Recently I came across a book, A Kind of Absence, written a good while back by João de Veiga Coutinho. At the onset let me admit candidly that I don't know enough about the author to form an opinion about his personal convictions or the lenses with which he might have viewed life, but this paragraph from the book made me think.

"In Portugal," Coutinho writes, "the sea is a call, an invitation to go beyond, a consciously embraced vocation. In India till very recently black water, dangerous and forbidden. In Goa an indifferent limit sometimes crossed but without the quickening pulse of excitement. Were our emigrants and more specially the shippies, prodded by the spirit of adventure, as some have claimed or by dire necessity? No comparison can be made."

It is this sort of Lusitanian reverence that galls me for it shows a marked lack of knowledge of our own history as humble as it may have been. Perhaps our history books are not peppered with grand names of explorers and conquerors but then again, much of it hasn't been written by us. When the Portuguese first arrived in the Indian waters they found their own ship captains were unable to chart the waters and had to depend on Arab, Gujarati and Malabar pilots who had a more profound nautical knowledge of currents and trade winds and from the time of Albuquerque onwards, the bulk of crew was made up of Asian seamen and black slaves.

Given the prominence of seafaring Gujaratis in Goa, a whole street in the city at Old Goa named after them, it is highly unlikely that Goans did not board the ships alongwith these daring Gujaratis to venture into the Gulf waters and down the coast of Africa into Mombasa and perhaps even beyond. The sea was hardly "black water" dangerous and forbidding. It was a way of life in fact it sustained life itself. It made possible, resettlement of Goans from the hilly interiors of Ponda and Sattari to the coastal plains along the Salcete and Bardez talukas. In Verna for instance according to folklore, there are Hindu Brahmins who eat fish. This itself tells us something that the sea and the Goan have been on familiar terms for a long time.

Much latter our tarvottis would earn the distinction of being stellar seamen on British ships, so much so that British captains refused to go out to sea without their favourite Goan stewards. When the British navy tried replacing Goans with Sri Lankans they soon had to abandon this policy because they found Goans to be much more trustworthy. Perhaps, our tarvottis did venture out to sea from dire necessity but that doesn't take away from their courage. It doesn't make them any less than those Portuguese who also ventured out to sea so as to return to Lisbon with ships laden with bounty from the East Indies. Wasn't that necessity and self-preservation as well? It was hardly a "vocation" or an "invitation" or a desire to explore the world that took them to the stormy waters of the East.

The sea is a treacherous and unfaithful mistress. It has taken our men away from us for centuries but it has made our stronger. It has made us adventurers, replaced a sense of fatalism with the knowledge that we can overcome obstacles. We cannot take away the Goan from the the sea, for if we do, he will wither away. Nor can we take away from him, the glory of his long and tempestuous affair with it.