Everton History

Everything You Wanted To Know About Portugal (But Were Afraid To Ask)

I'd been thinking about writing something about Portugal and Brazil since the appointment of Marco Silva and the arrival of Portuguese speaking players like Bernard, Gomes and Richarlison

The roughly 47 different articles I have on the go at the moment can be classified into three groups.

The first group are the subjects where the timing is unimportant; they don't really need to be tied to a date or an anniversary. The second group are the ones like the commemorations of the Everton players who were killed in WW1, the 100th anniversaries of each one I missed completely. The third group are those articles like the ones for the players who died in WW2. The 75th anniversaries are still in the future, although I wouldn't bet your life savings that I'll have the research done in time to mark those dates either.

Every now and then something happens to move them from one group to another, often to bump them up the list to the top. This article is an example.

I'd been thinking about writing something about Portugal and Brazil since the appointment of Marco Silva and the arrival of Portuguese-speaking players like Bernard, Gomes and Richarlison. However, a piece of graffiti on one of the industrial units adjoining the Blue Base just off County Road jolted me into something as close as I get to action. It said “SILVER OUT”, and I'm assuming it wasn't a comment on holding the precious metal as an investment in these uncertain times. I wouldn't think many hedge-fund managers live in Walton, so I think it is a spelling error and refers to our Marco; or our former Marco, as he now is.

Before the appointment of Silva, Goodison connections to Portugal and Portuguese speakers were few. Pele and Eusebio graced the ground in the 1966 World Cup, and there was the Brazilian lad that Howard Kendall tried to sign whose name escapes me. The Mike Walker - Agent Johnson period saw the fiasco over trying to sign Muller and more recently there were the Manuel Fernandes cameos and the signing of Jo, which were little more than footnotes.

Everton's short period under Portuguese management is in sharp contrast to the relationship between the UK, and before it England, and Marco Silva's country of origin. This goes back to a treaty of perpetual friendship signed in 1373, so 646 years up to the date Marco Silva's reign came to an end; it is the oldest active treaty in the world. Written in Mediaeval Latin it includes the following words, committing the two countries to -

true, faithful, constant, mutual, and perpetual friendships, unions, alliances, and leagues of sincere affection.

The king of England at the time was Edward III and it arose from the involvement of England in the dynastic conflicts in the Iberian Peninsula during a lull in the long struggle with France we now call the 100 Years War. The prime mover was Edward's son John, Duke of Lancaster, usually referred to as John of Gaunt. Gaunt is a corruption of his birthplace, Ghent, in what is now Belgium but was then part of the Duchy of Burgundy.

John's second wife was a princess of Castile, the northern kingdom in what is now Spain and at one point John claimed the Castilian crown through her. Portugal was regularly in conflict with neighbouring Castile and the English signed the treaty to gain an ally in the area. The relationship was cemented when John of Gaunt's daughter, Philippa of Lancaster married King John the First of Portugal. John, or Joà£o in Portuguese, was an illegitimate son of the previous king and, with English help, took the crown to prevent Portugal falling into Castilian hands.

Queen Philippa would have nine children with John, six of whom survived to adulthood, including Edward or Duarte who succeeded his father, and Henry or Henrique, known to modern historians as Henry the Navigator. Philippa's children are still referred to as the Inclita Geraçà£o — the Illustrious Generation — by Portuguese historians, while Philippa's brother, Henry Bolingbroke, would become King Henry IV of England and found the Royal House of Lancaster. His namesake and nephew, Henry, would have the most far-reaching influence on Portugal as he is credited with starting Portugal's rise to become the first of the great European maritime empires.

When Henry was born in 1397, Europe was largely cut off from Africa and Asia by the Ottoman Turks in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Moors and Barbary pirates in North Africa. The Algarve had only been wrested from the Moors in 1249, creating what is now Portugal, while Andalucà­a in southern Spain would remain in Moorish hands until 1492. Algarve comes from al-Gharb, the Arabic for ‘the west'.

Henry sent explorers down the Atlantic coast of North Africa to gain direct access to the wealth of tropical Africa beyond the Sahara. Little was known of what lay beyond Cape Bodajor which is 130 miles south-east of Grand Canaria, indeed for mediaeval sailors, the cape had a terrible reputation as the end of the world. Sailing ships hugging the coast found strong winds prevented them turning north and shallow water made the area treacherous. To the superstitious mediaeval mind, the area beyond the cape was the realm of sea monsters.

Henry ordered his captains to overcome the superstitions and, in 1434, Gil Eames was able to pass Cape Bodajor at the second attempt. Over the next 25 years, the Portuguese were able to explore the African coast down to where the coast runs east-west in the Gulf of Guinea. They were helped by the development of improved navigational instruments and a new type of sailing ship, the caravel, which could sail much closer to the wind and was better suited to the open ocean. Henry's sailors discovered that, if they sailed west out into the Atlantic, they could pick up winds that would take them back to Europe; it was a circulation of winds and currents that they called the Volta do Mar, literally ‘the return of the wind'. As they exploited this, they discovered Madeira in 1419 and the Azores in 1427.

Henry died in 1460, but the pace of exploration did not slacken; if anything, it accelerated. By the 1480s, the African coast beyond the equator had been explored and, in 1488, Bartolomeu Dias rounded what is now the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa. Ten years later, Vasco da Gama reached India, and between 1519 and 1521 the Portuguese explorer, Ferdinand Magellan, led a Spanish fleet in the first circumnavigation of the globe. By 1542, the Portuguese had trading posts all over the Indian Ocean, in China and had even reached Nagasaki in Japan. Equally important was the discovery of Brazil by Gonçalo Coelho and Bartolomeu Dias in 1500, although it is possible that the coast had been sighted earlier by Portuguese ships using the Volta do Mar to find favourable winds when returning from the Indian Ocean.

Although Henry the Navigator hardly left Portugal during his lifetime, his importance in the history of exploration and of Portugal is pivotal. That significance is recognised on Merseyside with a statue outside the Palm House in Sefton Park, alongside other great explorers like Columbus and James Cook.

But the first half of the 16th century marked the high-water mark of the Portuguese empire overseas. In 1580, the Portuguese and Spanish crowns were merged due to one of the many fortuitous marriages by the Hapsburg dynasty who dominated Europe. This meant that Portugal was now in conflict with England and, in 1588, it provided one of the five squadrons of the Spanish Armada which assembled in Lisbon before sailing north.

One of the causes of the war was Elizabeth I's support for Spain's Dutch rebels, whose sea power was turned on the vulnerable Portuguese empire from 1602. Much of Portugal's Indian Ocean possessions were seized, including the Cape colony in Southern Africa, leading to the settlement that would become the Boer Republic. The Dutch also made a determined effort to occupy northern Brazil. In 1640, the Portuguese took advantage of the Spanish being massively overstretched with war in the Netherlands and Germany, to begin a struggle to regain their dependencies.

The period of the Commonwealth of England (1649 to 1660) and the post-restoration reign of Charles II saw tensions with the Dutch result in three naval wars between England and the Netherlands. Not for the first time, Portugal had common cause with the English, having been in conflict with the Netherlands for most of the century. This resulted in Charles II marrying the Portuguese Princess Catherine of Braganza in 1662.

As part of the marriage contract, English troops, many veterans of the Parliamentary New Model Army, helped the Portuguese finally force the Spanish to recognise Portugal's independence. The marriage also gave England a brief foothold in North Africa with the gift of the port of Tangier, but of much more importance was the ceding to England of the Portuguese trading base off Bombay (now Mumbai) in India. Charles II rented this to the East India Company in 1668, and it became a key part of the company's operations in the sub-continent.

Catherine was unpopular in England due to her Catholic faith and her husband was serially unfaithful to her with a string of mistresses. She was unable to provide him with an heir and would eventually return to Portugal after Charles's death, but remained a supporter of close ties between the two countries. This relationship would be maintained through the wars of the 17th Century with Portugal mostly supporting her old ally against France. This continued with the Revolutionary wars against France and led to French forces occupying Portugal in 1807, with the Portuguese royal family having to flee to Brazil in Royal Navy vessels. The British landed a force under Sir Arthur Wellesley who defeated the French and liberated Lisbon.

Over the next 6 years, a seesaw struggle took place with a combined British and Portuguese force defeating the French in a series of battles but unable to drive them from the Iberian peninsula. The French would invade Portugal twice more, finally being stopped short of Lisbon by a defensive system built by the British and Portuguese in the hills north of the city called the lines of Torre Vedras. With his Portuguese base secured, Spain in revolt and following Napoleon's catastrophic invasion of Russia in 1812, Wellesley was able to liberate Spain and invade southern France in 1814.

The 99 years that followed Napoleon's final defeat at Waterloo in 1815 had a few of what Mr Moshiri would call 'bumps in the road' for Anglo-Portuguese relations but, with the outbreak of the First World War, the old allies were again on the same side. German attacks on Portugal's African colonies and U-boat raids on their Atlantic islands resulted in Germany declaring war on 9 March 1916.

In April the following year, Portugal sent two divisions to the Western Front and they were put into the line in a quiet sector near the village of Neuve Chapelle. They suffered badly from neglect from home and the northern European climate, and were about to be withdrawn from the front line on a very foggy day, 9 April 1918, when they and the neighbouring British divisions were struck by the second of the German Spring Offensives. The Portuguese have long been blamed for the German breakthrough that day, but recent detailed research suggests that they were not wholly to blame. The initial breakthrough took place just to the north where an exhausted British division was in the line, and the Portuguese would have been attacked from in front and from the flank.

Some of the Portuguese troops fought hard in the face of the German attack, most notably a man from northern Portugal called Anibal Milhais. He was a Lewis machine-gunner and distinguished himself by covering the retreat of Scots and Portuguese troops alike in the face of heavy enemy fire until his ammunition ran out. He then escaped capture and evaded the Germans for 72 hours, eventually reaching the Allied lines with a Scots major who he had rescued; all the time carrying his 28-pound gun. Two months later, he performed a similar feat covering the withdrawal of Belgian troops and was awarded Portugal's highest military honour.

At the ceremony, his commanding officer described him as one in a million men, and he became known as Soldier Millions, a play on words as his name, Milhais is close to the Portuguese for millions - Milhàµes. Despite his celebrity, he was faced with serious poverty on his return to Portugal, despite his name being added to his home village. He emigrated to Brazil, where the Portuguese expatriate community recognised his exploits and raised enough money to allow him to return to his home. The government was shamed into providing a small pension which allowed him to support his family until his death in 1970.

Brazil had been independent of Portugal since 1822, part of the wave of South American independence movements triggered by the problems of Spain and Portugal in the Napoleonic Wars. Prior to this, it had been a colony producing first sugar, later rubber, and also saw a gold rush from the late 17th Century in the south-eastern province of Minas Gerais (which means general mines). From the late 18th Century, coffee began to be grown and, by the middle of the 19th Century, Brazil had become the world's largest producer, a position it still holds.

Brazil had also entered the First World War on the Allied side and provided naval patrols in the mid-Atlantic after Brazilian shipping had been sunk by German U-boats. In the Second World War, Brazil entered the war on the Allied side in 1943 and provided a division that fought in Italy. Portugal remained neutral, playing a delicate diplomatic game to keep Spain out of the war on the German side and avoid provoking the Germans to invade. By 1943, the threat was sufficiently reduced to allow the Allies to use the Azores as an air base for the Battle of the Atlantic. Winston Churchill, as ever with a view to history, invoked the original treaty in the House of Commons:

"I have an announcement to make to the House arising out of the treaty signed between this country and Portugal in the year 1373 between His Majesty King Edward III and King Ferdinand and Queen Eleanor of Portugal."

The bases made a significant contribution and, in 1983, Portugal would again give support to their ancient ally during the Falklands War. By this time, the friendly relations between the two nations included millions of Britons visiting Portugal and its islands for holidays.

The more I look at Portugal and Brazil, the more interesting they get. There is the fascinating question of why an Anglo-Saxon village name is a common boys' name in Brazil, something that has been raised on ToffeeWeb before. Let's say this research is ongoing, as is trying to understand how Portugal and Brazil relate to each other through language and culture. The parallel between Britain and America is something I'd like to know more about.

As for Everton, the Portuguese and Brazilian players seem to have settled in really well, and seem to ‘get' what Everton is about. Hopefully they will play a key role for years to come, and they and the fans will have what the 1373 treaty calls true, faithful, constant, mutual, and perpetual friendship… and leagues of sincere affection.

Pete Jones — Copyright 2020.

This is dedicated to all our Portuguese and Brazilian players, indeed to all our Portuguese and Brazilian fans. Most especially it is dedicated to Andre Gomes and his ankle; it's great to see him back in training. Come back soon amigo.

Acknowledgments

Alison Jones

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