The search to understand the motives behind Portuguese overseas expansion has long preoccupied historians of the early modern period. Numerous articles, surveys and studies have addressed its economic incentives, achievements and legacies to the point where the historiography has obscured a holistic understanding of the forces at play in the early sixteenth century. Moreover, in this field of study overseas policy has been set apart from the domestic political and social climate, giving the impression that events taking place in Southeast Asia were foremost the concern of the policy makers in Lisbon. D. Manuel (1495–1521) who was king of Portugal and driving force behind the expansion during its arguably most crucial period, was neither warrior king nor astute entrepreneur, but rather the proponent of ambitious political reforms. The tenuous nature of his succession and his relationship with the highest stratum of nobility demands that scholarly attention focus on domestic politics during the so-called ‘Vasco da Gama era’. This paper contends that placation of the grandes (titled elites and their families) was D. Manuel's primary motivation behind continued expansion and conquest, superseding aspirations to economic and imperial power. It asserts that in an attempt to defuse his legacy of political instability left to him by his predecessor, D. Manuel manufactured a culture of chivalry that was linked to the overseas expansion and provided venues for noble combat away from the political centre.

In July 1752, two days after their arrival at a roadstead in Saint Augustine's Bay on the south-western coast of Madagascar, ‘theGreat Island’, two junior merchants of the Dutch East India Company ship Schuylenburch headed for the residence of king Ratsimandresy (Ramanrasse in the Dutch sources). They were Philip Boomgaard and Dirk Westerhoff, responsible for commercial affairs and on a trade mission for the Company. On the way to the king's residence, about two miles inland from ‘Toulier’ (Toliara), they were welcomed by Ramanrasse's son, ‘crovmprince Revenoe’, and they offered him a few gifts they had brought along. However, upon taking a closer look at the presents Revenoe disdainfully threw astring of beads on the ground replying ‘that the Dutch were nothing more than traffickers, and that he expected them upon their arrival to present him with proper gifts just like the British and French traders that frequented his father's court were accustomed to do’.

The Gulf of Guinea, home to numerous ethnic nationalities, stretches from the Republic of Senegal in the west to Nigeria in the east. There have been population movements and socio-economic interactions within and across the coastal belt over the past millennium. In response to their environment, the people have been engaged in fishing, salt-making, commerce and boat making. Fishing, the pivot of their economy, has taken the leading fishing groups – the Fante and Ewe (Keta) of the Republic of Ghana, and the Izon (Ijaw), Itsekiri and Ilaje of Nigeria – all over the entire West African coastline, where they have established many settlements.

The first reference to a ‘Sea of Melayu’ is from an Arabic document dated c. 1000, which noted that travellers ‘reaching the Sea of Melayu, were approaching the area of China’. While the location of the Sea of Melayu is not specified, the practice of naming a sea after a dominant people surrounding its shores suggests that this particular body of water must have been the Straits of Melaka. This is clear in the only other known reference to the use of this name, which is found in Description of Malacca, Meridional India and Cathay written in 1613 by Emanuel Godinho de Eredia, a Eurasian Jesuit born in Portuguese Melaka. Eredia refers to the Sea of Melayu as that ‘land-enclosed sea between the mainland of Ujontana [Malay Peninsula] and the Golden Chersonese [Sumatra]’. He was clearly referring to the Straits of Melaka, though it was obviously not yet called that by his contemporaries. Eredia's description of that ‘land-enclosed sea’ clearly reveals a commonly held assumption of the greater significance of a land mass over a body of water. But for Malays and many other sea and riverine peoples, the focus was on water, not land, and entities were formed by seas and rivers joined by short land passages.

After a lecture I once gave in Boston on Spaniards' treatment of the indigenous peoples of their empire, the mayor rose from the audience to ask me whether I thought English behaviour towards the Irish was not worse. The strength of the Irish legacy in Boston is one of the many signs that make you feel, wherever you go in New England, that you are on the shore of a pond and that the same cultures that you left behind on one side of it have spread to the other with remarkably little change, and remarkably little loss of identity, along the way. In Providence, Rhode Island, the only resident foreign consul is Portuguese; you can buy sweet bread for breakfast or pasteis de Tentúgaltor tea. A parking lot a few blocks from Brown University is marked with the sign, ‘Do Not Park Here Unless You Are Portuguese’. Ancestral homes, ancestral grievances are easily recalled. There are similar patches of Irishness and Portuguese identity dotted here and there all along this coast, mirroring home and looking back across the ocean. They are surrounded with other peoples’ transatlantic reminiscences and continuities. New England is a seaboard civilization, a narrow, sea-soaked coast with a culture shaped by maritime outreach; but, more than that, it is part of a civilization of two seaboards which face each other.