History of the Portuguese in Bengal

Mr. Campos has collected some interesting facts relative to the commercial, political and religious enterprises of the Portuguese in Bengal. The work done by the Portuguese as pioneers of European commerce in this part of India has not, perhaps, been sufficiently recognized, for it may truly be said that they paved the way for the commercial ventures of the Dutch, the English and other European nations. Mr. Campos quotes an array of authorities in support of his account, which shows that the Portuguese, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, occupied a position in Bengal comparable to that of the British in the middle of the eighteenth, with their settlements and factories, not only at the principal ports, Hughli and Chittagong, but at many other places in Eastern and Western Bengal, and as far up the Ganges as Patna. The earliest British mercantile adventurers in Bengal and the adjacent countries established themselves, naturally, at places where the Portuguese had already found openings for European commerce. Some of the Portuguese settlements in Bengal became virtually independent of the Mughal rulers of India, being directly subject, for a time, to the jurisdiction of the Portuguese Government of Ceylon.