Report to the Secretary of State for India in Council on the Portuguese Records relating to the East Indies, contained in the Archivo da Torre do Tombo, and the Public Libraries at Lisbon and Evora.

£350 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

At the request of the Foreign Office Danvers travelled to Lisbon and Evora to look at their archives. The resulting work provides an interesting history of the Portuguese expansion from the late 15th to the 18th century, based on documents held in the Torre do Tombo, Bibliotheca Nacional and the archive at Evora. The first four sections relate to India, section V deals with the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, followed by Ceylon, Malacca, China Japan. “I cannot speak in too great praise of the admirable manner in which the Portuguese Public Records are arranged and preserved […] The most important, from an Indian point of view, are the ‘Documentos remittidos da India’ or ‘Livros das Monçoes’. This series consists of 62 volumes, in which are bound up 12,465 miscellaneous documents received from India, bearing dates between the years 1600 and 1697, and thus covering the whole of the deeply interesting period during which the sovereignty of Portugal in India was being contested by the Dutch and English.” Uncommon.

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