previous next

Goa.

GOA is the principall city that the Portugals have in the Indies, wherein the Viceroy with his royall Court is resident, and is in an Iland which may be in circuit five and twenty or thirty miles: and the city with the boroughs is reasonable bigge, and for a citie of the Indies it is reasonable faire, but the Iland is farre more fairer: for it is as it were full of goodly gardens, replenished with divers trees and with the Palmer trees as is aforesayd. This city is of great trafique for all sorts of marchandise which they trade withall in those parts: and the fleet which commeth every yeere from Portugall, which are five or sixe great shippes that come directly for Goa, arrive there ordinarily the sixth or tenth of September, and there they remain forty or fifty dayes, and from thence they goe to Cochin, where they lade for Portugall, and often times they lade one shippe at Goa and the other at Cochin for Portugall. Cochin is distant from Goa three hundred miles. The city of Goa is situate in the kingdome of Dialcan a king of the Moores, whose chiefe city is up in the countrey eight dayes journey, and is called Bisapor: this king is of great power, for when I was in Goa in the yeere of our Lord 1570, this king came to give assault to Goa, being encamped neere unto it by a river side with an army of two hundred thousand men of warre, and he lay at this siege foureteene moneths: in which time there was peace concluded, and as report went amongst his people, there was great calamity and mortality which bred amongst them in the time of Winter, and also killed very many elephants. Then in the yeere of our Lord 1567, I went from Goa to Bezeneger the chiefe city of the kingdome of Narsinga eight dayes journey from Goa, within the land, in the company of two other merchants which carried with them three hundred Arabian horses to that king: because the horses of that countrey are of a small stature, and they pay well for the Arabian horses : and it is requisite that the merchants sell them well, for that they stand them in great charges to bring them out of Persia to Ormus, and from Ormus to Goa, where the ship that bringeth twenty horses and upwards payeth no custome, neither ship nor goods whatsoever; whereas if they bring no horses, they pay 8 per cento of all their goods: and at the going out of Goa the horses pay custome, two and forty pagodies for every horse, which pagody may be of sterling money sixe shillings eight pence, they be pieces of golde of that value. So that the Arabian horses are of great value in those countreys, as 300, 400, 500 duckets a horse, and to 1000 duckets a horse.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Sort places alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a place to search for it in this document.
Goa (Goa, India) (22)
Ormus (Iran) (4)

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide Dates (automatically extracted)
Sort dates alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a date to search for it in this document.
1570 AD (2)
1567 AD (2)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: