History of Orissa from the Earliest Times to the British Period v2.c37.103

v2.c37.103

The advent of European merchants into Orissa took place in this period, the earliest of them being of Portuguese nationality. No records exist about the doings of the Portuguese in Orissa, but from the English accounts of the first venture of the merchants of that nation into Orissa it appears that they were sufficiently powerful on the eastern coast even after the fall of Hooghly in 1632. Their principal port was Pipli on the Suvarṇarekhā, the very site of which has been forgotten. "Pipli was once the most important port on the Orissa coast and contained settlements of the Portuguese and Dutch. The Portuguese settled there in 1599 and for many years it was a centre of that power. Bruton writing in 1683 describes it as 'a port-town of the Portugals, where the Portugals are resident; and it was a great slave mart where the Arakanese pirates brought their prisoners.' Bernier (1660) mentions it as the port from which he went in a seven-oared scallop to Ogouli (Hooghly), a journey which took him 9 days. The capture of Hooghly in 1632 and their expulsion from Hijli in 1636, destroyed the power of the Portuguese, but even as late as 1723 a Jesuit missionary, Father Laynez.