The Orfas d’El-Rei, meaning ‘The orphans of the king’, were Portuguese female orphans who were sent out from Portugal to its many colonies in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to try and boost the size of the colonial population and for diplomatic reasons. The policy was adopted in light of the tendency for those who migrated overseas to European colonies in the early modern era to be overwhelmingly male. This was not a wholly uncommon method of colonial engineering in early modern times and governments in England and France used similar methods to boost the number of female colonists in the Americas in the seventeenth century, though the phenomenon possibly originated in Portugal. There are numerous well-attested instances of the Orfas d’El-Rei being sent to the Portuguese colonies in India and Brazil. Many people in these regions today will be descended to one degree or another from the women in question.[1]
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Orfas d'El-Rei chronology of events
The Kingdom of Portugal led the way in the early stages of the European Age of Exploration. It was the Portuguese who explored down the western coast of Africa throughout the fifteenth century and finally discovered the sea route to India in the 1490s. By the middle of the century they had established colonial outposts in India at places like Goa, in Malacca in the East Indies and at various places in western and eastern Africa, what would later become Mozambique and Angola, while Brazil had also been identified as part of the Portuguese colonial empire under the terms of the Treaty of Tordesillas.[2]
Early on in the age of European overseas colonialism, it was often difficult to attract people to the idea of setting off overseas to settle in distant and unknown lands. Spain did not have this problem, as the discovery of extensive gold and silver mines in Mexico, Peru and Bolivia made migration to their territories in the Americas more attractive. The territories involved also lay in regions which could be reached quickly from Spain and where the climate was similar to the home country. But for others it was more difficult, particularly so for Portugal. Depending on the weather encountered, it could take six to twelve months to voyage from Portugal to India. Moreover, the lands the Portuguese had acquired there were little more than coastal trading outposts and forts and land was not widely available. Unsurprisingly, in such an environment it was primarily men who set off for the Portuguese colonies, most of them soldiers, sailors or merchants.[3]
The policy of the Orfas d’El-Rei (Orphans of the King) was developed in response to this situation. It specifically aimed to boost the number of Portuguese women in the colonies. The first such instances of Portuguese female orphans being sent abroad date to the 1540s, when some girls were sent to the coastal colonies Portugal had established at Goa and elsewhere in India. These became associated with royal directives from King John III, the ruler of Portugal at the time, and so became known as the Orfas d’El-Rei in popular accounts. Some were married to Portuguese settlers there, though others became the wives of local Indian rulers. There was an element of social engineering here, the hope being that any children from the union might be raised as Christians, and indeed there is evidence of some of the Indian rulers in question converting.[4] Later the primary region to which the Orfas d’El-Rei were sent was Brazil. The policy dwindled over time, particularly so following the discovery of gold in Brazil in the late seventeenth century and the beginning of the Brazilian Gold Rush. With gold drawing hundreds of thousands of settlers to Brazil in the eighteenth century, there was no longer any need to coerce people into settling here and there is no mention of such methods from the middle of the eighteenth century onwards.[5]
The Portuguese were not the only colonial power to engage in efforts to boost the female colonial population in this way. In the early 1620s dozens of women arrived to the Jamestown colony in Virginia from England after the Virginia Company in London that ran the project began advertising in the English capital for women specifically to head across the Atlantic to join the many men who had headed out to Virginia in the 1610s on the back of a tobacco boom in the region.[6] Between 1663 and 1673 the French government sent out approximately 800 women known as the King's Daughters to New France in what is now eastern Canada to try and boost the colonial population there.[7] Thus, coerced migration of this kind was a common feature of European colonization during the early modern era. It was later succeeded by the use of overseas colonies as penal colonies, particularly by the British in Australia.[8]
Extent of migration of the Orfas d'El-Rei
The scale of the policy of sending out female orphans from Portugal to the colonies between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries is often overstated. A number of sensationalized accounts of the policy were written in the late nineteenth century which exaggerated the scale of it.[9] Nevertheless, over a span of about 200 years between the 1540s and the middle of the eighteenth century, many hundreds, perhaps even thousands of poor and destitute women and girls were sent from Portugal to places like India and Brazil. Exact figures for the scale of this migration are broadly conjectural, but it would have not have been a very large number. This was particularly so given that the Portuguese did not practice extensive settler colonialism in Africa and Asia, which sought to plant large numbers of the colonial power’s people in a given region, instead preferring mercantile colonialism in Africa and Asia, by which they established small trading outposts that aimed to extract valuable raw materials from a given region through aggressive trade. An exception to this pattern was Brazil, but the colony had many pull factors after the gold rush began here in the late seventeenth century and there was no need for coercive measures to force females to the colonies thereafter.[10]
Demographic impact of the Orfas d'El-Rei
While the number of poor and destitute women who were sent to the Portuguese colonies between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries was small, their presence there had a major demographic impact over time. There are obvious reasons for this. The global population in 1500 was probably somewhere around half a billion people. Anyone whose bloodline has survived since that time has begot hundreds or even thousands of descendants. Moreover, while entire native groups were wiped out in early modern times owing to the introduction of diseases like smallpox and measles into the Americas, those of the newcomers proliferated. Therefore the demographic impact of colonists like the Orfas d’El-Rei was outsized.[11]
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See also
Explore more about the Orfas d'El-Rei
- Portugal, Baptisms, 1570-1910 records collection on MyHeritage
- Portugal, Marriages, 1670-1910 records collection on MyHeritage
- Portugal, Deaths, 1640-1910 records collection on MyHeritage
- Portugal, Porto, Catholic Church Records records collection on MyHeritage
- Portugal, Madeira, Index of Marriages, 1574-1940 records collection on MyHeritage
- Brazil, Baptisms, 1688-1935 records collection on MyHeritage
- Brazil, Marriages, 1730-1955 records collection on MyHeritage
- Brazil, Deaths, 1750-1890 records collection on MyHeritage
References
- ↑ Timothy J. Coates, Convicts and Orphans: Forced and State-Sponsored Colonizers in the Portuguese Empire, 1550–1755 (Stanford, 2001).
- ↑ https://www.worldhistory.org/timeline/Portuguese_Empire/
- ↑ Roger Crowley, Conquerors: How Portugal Forged the First Global Empire (London, 2016).
- ↑ Timothy Coates, ‘State-Sponsored Female Colonization in the Estado da índia’, in Santa Barbara Portuguese Studies, First Series, Vol. 2, Special Issue: The Portuguese and the Pacific II (1995), pp. 40–56.
- ↑ Fleur D’Souza, ‘Dowries and the Dona: Women in Portuguese Settlements in the Provincia do Norte (1534–1739)’, in Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, Vol. 73 (2012), pp. 383–390.
- ↑ https://www.history.com/news/jamestown-colony-women-brides-program
- ↑ https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/filles-du-roi
- ↑ https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/convict-transportation-peaks
- ↑ James T. Wheeler, The History of India from the Earliest Ages, Volume 4 (London, 1881), pp. 425–426.
- ↑ Manoel Cardozo, ‘The Brazilian Gold Rush’, in The Americas, Vol. 3, No. 2 (October, 1946), pp. 137–160.
- ↑ Coates, Convicts and Orphans, esp. chapter 7.