Introduction

The carreira da India was the term used by the Portuguese for the round voyage made by their Indiamen between Lisbon and Goa in days of sail. It was generally considered by contemporaries to be ‘without any doubt the greatest and most arduous of any that are known in the world’, ¹ although some would have excepted the annual voyage of the Manila galleon across the Pacific. In both cases the seasonal winds of the Tropics formed the determining factor, and the round voyage, including the stop-over at Goa or at Manila, took about a year and a half for the Portuguese ships and a year for the Spanish, under the most favourable conditions.