Diogo Lopez de Sequeira was a Portuguese navigator who, in August 1509, left Cochin with a fleet of five ships under instructions from King Manuel I of Portugal to call at Madagascar, sail to Malaka, demand tribute and load spices — and on the way called at the pepper ports of Pedir and Pasei on the north coast of Sumatra, the first European visit to the Atjeh coast. Sequeira’s mission is the opening episode of European-Atjeh contact and the immediate antecedent of the Portuguese conquest of Malaka of 1511.
The 1509 mission
The Sequeira mission of 1509 was dispatched from Cochin in August 1509 with five ships under instructions from King Manuel I of Portugal. The instructions were to call at Madagascar, sail to Malaka, demand tribute (schatting) and load spices. Van der Woude frames the mission as part of the wider Portuguese project of the Estado da Índia: the construction of a network of fortresses and factories commanding the Indian Ocean trade, with Malaka as the eastern anchor.
The Atjeh coast call
On the way to Malaka, Sequeira called at the pepper ports of Pedir and Pasei on the north coast of Sumatra — the first European visit to the Atjeh coast. At both ports he obtained permission to trade but took on no cargo, “zonder lading in te nemen”. The Atjeh coast call thus established the first European commercial presence in the Atjeh region, though without immediate commercial consequence. The pepper of Pedir and Pasei would, within a generation, become one of the chief attractions of the Atjeh coast to European traders; the Houtman brothers’ visit of 1599 would call at Pedir for rice and would find one of its crew taken prisoner there.
The Malaka mission
From Pedir and Pasei, Sequeira proceeded to Malaka, where the sultan received the Portuguese civilly and granted them leave to set up a factory. After two months, however — alarmed by reports of Portuguese behaviour elsewhere in the East and pressed by his Muslim merchant community — the sultan prepared to attack the fleet. The plot failed, but several Portuguese were killed on shore and others taken prisoner in the factory, including the factor Ruy d’Aranjo. The ships withdrew, taking reprisals on Malay craft they encountered on the way home. Sequeira’s failure at Malaka was the immediate antecedent of Affonso d’Albuquerque’s conquest of 1511: it was Aranjo’s letter from captivity that persuaded Albuquerque that the trade of Malaka could only be secured by force.
Significance
Diogo Lopez de Sequeira is, in Van der Woude’s narrative, the principal instance of the first European visit to the Atjeh coast and the principal antecedent of the Portuguese conquest of Malaka of 1511. The Atjeh coast call at Pedir and Pasei in 1509 established the first European commercial presence in the Atjeh region, though without immediate commercial consequence. The failure of the Malaka mission — and the captive Aranjo’s letter to Albuquerque — set the Portuguese on the path to the conquest of Malaka and the construction of the Estado da Índia that would define the Portuguese empire in the East for the next century and a half. The Dutch arrival at Atjeh in 1599, with which Van der Woude’s Atjeh chapter opens, was thus the resumption — by new hands and at a new commercial stage — of the European commercial penetration of the Atjeh coast that Sequeira had inaugurated in 1509.
See Also
- Portuguese conquest of Malaka (1511)
- Affonso d’Albuquerque
- Pedir
- Pasei
- Malaka
- Acheh
- Sultan of Atjeh (1589-1604)
- Houtman brothers’ visit to Atjeh (1599)
- 1509
- 1511
Source
Coen, Koopman van Heeren Zeventien. Geschiedenis van den Hollandshen Handel in Indië (1598-1614), by Johan van der Woude (Amsterdam: C.V. Uitgeverij v/h C. De Boer Jr., 1948), Hoofdstuk V “Voorgangers, Hollanders en mededingers tot 1614. Atjeh. Djohor. Malaka.” (pp. 134-135).
The Portuguese in India, by F. C. Danvers, Vol. I-II (London, 1894).