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First of all, Portuguese was the language used in the fortresses and trading units that were set up as permanent agencies, small expatriate communities in port cities and their surrounds. This was not in itself very significant: inevitably, after all, emigrants go on using their own language to their own kind, and pass it on to at least some of their children and servants when they establish themselves in households in their new homes, especially if they are keeping in regular touch with their countrymen—and trade with Europe was the very raison d’ ětre for all these Portuguese settlements, actively maintained against mounting competition until the middle of the seventeenth century. (This carreira da Índia averaged five ships a year from 1550 to the 1630s.1) The early shock value of their arrival and the attendant prestige may even have encouraged others for a time to associate with them, and learn from them; in the same way, Christianity proved most attractive in the first couple of generations after it was first preached in Asia, but its growth fell away once it became as well known as the Hindu, Buddhist and Muslim institutions it was bidding to replace.

From this native basis, however, Portuguese spread as a tool of trade and international communication, i.e. as a lingua franca. When Portuguese settlements were so widespread in the accessible spots of the coasts of Africa and Asia, it was inevitable that their business partners and other associates would begin to find that the language they had acquired to facilitate relations with the Portuguese had an extra utility in dealing with others of their partners and associates—who might indeed have no other language in common. In fact, this utility of Portuguese outlived its trading dominance by at least a hundred years, lasting until the eighteenth century, when a Frenchman opined: ‘Merchants of the Hindus, Moors, Arabs, Persians, Parsees, Jews and Armenians who do business with the European factories, as well as black men who wish to work as interpreters, are obliged to speak this language; it serves also as a medium of communication among the European nations settled in India.’2

In 1551 the Englishman Thomas Wyndham, visiting the Gold Coast with a Portuguese companion, Antonio Pinteado, found that they could converse in Portuguese with the king of Benin, who had known it since his childhood.3 In 1600, when Japan received its first ever English visitor, the pilot Will Adams, he was able to communicate only when his surprised host, the shōgun Tokugawa Ieyasu, managed to find a Portuguese-speaking interpreter.4 In 1606 Brother Gaspar de San Bernardino, forced by lack of water to land in Persia, was amazed to be addressed by the local military commander: ‘Padre, quem te trouxe a esta terra tam longe da Índia?’* In 1638, another traveller wrote: ‘Rare are the visitors to Gomron,t though they be for the most part Persians, Arabs and Indians, who do not speak or understand Portuguese, from the trade that they had in earlier years with the Portuguese, who long held the city of Hormuz.’5 A little later, in the mid-seventeenth century, kings of Ceylon, and of Arakan on the other side of the Bay of Bengal (northern Burma), insisted on using Portuguese to correspond with the Dutch—even though the emperor of Kandy, Rajasinha II, was in fact in alliance with them against the Portuguese.†

Portuguese soon transformed itself from a lingua franca of use to princes and elite travellers to a more generally understood language of the servant class and (often the same people) early converts to Christianity. In the early days, a few phrases in Portuguese might be all that converts gained. Fernáo Mendes Pinto, on a visit to a city in southern China that he calls Sampitay in the late sixteenth century, encountered a woman dressed in red satin, who inveighed passionately against the evils of long sea voyages, and then pulled up a sleeve to reveal a cross elegantly branded on her arm.

… she gave a cry and lifting