The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma (15 page)

*

For a hundred years or so Arakan existed in a sort of tributary relationship with the much more powerful Bengal sultanate next door. But then the Bengal sultanate landed on hard times, and the Arakanese began to spread their wings. They built up a strong navy with hundreds of ships. They occupied the island of Ramu and in 1578 took the big port city of Chittagong, today in Bangladesh. Teaming up with newly arrived Portuguese pirates and mercenaries, they soon captured most of eastern Bengal. The Arakanese then also pushed eastward, temporarily holding Pegu and deporting from there three thousand people, including members of the royal family.
¹³
Arakan was soon at the height of its powers, and for a brief moment its dominion extended across more than a thousand miles of prime beachfront property from Dacca to Martaban.

Scientists today say that human sexual attraction may be based, at least in part, on the influence of pheromones, a personal cocktail of
chemicals that signals suitability (or not) to a potential mate. This was apparently old knowledge to the kings of Arakan. According to the Portuguese merchant and travel writer Duarte Barbosa, who visited in 1610, twelve of the most attractive young women from every part of the realm were sent to the palace on a regular basis, not in the first instance to meet the king but to stand, fully dressed in the heat, on a “terrace in the sun.” They would then take off their clothes, and the “damp cloth” they had been wearing (with their names scribbled on them) would be sent for His Majesty to sniff. Only those who passed this scent test would be invited into the royal apartments. The rest would be proffered to lesser lords.
¹⁴

Over the years Mrauk-U grew rich from loot and the settling of captives into the fertile river valleys nearby. It also grew rich from trade, including trade in slaves. The slave trade was an important part of business in the Bay of Bengal. And this was the seventeenth century, when not only were tens of thousands of Africans from Gambia, Angola, and elsewhere being trafficked to the plantations of the West Indies and Virginia, but Barbary pirates were raiding the coasts of Western Europe, Ireland, and even Iceland (in 1627) in search of captives for the king of Morocco and the markets of Constantinople. Portuguese and other freebooters were happy to help fill the slave markets and, together with the Arakanese king’s men, ravaged the coasts of Bengal, capturing tens of thousands of people a year. Places once thickly peopled became deserted, “the desolate lair of tigers and other wild beasts.”
¹⁵
But for Mrauk-U this only meant more riches and an ever more splendid city.

The Dutch were also eager to gain a piece of the action.
¹⁶
By the early 1600s Portuguese energy was dissipating, and in its place new Europeans were working hard to make their presence felt. The Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie, or Dutch East India Company, was founded in 1602, when the Netherlands States-General granted it exclusive rights to carry out commerce in the East. A regional headquarters was set up at Batavia (now Jakarta), and other outposts were soon scattered across Asia, in Japan, Persia, Bengal, Ceylon, Siam, and China as well as in Burma and the Spice Islands. The Dutch began to dominate the immensely lucrative trade back to Europe in nutmeg and mace. By the middle 1600s, the Dutch East India Company, or VOC, had become the single richest company the world had ever seen, with 150 merchant 
chant ships, 40 warships, 50,000 employees, a sizable private army, and a handsome dividend to its shareholders of no less than 40 percent a year. In Arakan the Dutch interest was primarily in slaves, and schemes were drawn up to transport tens of thousands of Arakanese-captured slaves to populate new Dutch colonies in the East Indies.
¹⁷
But too many died, of disease and abuse, before ever reaching the shores of Java.

There was also a Dutch trade with Pegu and other Burmese ports, and the new commerce brought new luxuries and new trends. In the early 1700s well-to-do Burmese had even acquired an exotic taste for North American beaver hats, all the way from the St. Lawrence Valley, which fetched extravagant prices, and one imagines the fashionably correct at Pegu and Ava, and perhaps Mrauk-U as well, setting off their multicolored silks with the black broad-brimmed hats of a Rembrandt or a Vermeer.
¹⁸

FROM THE RIO TEJO

Around the time of the first Elizabethan settlements in Virginia, Filipe de Brito e Nicote escaped poverty in Lisbon and sought to make himself a Burmese king. He had come east as a teenage cabin boy on the lofty three-masted sailing ships of the day, working his way down the coast of Angola, around the Cape of Good Hope, to Goa and finally to the calm waters of the Bay of Bengal. By the time he reached Arakan, many years later, he was already an experienced fighter, and he was recruited as a musketeer in the local army. Before long he was an officer and led royal Arakanese troops in battle. The Portuguese were well experienced at making money from Goa and Malacca. But now some sought even greater power. Ceylon had just been taken over, and this whetted the appetite of many men like de Brito for the treasures that would come with actual dominion over an Asian land. In 1599, Portuguese and Spanish mercenaries nearly succeeded in taking over Cambodia. It was now de Brito’s turn to see how well he could play his hand.
¹⁹

His business plan was a simple one: The Estado da India did not possess a single customshouse or fortress on the long eastern coast of the Bay of Bengal, with the sole and important exception of Malacca. A port in southern Burma was well placed to be Malacca’s northern
counterpart, and from a Burma-based fleet, the Portuguese would be able to control all the trade from Bengal to Malaya as well as the inland trade of Burma itself. Bayinnaung was dead, and his heirs, though princes of considerable strength, could be handled. Much of the country had fallen apart yet again, with Bayinnaung’s successors, now based at Ava, only holding part of the Irrawaddy Valley.

This was also when Arakan was in full flight and in temporary possession of nearly the entire Burmese coastline. De Brito’s nominal master, the king of Arakan, had granted him the port of Syriam, very close to modern Rangoon. De Brito quickly went to work, building up the settlement as best he could, encouraging men from all around the region to settle there under his protection. He had with him his lieutenant, Salvador Ribeyro. They constructed a wall and a moat and recruited an impressive militia around a steel core of hardened Iberian fighters. They included many men of mixed European and Asian descent as well as Burmese, Africans, and Malabaris from South India. The Burmese called him Nga Zinga, meaning, in the patois of the Indian Ocean, “The Good Man.”

His next step was to circumvent the Arakanese entirely and appeal directly to the viceroy at Goa, Dom Aires de Saldanha, for money and men, and the viceroy, seeing a good proposition, gave de Brito what he wanted. With resources pouring in, Syriam became a power in its own right, though in theory it was still under the sovereignty of Arakan. Most of de Brito’s riches came from forcing ships to use only his Syriam as a port and from looting and pillaging the towns of the Burmese interior. He even pillaged pagodas, melting down the bronze bells of many Buddhist establishments to make cannons for his army.

De Brito also sought alliances and married his son, Simon, to one of the daughters of the prince of Martaban. He took as his own wife Doña Luisa de Saldaña, a niece of the viceroy himself, born to a Javanese mother, “neither tall nor slender” but “with that dash of beauty which is so dangerous in women.”
²⁰
It was now the early years of the seventeenth century. Portuguese power in the East was waning, but things seemed to be going very well for the onetime cabin boy from Lisbon. De Brito lived extravagantly and took on the airs of an Oriental monarch.

In addition to his Portuguese captains, de Brito had as his good friend a Burmese nobleman named Natshinnaung, remembered as a
champion polo player and an accomplished poet and scholar. In 1593 this nobleman had been present at a battle in which the Burmese crown prince was killed on elephant back by the crown prince of Siam. He was fifteen at the time and was handed the task of riding to Pegu and informing the widow of the dead prince of her husband’s fate. She was Raza Datu Kalayani, many years older and a famous beauty. He fell in love with her, and she eventually fell in love with him. From that day on, Natshinnaung dreamed of becoming king and making Kalayani his queen.
²¹
In Filipe de Brito he found a kindred spirit.

The man who would destroy both de Brito and Natshinnaung’s heady plans was Bayinnaung’s grandson Anaukpetlun, the king of Burma. Not quite the world conqueror his ancestor was, he was nonetheless a serious prince with a serious army. He wanted at least to rule over the entire Irrawaddy Valley, and de Brito was in the way. No one was happy with de Brito’s Syriam, not the Persian merchants of Masulipatnam in South India who were losing trade and money, not the Arakanese whose nominal rule he was discarding, and certainly not the Burmese whose territory he had annexed. Encouraged by many, the king of Burma decided to put an end to de Brito once and for all, sailing down the Irrawaddy with a huge force including more than four hundred war boats. Six thousand of his men were Muslim mercenaries from the Indian Deccan, Persia, and elsewhere in the Islamic world. Slowly but surely, the towns and villages under de Brito fell to the Burmese until only Syriam was left. De Brito was surrounded.

De Brito had roughly three thousand soldiers with him, including about a hundred Portuguese. But he was running low on gunpowder for his cannons as well as food and other provisions. He sent a messenger with money to Bengal for help, but the messenger just pocketed the money and ran away. When the gunpowder ran out, the Syriam defenders poured boiling oil on the Burmese to stop them from scaling the walls. Ships were dispatched to break the siege, but these were forced back. After more than a month de Brito, reading the writing on the wall, asked for terms, but the Burmese king replied that he would accept only unconditional surrender. For three days and three nights the Burmese attacked, and hundreds lay dead by the time the fighting was over. De Brito was finally captured, betrayed by a Mon officer within his own ranks.

Filipe de Brito was set up on a hill above his would-be royal capital
and impaled on a wooden spike. He survived two days in agony. His wife, Luisa, was seized and cleaned by the river and then brought to the Burmese king, who intended to keep her for himself. But when “she turned on him with such scorn and courage that his desire for her beauty was turned to anger,” he sent her to Ava to be sold together with the common slaves. Senior Portuguese officers like Francis Mandez were also impaled. Others like Sebastian Rodriguez were taken first to Ava and then to villages north of Ava to be settled as hereditary members of the king’s bodyguard and artillery. King Anaukpetlun, before returning himself to the north, donated gold and diamonds and two thousand rubies to the Shwedagon Pagoda.
²²

Natshinnaung remained loyal to the end. The Burmese king had tried to divide the two friends and told de Brito that he would receive good treatment only if he turned over the renegade Burmese. The messenger who carried the letter was brought blindfolded to where the two were sitting. De Brito, who most likely could not read Burmese, asked Natshinnaung to read it. When he heard the offer, he said, “Tell your master that we Portuguese keep faith. I have given my word to Natshinnaung and cannot break it.” During the last days of the siege Natshinnaung converted to Roman Catholicism and was baptized by a priest from Goa.

Nothing remains of de Brito’s legacy at Syriam today, only the scattered bricks of the old wall and Catholic church. But at Henzada in the Irrawaddy Delta, not far away, there is a small pagoda with an inscription that it was built by “Nanda Baya and his sister Supaba Devi,” children of an Arakanese lady Saw Thida and “the Feringhee Nga Zinga, king of Syriam.”

*

Under a cloudless blue sky in early January 1997, I rented an old Nissan and drove about two hours to the valley of the Mu River, just to the northwest of Mandalay. Here and there scattered among the seemingly endless fields of rice, cotton, and tobacco, the clumps of banana trees, and the occasional shiny pagoda on a hill were the so-called
bayingyi
, or
feringhi
, villages—Roman Catholic villages in a sea of Buddhist Burma. The people of these villages were all descendants of earlier generations of Europeans who had come to the country, including descendants of de Brito’s Portuguese officers and other immigrants and
captives from the West. It had been the habit of Burmese kings to settle newcomers in specific places, so that they could police their own communities and so that the Court of Ava could keep a better account and press them as needed into the king’s service. Muslims and Christians each had their own towns and villages. And here near the Mu River was the home first of Iberian and later of Dutch and French mercenaries and war captives, their wives, and their children for generations down to the fall of Mandalay.

The little wooden and thatch huts, shaded under palm trees and huddled together on sandy ground, were no different from any other settlement in Upper Burma, except for the powder blue and white church off to the side and a flooded cemetery, set low against a nearby canal, with dozens of half-submerged crosses peering out from beneath the brackish water. There had been no signs, and I had to ask directions many times; but once there, seeing the faces of the people, it was hard to mistake the villages’
feringhi
past.