Saint Thomas' Fort

Kollan [Coulão/Quilon], Kerala, India

Military Architecture

he vestiges of the Portuguese fortifications at Kollam, in the area of Tangasseri, are one of the few examples of military structures from the Manueline period to have survived until today in the region of the Indian Ocean. The Dutch used the original fortress after they had captured it in 1661 and it only fell into decay after the British conquest in 1795. The port of Kollam, lying on the Travancore Coast about a hundred and thirty kilometres south of Kochi, was known at the beginning of the 16th century not only as an important entrepôt for pepper and ginger but for its relatively numerous colony of Saint Thomas Christians that had been settled there since the 7th century, this being one of the reasons that the Portuguese wished to erect a fortress there. After a first contact made by Vasco da Gama on his second voyage, Afonso de Albuquerque signed a trade agreement with the local authorities in 1503 that authorised the establishment of a trading post, António de Sá becoming the manager. King Manuel I ordered the fortification of the post in February 1505, but a conflict that broke out with the local Muslim merchants led to the destruction of the trading post and the former Saint Thomas’s Church and the death of all the Portuguese there. This fact, allied to the decision of the viceroy to concentrate his forces around Kochi with the aim of ensuring the regular victualling of the ships on the India Run, meant that its reconstruction only took place in 1519. Appointed as manager of the post in 1517, Heitor Rodrigues had received orders to reestablish the Portuguese presence in the area and start the construction of a new fortification. According to Gaspar Correia, the Tangasseri beach was chosen as the site for the new fortification, but the work went ahead very slowly and the ordnance of swivel guns, falcons and camelo cannon had to be installed surreptitiously so as not to arouse the ire of the local population. Fernão Lopes de Castanheda also mentions that a defensive system of stakes and canes was erected so as not to attract too much attention, while foundations were laid under the supervision of a master builder brought from Kochi for the purpose. Three towers were erected, “the keep and two others to make a triangle so that when the artillery was used one could not hinder the others”. The walled area measured about 185 palms (40.7 metres) in length by 75 palms (16.5 metres) in width, the walls being about the height of two men. During the next few months a couraça toward the beach and the walls of a cubelo tower farther inland were erected, at the same time that the gates were strengthened with draw-bridges. The work was finished during the governorship of Diogo Lopes de Sequeira in September 1519, as a result of a secret agreement signed by Heitor Rodrigues and the Queen of Kollam and her minister Chanai Pillai. Indian forces besieged Kollam shortly afterwards. Despite being a small fortification with an irregular layout and very different from the coastal castles erected in the first phase of Portuguese settlement in the Orient – as can be seen from Gaspar Correia’s drawing in Lendas da Índia– the small Portuguese garrison held out for many months and repelled the constant attacks of the assailants. Saint Thomas’s fortress was frequently repaired throughout the years, especially the watch tower, which collapsed several times during the captaincy of Rodrigues. As it lay outside the walls, a wall was built around the well in order to prevent an enemy from poisoning the water. New works were carried out at the end of the 1580s, as can be proved through a letter sent by the city council to the king thanking him for the directives issued allowing the repair work to be completed. Due to the erosive action of the tides the fortress was significantly closer to the shoreline in the mid- 1630s according to the drawings and descriptions of António Bocarro and Pedro Barreto Resende, especially “on the eastern side, which is closest to the sea”, where it had lost approximately 15 of the 20 metres that initially separated it from the sea. This caused the collapse of the walls on more than one occasion. The ensemble maintained the initial structure with three towers, “to which one enters through a gate, then climbs 15 steps to a balcony or roofed watch tower” where there was a ravelin armed with two falcons and which led to the keep. The last-named, “which is the largest and which stands alongside the said balcony, has another adjoined to it only in the place where there is a door where one enters”. Both towers had three floors “and in the middle is a room two storeys high, both whitewashed, from where one moves to a third tower that, like the others, has three floors”. This fortification was then “very damaged and almost in a state of collapse”,asithad never been “rebuilt and rarely repaired” since its construction. At this time, however, the Portuguese were concerned with the renewal work and with closing the wide perimeter wall built around the original fortress and the adjacent settlement. The approximately thousand paces (around one kilometre) of the wall were exhaustively described by António Bocarro: there were six bulwarks or watch towers armed with ordnance, three unarmed bulwarks or ravelins and two gates. Some of these positions do not figure in the drawing appended to the description. The fortified complex was revealed to be impotent to repel an attack when Rijkloff van Goens’ powerful Dutch squadron easily captured the stronghold on 10 December 1661. The Portuguese wall and a drawing of Kollam’s new line of defence, which was more regular and shorter, appears in Philippus Baldeus’ work, but we cannot be sure that it was built in detriment to the Portuguese structure. But we do know that the Dutch restored and used Saint Thomas’s fort, which was the Manueline nucleus of Kollam. The ruins of one of those three towers of the fortress still exist today among the palm trees that stand on the Tangasseri inlet.