Golden Goa 1510-1954

Historians are generally agreed that Portugal owes her place in world history to four achievements. These are the ocean voyages in which her mariners revealed to the European world the coasts of almost half the globe in the space of one hundred years; her domination of the Indian Ocean in the sixteenth century; her missionary enterprise in three continents; and her colonization of Brazil. The actual Portuguese possessions in Asia (Goa, Damao and Diu in India, Macao in South China, and part of Timor in Indonesia) are relics of the first three of these outstanding achievements. This alone goes far to explain the tenacity with which a people so proud of their past as are the Portuguese cling to what others have contemptuously dismissed as “colonial fossils.”