Garcia de Orta

• 1. Introduction

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  Garcia de Orta sailed out of the Tagus river in March 1534 carrying a set of questions that European medicine had never properly answered. What were the true sources of the spices and drugs that flowed from the East? Which ancient authorities had simply been wrong? On the island of Goa, far from the lecture halls of Salamanca where he had trained, he would spend the rest of his working life pursuing those answers.

  He was born in Castelo de Vide, probably in 1501, the son of a merchant whose family carried a secret that could get them killed. His parents were Spanish Jews, descendants of those expelled from Spain by Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492 and then forcibly converted to Christianity in Portugal in 1497. They were called Cristãos Novos, New Christians, and the derogatory term marranos. Some of them kept their old faith hidden.

  By 1563, Garcia had produced a book unlike any that had come before: Colóquios dos simples e drogas da India, the earliest European treatise on the medicinal and economic plants of India. But his achievement came at a cost that would only become fully visible after his death in 1568, when the machinery of the Goa Inquisition turned its attention to everything he had left behind.

• 2. A Family Under Watch

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  Fernando and Isabella's expulsion decree of 1492 set in motion a chain of migrations that eventually produced a physician in Goa. Garcia's parents fled Spain for Portugal, carrying with them a faith they were soon forced to publicly renounce. The forced conversion of 1497 gave them Christian names and Christian identities, but not Christian convictions. A friendly neighbor at Castelo de Vide, the nobleman Dom Fernão de Sousa, Lord of Labruja, may have helped the family, and possibly nudged Garcia's father toward investing in his son's education.

  Garcia studied medicine, arts, and philosophy at the Universities of Alcalá de Henares and Salamanca in Spain. He graduated and returned to Portugal in 1525, two years after his father died. He built a medical practice first in his hometown, then from 1526 in Lisbon, where he eventually held a lectureship at the university and became a royal physician to John III of Portugal.

  By the early 1530s the Portuguese Inquisition was gathering force. Garcia apparently feared what that meant for a man of his background. He was able to evade the ban on emigration that applied to New Christians and secured a position as Chief Physician aboard the fleet of Martim Afonso de Sousa, that same nobleman's son who had grown up near Garcia's childhood home. The connection that began as a neighborly acquaintance in Castelo de Vide would become the relationship that shaped the rest of Garcia's life, and may have shielded his family from the worst of what came later.

• 3. Goa and Its Markets

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  Garcia reached Goa in September 1534 and traveled with Sousa on various military campaigns before settling there in 1538. Goa at that moment was one of the most richly connected trading ports in the world, and for a physician-naturalist that was an extraordinary advantage. Spice merchants, traders, and doctors arrived from across southern Asia and the Indian Ocean coasts, and Garcia met them all.

  He was confident in Portuguese, Spanish, Hebrew, Latin, Greek, and Arabic, though he did not know Sanskrit. That range of languages let him gather knowledge from traditional medicine practitioners across several regions of India. Correspondents and agents sent him seeds and plants from distant places he could not visit himself. He traded in spices, drugs, and precious stones, and maintained both a laboratory and a botanical garden.

  His medical practice grew prominent. He served as physician to Burhan Nizam Shah I of the Nizam Shahi dynasty of Ahmadnagar, and concurrently to several successive Portuguese Viceroys and governors of Goa. That dual role, serving both an Indian sultan and the Portuguese colonial administration, placed him at the intersection of two medical worlds. He was influenced by Yunani medicine as well as Ayurveda, though he cited Galen, al-Rhazi, and Ibn-Sina more often. His approach was to try European methods first, and only turn to local ones when those failed.

  In 1554-1555, the King of Portugal through Viceroy Dom Pedro Mascarenhas granted Garcia a lifelong lease on the Ilha da Boa Vida, the Island of the Good Life, which later became part of Bombay. The only condition was that he improve the place. He built a manor house with a large garden and what was probably an excellent library.

• 4. The Colóquios

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  The printing press had only arrived in Goa in 1556, seven years before Garcia's book appeared. The Colóquios dos simples e drogas da India was published in 1563 and ran to 217 pages. It was only the fifth European book ever printed in Goa. The printer, thought to be João de Endem, produced a first edition so full of typographical errors that the errata ran to twenty pages, ending with a note that the list was probably still incomplete.

  The book was structured as a dialogue between Garcia and a traditional doctor named Ruano, a form that was common at the time for navigating the tension between established authority and newer observations. Garcia used it to challenge received wisdom directly. He was the first European to describe the symptoms of several Asian tropical diseases, notably cholera. He performed an autopsy on a cholera victim, the first recorded autopsy in India. Before his book appeared, tamarind was thought in Europe to come from a palm tree. Garcia corrected that. His work also covered plants of what he called forensic importance, including Datura, which he reported was used by thieves and robbers to poison their victims.

  His independence from ancient authority ran deep. He cited Galen and Ibn-Sina and Averroes throughout, but he questioned their assumptions and offered alternative hypotheses. His critique of the German botanist Leonhart Fuchs was blunt. He wrote that Fuchs "knew little of physic, and still less of things to save his soul, being a heretic condemned for Lutheranism," and added that although medicine had nothing to do with Christian religion, he nonetheless found the author repugnant.

  The preface included a verse by Luís de Camões, who had worked briefly in Macau before returning to Goa in 1561. In his own famous poem Os Lusíadas, Camões later played on the word Orta, which referred to his friend and also meant garden in Portuguese. Garcia dedicated the book to Dom Francisco Coutinho, Count of Redondo, Viceroy of Goa from 1561 to 1564, and to Martim de Sousa. He explained in the preface that he had deliberately written in Portuguese rather than Latin, so that traders and local people could actually use it.

• 5. Spread Across Europe

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  Carolus Clusius came across Garcia's book by accident in early 1564 and immediately recognized what he had found. He translated it into Latin, reorganizing the dialogue into a condensed reference form, and the resulting text circulated across Europe through multiple editions: 1567, 1574, 1579, 1582, 1584, 1593, 1595, and 1605-6. An Italian translation by Annibal de Briganti appeared in 1576, with further editions in 1582, 1589, and 1616.

  Cristóvão da Costa published a related work in Spanish in 1578 from Burgos, the Tractado de las drogas y medicinas de las Indias orientales, which Clements Markham, who produced the English translation, considered largely derived from Garcia's work. Others pointed to significant differences. Da Costa's edition included illustrations of Indian plants that became part of how European readers visualized the pharmacopoeia Garcia had described.

  Garcia's influence spread through the botanical literature of the following generations. His work shaped the herbals and botanical writings of Juan Fragoso, Nicolas Monardes, Hendrik van Rheede, and Jacobus Bontius. The man who had worried about the Portuguese Inquisition enough to leave Lisbon had, through one book, become a standard reference for European medicine's engagement with Asian plants.

• 6. Persecution and Posthumous Ruin

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  An inquisitorial court opened in Goa in 1565, three years after Garcia's book was published. Garcia died in 1568 without having suffered seriously from the persecution that was intensifying around him. His sister Catarina was not so fortunate. She was arrested as a Jew in 1568 and burned at the stake in Goa on the 25th of October, 1569. A confession from Garcia's brother-in-law, made after Garcia's death, stated that Garcia had privately maintained that the Law of Moses was the true law.

  On the 4th of December, 1580, Garcia was posthumously convicted of Judaism. His remains were exhumed and burned, together with an effigy representing him, at an auto-da-fé. A statistical summary of the Goa Inquisition covering the years 1560 to 1812 records that a total of 57 people were burned in the flesh and 64 in effigy, crypto-Jews, crypto-Muslims, and others among them.

  During Garcia's lifetime, his mother and sisters had been arrested and briefly interrogated in Portugal, but they were probably shielded by Martim Afonso de Sousa, who served as Governor-General of Portuguese India from 1542 to 1545. Garcia married a wealthy cousin named Brianda de Solis in 1543, an unhappy union that produced two daughters. His mother and two of his sisters managed to join him in Goa in 1549. What happened to his daughters after his death is not known.

  The manor on the Island of the Good Life that Garcia had developed passed through several hands after him. By the time Bombay was formally transferred from Portugal to England, the property was occupied by Dona Ignez de Miranda, widow of Dom Rodrigo de Monsanto. It was in that house, the one Garcia had built, that Humphrey Cooke signed the treaty transferring Bombay to the English on the 18th of February, 1665.

• 7. Memory and Memorials

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  Portugal issued a postal stamp commemorating Garcia de Orta in 1963, exactly four hundred years after the Colóquios first appeared in Goa. In 1971, his portrait appeared on the 20 Escudos bank note. Memorials recognizing his work stand in both Portugal and India.

  In Lisbon, a public garden carries his name: the Jardim Garcia de Orta. The Escola Secundária Garcia de Orta in Porto and the Hospital Garcia de Orta in Almada continue the same recognition. In Goa, the municipal garden of Panjim, built in 1855 and renovated in 2010, has been named for him. It faces the main city square and the church of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception.

  His name has been Latinized in various ways across the centuries. Some works render him as Garcias ab Horto; French texts have called him de la Huerta or Dujardin, all variations on the Orta that Camões once used as a pun meaning garden. The first edition of 1563, full of errors and printed by a press that had barely found its footing in Goa, was by 1890 thought to survive in only about six copies, a rarity that belies the reach the book achieved through Clusius's Latin translation.