Portuguese Conquistadores in Eastern Africa
Much less is known about the Portuguese conquistadores of eastern Africa, explains Malyn Newitt, than of their counterparts in America and the Indies.
In 1525 Cortés became a Marquis and received the richest encomienda in the New World; Vasco da Gama was made Count of Vidigueira, became one of the richest grandees of Portugal and founded a family that was to play a major role in Portugal's imperial history. Yet the empires they helped to found were very different in character.
The Castilian and Portuguese conquistadores both expected to make their fortunes through the exercise of arms. The men who followed Davila, Velazquez and Cortés in the Caribbean were not interested in founding settlements and cultivating the land while there were the accumulated hoards of Indian treasure to plunder. Their Portuguese counterparts in the East also indulged in wholesale plunder and extortion using their heavily armed ships as mobile bases for attacking the ports of the Indian Ocean. In spite of these similarities, however, the empires evolved quite differently.
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