EMPIRE IN THE EAST^135Small wonder that the life of science and speculation decayed. A
privileged few were eventually exempted from controls—thus the
noble and clerical members of the royal historical academy (founded
1720), amateurs all, who were permitted to import otherwise
forbidden books, but found it easier to write fawning eulogies of the
royal family.
To be sure, it was impossible to isolate a country caught up in the
concert of Europe and the course for empire. Portugal diplomats
and agents abroad came back with the message that the rest of the
world was moving on while Portugal stood still. These
estrangeirados—their pejorative nickname—attracted deep suspicion,
for they were tainted. Their dismissal was implicit in Portuguese
pride. Most unfortunate. They saw what few Portuguese could or
would see: that the pursuit of Christian uniformity was stupid; that
the Holy Office of the Inquisition was a national disaster; that the
Church was swallowing the wealth of the country; that the
government's failure to promote agriculture and industry had
reduced Portugal to the role of "the best and most profitable colony
of England."^14 (British classical economists would put it differendy.
Portugal was Ricardo's chosen example of the gains from trade and
pursuit of comparative advantage.)
Portuguese intellectual shortcomings soon became a byword: thus
Diogo do Couto, referring in 1603 to "the meanness and lack of
curiosity of this our Portuguese nation"; and Francis Parry, the
English envoy at Lisbon in 1670, observing that "the people are so
litde curious that no man knows more than what is merely necessary
for him"; and the eighteenth-century English visitor Mary Brearley
who remarked that "the bulk of the people were disinclined to
independence of thought and, in all but a few instances, too much
averse from intellectual activity to question what they had learned."^15
Through this self-imposed closure, the Portuguese lost
competence even in those areas they had once dominated. "From
being leaders in the van of navigational theory and practice, [they]
dropped to being stragglers in the rear."^16 By the end of the
seventeenth century, several of the pilots in the carreira da India
(the Indian trade) were foreigners. Gone the days of top-secret
navigational charts; the Dutch had better ones. And when the chief
engineer persuaded King John (Joào) V (reigned 1706-50) to renew
the teaching of mathematics, military engineering, and astronomy,
the instruments required came from abroad.
By 1600, even more by 1700, Portugal had become a backward,