Map of Goa https://www.worldhistory.org/image/14225/map-of-goa-c-1750/

Between 1572 and 1574 Thomas Stephens was to be found wandering around England disguised as a servant and proselytising for Roman Catholicism alongside Thomas Pounde. The wealthy gentleman Pounde was a fallen favourite of Elizabeth I, and it is he who seems to have developed a zeal for travelling to India, inspired by the letters of Francis Xavier (d. 1552), founder of the Jesuit mission there. This zeal he instilled in his companion, and together they planned to commit themselves to the Society of Jesus, or Jesuits, at Rome, and thereafter make the journey to the Portuguese settlement at Goa, on India’s western coast. On the eve of their departure in 1574, however, Pounde was betrayed to the queen’s officers, arrested and imprisoned as a religious dissident.

At this, Stephens seems to have determined life in England was far too dangerous to endure and promptly fled to Rome. Now a religious refugee, he was never to return and certainly never to forget the oppressions he and his co-religionists had faced in England. Years later, in a letter to his brother, he would recall how he ‘fled from England’, adding the grim caution, ‘ “Be on your guard against the snares of your enemies,” is a maxim that you should highly treasure.’ On arrival in Rome, Stephens enrolled as a novice in the Society of Jesus at San Andrea on 20 October 1575. Never losing sight of the prize, in 1579, following ardent requests, he managed to obtain the permission of the Society to voyage to Goa to join the Jesuit mission there. The dream he and his friend had nurtured was finally becoming a reality, albeit the incarcerated Pounde was never to participate in it.

Stephens could barely wait. He immediately travelled to Lisbon, arriving at the end of March. A few days later he joined a group of twelve Jesuits aboard a five-vessel Portuguese fleet destined for Goa. On 4 April the fleet, carrying England’s first seafaring traveller to India, solemnly set forth to a fanfare of trumpets. The journey proved long and difficult, marred by disease, piracy and the ravages of an inhospitable sea. Of the perilous voyage and eventual arrival, Stephens wrote to his father in a letter dated 10 November 1579. Most of this letter is spent detailing the voyage, but the final section briefly describes India and its peoples. Having fled religious persecution in his English homeland, the traveller writes grimly of his fleet’s attack near Madeira and the Canary Islands by an ‘ill-occupied’ English pirate vessel. Meanwhile, contrary winds – or indeed none at all – combined with mercurial elements ‘thick and cloudy, full of thunder and lightning and rain, so unwholesome’ such that in the face of ‘such evil weather’ the struggling fleet began to despair of rounding the Cape at all. Amid dwindling endurance and desperate prayers, India was eventually sighted and the fleet made landfall on 24 October. Seven months after setting sail from Lisbon, an exhausted Thomas Stephens staggered on to the bustling shores of Goa, a weary and relieved refugee and migrant to India.

Portuguese in India https://www.worldhistory.org/image/14366/portuguese-nobleman/

It was nearing the end of the monsoon season. Sweltering humidity mingled with the drenching showers that poured in short but intense bursts. Goan inhabitants knew the season well and dressed sparingly, many of the men bare-chested and wrapped in ‘an apron of a span long’. This was quite a contrast to the Portuguese arrivals, who were oppressively bundled in long-sleeved shrunken doublets, starched and broad linen ruffs fitted close at the neck and wrists and voluminous breeches complete with stockings. Having spent the first three decades of his life in Europe, this new land several thousand miles from the tiny hamlet of his birth must have been quite the sensory experience for Stephens, and a stark contrast to the English weather he was used to.

In his letter to his father, Stephens marvels at his new surroundings: ‘Of the fruits and trees that be here, I cannot now speake, for I should make another letter as long as this. For hitherto I have not seene tree here, whose like I have seene in Europe.’ The Indian people he encountered proved hospitable and welcoming, treating the new arrivals ‘with passing greate charity’. He particularly admired palm trees that bear ‘a fruit called cocoa [coconut]’, the water of which he terms ‘wine of the palm tree’. Writing to his brother four years later, Stephens goes into exacting detail on the many uses of this versatile Indian tree and its refreshing fruit. From the ‘oil, liquor, toddy, syrup, sugar and vinegar’ extracted from its fruit to the seaworthy rope spun from its husk and the use of its branches in building huts, the traveller can barely contain his astonishment at the abundant resources offered by this single tree.

While Stephens observed his surroundings with fascination, and recorded it for his family back in England, it would not be long before he himself assimilated into his new home. The next four decades that remained of his life would be spent in India, dedicated in its entirety to the Jesuit mission.

This blog is extracted from Travellers in the Golden Realm: How Mughal India Connected England to the World by Lubaaba Al-Azami (John Murray £25 pp320). To order a copy go to Travellers in the Golden Realm by Lubaaba Al-Azami | Hachette UK.