
Illustrations: Paul Aitchison
In the courtyard of the Mural Art Museum in Thrissur, Kerala, I was staring at the tombstones lying around, scattered like garbage. The names on the granite slabs were strange, the images sculpted on them exotic and the script hard to decipher. A slab with a Jolly Roger-like skull and cross-bones belonged to Francisco Rodrigues, maybe a sea pirate; another to Mateus Arruda, a vicar; then Antonio Raposo and his heirs; elsewhere, someone from the Costa family; and, in a corner, Jorge Fernandes, who died on 22 December 1565.
Senior archaeologist S Hemachandran suggests that the stones were brought in from Kochi in the 1930s. Around 1925-26, Sir Robert Bristow, a harbour engineer who built the Kochi Port, recovered them from the seabed while dredging the harbour to create a deeper haven for ships. Kochi’s placid backwaters had long provided a safe berth in tempestuous times for ships that came from all over the world in search of lucrative spices.

Sir Robert Bristow
Following the footsteps of Vasco da Gama, Portuguese explorer Pedro Alvares Cabral had started his journey east with a fleet of ten ships, 1500 men and a fine collection of muskets and machetes. He arrived in Kochi in December of 1500. In very little time, the Portuguese established themselves as the biggest power on the west coast. When they first arrived, the town was small and humble. The houses were built with mud walls and the roofs thatched with leaves. Even the king sat on a mat made of grass. The Portuguese settled down, built forts and churches, married native women and fathered a mixed race they called mestiços.
The 163-year-long Portuguese rule only came to an end in January of 1663. A Dutch admiral, Rickloff van Goens, led a successful attack on his fellow Europeans. The Dutch had captured the island of Vypeen, north of the mainland, two years earlier. They proceeded inland. The bloody Dutch siege of Kochi lasted eight long days and nights. Admiral Goens set up his headquarters at the Portuguese Bishop’s House. He proceeded to fortify the Roman Catholic Church to station his 700-strong force. When the town fell, the Portuguese left for Goa. One of the churches they left behind was converted into a warehouse, another into a Protestant church. Only one was left untouched for the Catholic folk. Bricks and stones from the destruction went into the construction of palaces, houses, and the Dutch fort of Neuw Oranje. The elaborately carved tombstones of Portuguese traders and sailors that once decorated the churchyards were thrown into the harbour, it is assumed.
Centuries later, in 1920, the British decided to bring in an engineer to develop a major commercial and strategic port. Bristow, who spent time studying the currents in the estuary, had found a rock-like formation of sediments that prevented big ships from entering the harbour. The dredger Lord Willingdon was called in to clear up the channel. In his book, The Cochin Saga, Bristow recalls what he saw as they worked the pumps: “…large quantities of miscellanea such as a jettisoned cargo, bundles of hoop iron, cannon balls, masses of tangled wire rope, remains of old boats, heaps of stone ballast, and, as we were to find, much in the way of specie, the coins rattling through the pipeline in showers which, alas, it was quite impossible to save before the tremendous discharge of the pipeline scattered them and buried them in its own spoil… I often stood on the rounded surface of the pipe to hear and feel with the soles of my feet the coins as they passed through; there was no mistaking what they were: relics of many a wreck or fights in the days of the Portuguese or Dutch perhaps.”
Gravestones were brought in from the sea, some broken and damaged. Bristow recalls that the few they gathered from the harbour were sent to a museum for identification and safe keeping. They were anything but safe. In the next nine decades, they were shifted from place to place, handled roughly and finally dumped in the courtyard of the museum in Thrissur. Only one tombstone remained intact: an imposing granite pillar standing erect on a pedestal, with an intricate coat-of-arms sculpted on top alongside early-16th-century Portuguese script. This monument, however, is thought to have arrived from a village near Kodungallur, an ancient town north of Kochi.
Scholars have ignored these stones. Old transcripts from Bristow’s time seem to have been lost. The Government Archives at Kochi and Calicut drew blanks. It was up to Rafael Moreira – a historian at the New University of Lisbon – to read the script and decipher the names. The transcript from the only pillar that remains intact reads: “Felipe Perestrelo da Mesquita, fidalgo [nobleman] of the house of the King our Lord, firme [superior] of the mosque [school or place of worship] of Dona Beatriz Natover, native of them. Mestre escola [school teacher] and her vicar…”