Almeida

“ Or if they do not attempt Alemtejo, I think they will attempt advancing in three columns by Castello Branco from Coria and Placencia, and from Guinaldo, etc., by Sabugal, and in our front by Celorico or Guarda, endeavouring to unite beyond the Sierra de Estrella. In this case we shall come into play immediately. Almeida, I think, they will merely mask by a strong [151] Corps, and leave in their rear. If they succeed, the place must fall of course. If not, there is not force enough in it to annoy them. ”

“ Had Badajos held out some time longer this diversion might have been of some consequence, as Ciudad Rodrigo would have been much distressed for provisions, and Almeida not in the safest state of defence. As it is, all he has got has been his trouble for his pains, great sufferings to his army, and a hasty retreat before an army but very little superior in numbers to his own. ”

“ But by a desperate effort Almeida, the Portuguese viceroy, collected all his forces for a final blow, and succeeded in winning a magnificent naval victory which once and for all firmly established the Portuguese power in India. Two years afterwards Almeida's rival and successor, Alfonso de Albuquerque, gained possession of Goa (1510) , and this city became the centre of their Indian dominion, which now included Ceylon and the Maldive Islands, together with the Malacca and Malabar coasts. ”

“ Albuquerque wished to establish a real Portuguese empire, which should rest upon the possession of Portuguese colonies owning the direct sway of the King of Portugal. Almeida thought it sufficient to command the sea, and that the only land stations should be a few factories in commercial cities, defended by fortifications against all assaults. Almeida therefore was quite satisfied that the fortresses he had built at Cannanore, Cochin, and Quilon were all that was needed ”

“ On arriving at Lisbon, his first care was to present his letters to Almeida and Mendoça; he also sent for Lemos and Correa, whom he had long secured in the interest of his master. These were rich citizens, who had served all the principal offices of the city, employed a considerable number of artificers, and were highly esteemed by the people. ”

“ Within two hours of the second letter Ney sent in the third, which was no mere protest, nor even a mere refusal to move, but [p. 177] an open declaration of his intention to march back to Almeida. ‘I warn your Excellency that to-morrow I shall leave my positions of Carapichina and Cortiço, and échelon my troops from Celorico to Freixadas, and on the day after they will be between Freixadas and Almeida. ”

“ Almeida’s statesmanship was to a great extent sound. The Portuguese could never penetrate far inland; throughout the 16th century their settlements were confined to the coasts of Asia, Africa or America, and the area they were able effectively to occupy was far less than the area of their empire in the 20th century. A Chinese critic, quoted by Faria y Sousa, said of them that they were like fishes, “remove them from the water and they straightway die.” It is thus absurd to speak of a “Portuguese conquest of India” ”

“ When we get within the Portuguese frontier, we find a road parallel to the last, from Almeida by Guarda to Abrantes, also a difficult route, but like it in perpetual use: usually, when the French marched from Salamanca [p. 79] to Alcantara, Wellington moved in a corresponding way from near Almeida to Abrantes. This road runs along the basin of the Zezere, though not down in the trough of the river, but high up the hillsides above it. Spanish and Portuguese roads, as we shall see, generally avoid the river banks and run along the slopes far above them. ”

“ Almeida was at that time garrisoned by some Portuguese troops commanded by an English officer. The French had invested it, but Lord Wellington expected that it would have been able to baffle the enemy until the commencement of the rainy season, and would thus retard the enemy's movements. Almeida was a town of very great strength, but Massena opened fire on it about the 23rd of August, and it was obliged to capitulate as soon afterwards as the 27th, a magazine containing most of the ammunition having blown up, taking with it great part of the town and the fortifications ”

“ A much more vigorous resistance was offered by the Moors of Mombasa, but the town was taken and destroyed, and its large treasures went to strengthen the resources of Almeida. At other places on his way, such as the island of Angediva, near Goa, and Cannanore, he built forts, and adopted measures to secure the Portuguese supremacy. On his arrival in India he took up his residence at Cochin, where a Portuguese fort had been built by Alphonso d’Albuquerque in 1503. ”

“ It is rather drawn, in a somewhat arbitrary and haphazard fashion, through the midst of the desert upland, where Spain and Portugal turn their backs to each other. For the only piece of flat plain-land on the whole border is that from the Douro to Almeida, a mere ten or twelve miles, and immediately behind the Coa, only three or four miles from Almeida, the mountains begin. The rest of the frontier runs through thinly-peopled, barren highlands, from which the Coa, the Mondego, the Zezere, and the Ponçul fall away towards Portugal, and the Agueda and the Alagon towards Spain. ”

“ NOTE ON ALMEIDA AND THE BRIDGE OF THE COA
The small circular town of Almeida has never recovered from the disaster of 1810. The population does not fill up the area within the walls: open spaces are frequent, and some of the more important buildings—especially the old palace of the governor—stand in ruins. Others show solid seventeenth- or eighteenth-century masonry on the ground floor, and flimsy modern repairs above, where the upper stories were blown away by the explosion. The cathedral has never been properly rebuilt, and is a mere fragment. ”

“ ALMEIDA, JOHN (1572–1653) , Jesuit missionary, was a native of London, his real name being Meade. At the age of ten he was taken, apparently without the consent of his parents, to Viana in Portugal, where he was piously brought up in the family of Benedict da Rocha, with whom he afterwards made the voyage to Pernambuco in Brazil. There he abandoned mercantile pursuits, and was admitted a member of the Society of Jesus in 1592. ”

“ GARRETT, JOÃO BAPTISTA DA SILVA LEITÃO DE ALMEIDA, Visconde de Almeida-Garrett (1799–1854) , perhaps the greatest Portuguese poet since Camoens, was of Irish descent. Born in Oporto, his parents moved to the Quinta do Castello at Gaya when he was five years old. The French invasion of Portugal drove the family to the Azores, and Garrett made his first studies at Angra, beginning to versify at an early age under the influence of his uncle, a poet of the school of Bocage. ”

“ Almeida, Ciudad Rodrigo, and Badajoz, fell into the hands of the British general, then Lord Wellington. His successes were, however, obtained with great difficulty and loss of his soldiers, through the inadequate supply of material to his army by the home authorities. Every fortress which was not strategically abandoned by the French, was won by the skill of the general-in-chief, and the recklessness of life shown by his soldiers, in spite of the want of almost every appliance proper for an army. ”

“ Albuquerque, Almeida, and the heroic Pacheco, who like a fabulous Paladin, withstood whole armies with his single arm, and who died unregarded and unnoticed by his ungrateful sovereign in a hospital in Lisbon, were no more; the disinterestedness, the honour and humanity, that distinguished the administration of Albuquerque, was not imitated by his successors. He had taken Goa, and founded an empire, which the corrupt government of Portugal has caused us to inherit. The local governors too often sought only to enrich themselves ”

“ Sir John Moore to general Anstruther, at Almeida, dated Lisbon, October 12, 1808.
“A division under Beresford is marching upon Coimbra, and a part of it will proceed on to Oporto or not, as information is received from you, that the road from thence to Almeida is or is not practicable. Some officers of the Spanish engineers, employed in the quarter-master-general’s department, with commissaries, are sent from Madrid to obtain information on the subjects you will want with respect to roads, subsistence, &c. &c. from Almeida to Burgos.” ”

“ Again, a very pretty and innocent Portuguese ballad, ‘O Cego,’ Almeida-Garrett, III, 191, No 35, Braga, Romanceiro Geral, p. 147, No 55, and Cantos pop. do Archipelago Açoriano, p. 372, No 76 (all in Hartung, II, 103 ff.) , which Almeida-Garrett, quite extravagantly, supposed might be derived from ‘The Gaberlunyie-Man,’ brought home from Scotland by Portuguese sailors. There is an accidental similarity in one or two points with the Spanish ballad ‘Tiempo es, el caballero,’ Duran, I, 163, No 307, Primavera, II, 91, No 158. ”

“ Almeida might long have defied any efforts which the Portugueze or the Spaniards in that quarter could have made against it; it was, however, gladly delivered up, in conformity to the convention, and the garrison were marched to Porto, under a British escort, there to be embarked. ♦Tumults at Porto.♦ On the day of their arrival, they employed themselves in converting as much of their plunder as possible into money: purchasers were not wanting, and their market continued the whole day and night, horses being the ostensible articles. ”

“ The Army is all on the move, but I am ignorant of what the intention of our Generals is, whether to cross the Coa and raise [159] the siege of Almeida, on which place they have not yet that we know of opened their batteries, or whether by a diversion on this side favor the disturbances which have been reported to have arisen in Spain. Whatever it is, it is a forward movement. Everybody is in high spirits. ”

“ Constantly at its head, encouraging and directing it, he was within sight of every man in his division.
Masséna having laid waste the country in his retreat, the pursuit had to be relaxed on account of the difficulty of obtaining provisions. By 5 April 1811 the whole of Portugal, with the exception of Almeida, had been freed from French troops at the point of the bayonet, and the allied army invested Almeida. On 2 May Masséna advanced on Almeida. The battle of Fuentes d'Onoro followed on the 5th, when the principal share in the fighting once more fell to Picton's division. ”

“ It may be remarked, by the way, that nothing in all the geography of Portugal seems more astonishing than that there should not be a fourth alternative road, one down the long valley of the Zezere, which, running in a straight line from Belmonte to Abrantes, looks on the map as if it ought to be a main artery of communication, and seems to indicate the obvious road to Lisbon from Almeida, since a straight line drawn between these points would run along the river for some forty miles. ”

“ The death of his son disturbed his sound judgment and transformed his former opinions of a statesman to blood-thirsty furies, attested by the devastation of the coast of Guzerat. He yielded also to the intrigues and slanders of the captains who had come from Ormus, recently conquered by Albuquerque and ruled with the terrible wildness of his titanic enterprises. They scoffed at the viceroy who had just finished his term of office, and at Albuquerque, already appointed from Lisbon to succeed him; and treacherous accounts of the excesses of the wise Almeida had already reached the court. ”

“ Mean while, some of the Gentlemen, with a few of the most reputable Citizens, should proclaim Don John, Duke of Braganza, King of Portugal throughout the City; and that the People being rais'd by their Acclamations, they should make use of them to assist, wherever they found any Opposition. After this they resolv'd to meet on the first of December in the morning, some at Almeida's, some at Almada's, and the rest at Mendoza's House, where every Man should be furnish'd with necessary Arms. ”

“ From Almeida the ground slopes down sharply to the place of Craufurd’s celebrated skirmish. The town is not visible after the first mile of the descent towards the deep-sunk gorge through which the Coa cuts its way. The high-road is very bad for artillery, being steep, filled with great stones, and in many places shut in by high banks, which tower above it and make it narrow. The sharp turn at the end, where it descends to the river with a sudden twist, must have been specially tiresome to a force with cavalry and guns, compelled to a hasty retreat. ”

“ It is preferable to leave them on one side (although an anthology of some merit might easily be formed from their works) and to go back to that strange figure and very real poet of the first half of the nineteenth century, the Visconde de Almeida Garrett (1799-1854) . He was master of a peculiar and fascinating [146] style of Portuguese prose, he revived the Portuguese drama, he wrote long romantic poems and exquisitely finished short lyrics, and he collected old Portuguese romances, which, however, he could not refrain from retouching and adorning. ”

“ Of this danger he was well aware, but judged it worth risking, in view of the importance of holding the best possible position for covering the siege of Almeida. No battle-ground that was ever chosen is destitute of some fault. ”

“ He had moreover discharged more than 2,000 additional sick upon Portugal ere he began field operations: they were encumbering the hospitals of Almeida and Lamego when Cradock appeared. The 10,000 men fit for service were scattered all over Portugal: the two battalions, which had just come back from Spain, and the two others which had been too late to join Moore, were in the north, at Almeida and Lamego [231] . One battalion was in garrison at Elvas [232] . Six lay in Lisbon, as also did the whole of the cavalry and guns [233] : two were on the march from Abrantes to Almeida [234] . ”