couto's part in it did not end on the ship. Severim de Faria wrote that Camões consulted him often and took his advice on some passages, and that at the poet's request Couto began a commentary on the poem. He got as far as the fifth canto and sent the manuscript to a friend, D. Fernando de Castro Pereira. In the 1620s it belonged to a canon of Évora; it has since disappeared.3 sources3 sources

Couto's months in Lisbon overlapped with the death of the man whose work he would continue. João de Barros, the court historian who wrote the history of Portuguese Asia without ever going there, had printed three Décadas in 1552, 1553 and 1563, and died at his country house near Pombal on 20 October 1570, leaving the fourth unfinished.3 sources3 sources

Couto got his reward and left again on 17 March 1571 with the new viceroy, D. António de Noronha. He reached Goa on 6 September and never saw Portugal again. In Goa he married Luísa de Melo, whose brother, the Augustinian friar Adeodato da Trindade, later acted as his agent and editor in Lisbon. They had one daughter, who died young. Couto left the army and was put in charge of supplying provisions for the ships.2 sources2 sources

The idea of a chronicler living in India was already in the air. In late 1569 D. Jorge Temudo, by then Archbishop of Goa, urged King Sebastião to appoint one, paid and sworn, to record the deeds of each viceroy and the services of soldiers as they happened. Historians writing in Portugal years after the events, he argued, had not known a quarter of it.1 source1 source

Nobody acted on it. Couto wrote to the king offering his services on 20 November 1589 and again on 15 November 1593. By then the king was Philip II of Spain, who had taken the Portuguese crown as Philip I in 1580, after King Sebastião died without an heir and the old Cardinal-King Henrique followed him.3 sources3 sources

Couto had begun with the years since Philip's accession. Philip's answer, dated Lisbon, 28 February 1595, asked for that volume but told him to go back and continue the history from where Barros had stopped. The same letter made him guarda-mor, chief keeper, of a new archive.2 sources2 sources

Torre do Tombo was the name of the royal archive in Lisbon, and the Goa archive borrowed it. On 25 February 1595 the king ordered the viceroy, Matias de Albuquerque, to fit out rooms in the viceroys' palace to hold the papers and for the chronicler to work in. Royal letters of 1597 and 1598 deal with finishing the room in the fortress of Goa and handing Couto the keys, books and papers.3 sources3 sources

The archive was largely his idea. Couto complained throughout his histories about documents rotting in officials' houses; in one chapter he could not even find the names of the captains of three armadas, because the books of appointments were ruined from being passed around the houses of the treasury clerks.1 source1 source

Keeping the archive was a working job. Couto issued certificates of service, the documents a soldier or captain needed to claim a reward in Lisbon. One surviving example, dated 10 December 1612, vouches for the services of Francisco Bernardes de Cabreira.2 sources2 sources

The papers also fed his history. Severim de Faria thought this gave Couto an advantage over earlier writers: in Goa he had the original treaties and registers at hand, and he could question the men who had fought, while other witnesses in the same city kept them honest. Couto made the same point himself in 1616.2 sources2 sources

Goa also chose him to make its speeches of welcome to new viceroys and governors; his surviving orations run from 1597 to 1614. For the viceroy D. Francisco da Gama, Vasco da Gama's great-grandson and his regular correspondent, he wrote a history of the Gama family in 1599.3 sources3 sources

Barros had organised his history in decades, after the Roman historian Livy: each Década was a volume of ten books. Couto kept the form and the title, starting at Década IV. Between 1595 and 1616 he wrote nine Décadas, IV to XII, which together cover the Portuguese in Asia from 1526 to 1600. Severim counted 90 books in all.4 sources4 sources

He worked fast. The fourth Década took him from 1595 to 1596 and the fifth from 1596 to 1597, and the two were sent to Lisbon together. The tenth, the one he had started first, went in 1600. He sent each manuscript to Frei Adeodato in Lisbon, who prepared it for the press and, in the process, changed spelling and wording, cut passages and added material of his own.1 source1 source

Then the losses began. The first copy of the seventh Década, sent in 1601, was on board the galleon Santiago when Dutch ships captured her, and Couto had to send it again in 1603. In 1614 the sixth was printed in Lisbon, and the printer's house caught fire with the finished edition inside. According to Severim, only six copies survived, because they had already been taken to the Augustinian convent in Lisbon.2 sources2 sources

The worst loss came next. Couto finished the eighth and ninth Décadas in 1614 and was about to send them when, Severim wrote, he fell so ill that he was not expected to live. While he lay sick the two volumes disappeared from his house, taken, Severim thought, by someone who meant to pass off the work as his own. Severim put the theft in 1614; Couto, writing in January 1616, said he had meant to send the volumes “last year”, which points to 1615.3 sources3 sources

Couto, 72 by Severim's count, recovered and rebuilt the story of both Décadas from his notes and memory as one shorter volume, “in the manner of an epilogue”. He dedicated it to the king from Goa on 28 January 1616.3 sources3 sources

The eleventh Década went missing after Couto sent it to Portugal around 1611 or 1612. In January 1616 he still believed it was safe there, but no copy of the full text has ever been found. Barbosa Machado, the eighteenth-century bibliographer, recorded that repeated searches had failed. The account of the wreck of the São Tomé that closes Couto's life of the captain D. Paulo de Lima Pereira is thought to come from it.3 sources3 sources

Couto's other famous book is a dialogue. While King Sebastião still reigned, probably during his stay in Lisbon in 1570, he wrote one in which a newly chosen viceroy questions an old India soldier who is hanging about the court seeking his reward. The soldier explains what the viceroy needs to know about the royal treasury and the soldiery of India.2 sources2 sources

That manuscript was stolen too. Copies circulated in Portugal without his name. Around 1610, warned by a friend, Couto wrote it again almost from scratch, now as a conversation between a former governor of India and a practical soldier in the house of a despachador, the official who handled petitions. He dedicated it to the Marquis of Alenquer.2 sources2 sources

The soldier's complaints are pointed: he accuses governors and nobles, and exposes theft and corruption in the running of Portuguese India. The book stayed in manuscript until the Royal Academy of Sciences in Lisbon printed it in 1790, under the title Observations on the principal causes of the decline of the Portuguese in Asia. The literary scholar Manuel Rodrigues Lapa thought it among the most honest books in Portuguese literature and advised reading it alongside Os Lusíadas.3 sources3 sources

The archive suffered first. D. Francisco da Gama, viceroy again, wrote from Goa to the king on 4 March 1626 that he had found the Torre do Tombo “notably wrecked”, because since Couto's death the people who served there had not cared for the books and papers. In 1631 the Archbishop of Goa complained that there was not a single paper in it fit to base a history on.1 source1 source

The books took centuries to appear. Couto's unpublished Décadas passed to Frei Adeodato. Royal letters of 1617 and 1620 deal with printing his History of India, but the twelfth came out only in Paris in 1645 and the abridged eighth in Lisbon in 1673. The Regia Officina Typografica finally printed Barros and Couto together in Lisbon between 1777 and 1788, with Severim's life of Couto at the head of his volumes.3 sources3 sources

Pieces kept turning up. In 1917 a longer manuscript version of the eighth Década was found in the municipal library of Porto, and a near-identical copy in Madrid in 1971. It says more about Camões than the printed summary, including that he escaped a shipwreck in Southeast Asia with his Lusíadas. Maria Augusta Lima Cruz published a critical edition in 1993 and 1994, and argues that the codices are working materials for a full Década, not the stolen text itself.2 sources2 sources

For the Portuguese in Asia between 1526 and 1600, Couto's Décadas are one of the main sources historians have. They draw on documents from the archive he kept and on oral testimony from many quarters; he marked the oral sources himself, with phrases such as “they told me” and “I heard it said”.1 source1 source

He was the first keeper of the Torre do Tombo of Goa, and his portrait in Lisbon calls him the only one. He also left a first-hand account of Camões on Mozambique Island, in the winter when, by Couto's account, the poet finished polishing Os Lusíadas.3 sources3 sources