D. Joao de Silveira was the first Portuguese commander* of an expedition to come to Bengal. In 15 17 he landed on the coast of Arakan whence he steered towards Chittagong staying in the Bay for a considerable portion of the year 15 18. He had come to Bengal not as an itinerant foreigner like the Venetian Nicolo Conti or the Bolognese Ludovico Di Varthema. Like the ancient Megasthenes, who was perhaps the first European to behold the Ganges, Silveira came to Bengal as the envoy of a European nation — of that small nation, shot into the western corner of Europe, geographically occupying an area of barely 34,000 square miles but historically great in civic feats and martial triumphs. He belonged to that race that had scurried the Moors out of Portugal and had hotly pursued them into Africa, conquering such possessions as Ceuta, Fez, Morroco, Macau, Mozambique, Congo, and Guinea ; that had even penetrated into their stronghold in Asia establishing their supremacy in such rich Eastern centres as Goa, Malacca, Ormuz, Cochin and Ceylon. The Portuguese visited Bengal when their long-cherished dreams about the creation of an Empire in the East were about to be realized. The dawn of the sixteenth century had ushered in a period of conquest as the close of the fifteenth century had witnessed the culmination of discovery. As early as 1494 Spain and Portugal, known together as Iberia to Herodotus and the Greeks, and called Hispania by the Romans, had already divided between themselves the eastern and western hemispheres.
A glance on this great movement that revolutionized an age and marked a new era in discovery and geographical expansion, revealing to man "more than half the globe"!
- Silveira commanded the first expedition to Bengal but he was not
the first Portuguese to come to Bengal, as stated by modern writers. Joao Coelho was in Chittagong before Silveira, and many Portuguese, specially from Malacca, had come to Bengal in Moorish ships as roving traders. Besides, the Portuguese who had settled in PipH (Ortssa) in 1514 had visited Hljiti (Western Bengal) about the same time.
