B - Notices of the Exiled Kings of the Maldives

Summary

In the course of his narrative Pyrard makes reference on several occasions to the family of titular Kings of the Maldives who resided in India under Portuguese protection. By the aid of the Portuguese archives at Lisbon and Goa, supplemented by other authorities, we are enabled to follow the fortunes of these exiled royalties during the century which elapsed between the revolution that cost them their throne and the death of the last representative of this legitimist line. They were in no sense Portuguese captives, for the first exile lost his throne fairly enough in an internal revolution, and threw himself upon the protection of the Portuguese. When he afterwards became a Christian and married a Portuguese wife, he forfeited any chances of restoration that might have been hoped from a counter-revolution. The Portuguese, after one endeavour to replace him, saw that it was impossible to impose a Christian king upon the Maldivians, and thereafter merely used the family claims as a lever to enforce the necessary supply of coir for their fleets. The individual princes on their part eked out inglorious, and not always reputable, lives as pensioners in the foreign land of which by intermarriages they became half-citizens. Somewhat similar cases have occurred in the history of British India; and the dispatches quoted before would probably find their counterpart in many filed in the Foreign Departments of our Indian Presidencies.