More Portuguese Lives at Singapore's Fort Canning

This post continues our survey of the Portuguese names carved into tombstones displayed on the walls at Fort Canning Green, following on from José d'Almeida and Other Portuguese Pioneers in Singapore. Where Nicolau de Oliveiro and Sibrino Alliandre gave us, respectively, a life we could partly reconstruct and a name we could not reconstruct at all, this batch of five stones sits somewhere in between: none of these people left a paper trail beyond the wall itself, but unlike Alliandre, the wall has quite a lot to say. Photographs of the inscriptions, taken on site, are the primary source for everything below.

Januario Agostinho da Silva, Portuguez

Of the six, this is the stone that speaks longest — and it speaks entirely in Portuguese, which sets it apart from every other inscription discussed in this series. It reads, in the elaborate copperplate of the period:

AQUI está sepultado JANUARIO AGOSTINHO DA SILVA PORTUGUEZ, Morador e Casado na Cidade de MACAO, Proprietario e Capitão do Brigue CASSADOR, o qual voltando de Damão para MACAO morreo na (ilha?) de Malaca no dia vinte do mez de Julho de 1834...

("Here lies buried Januario Agostinho da Silva, Portuguese, resident and casado in the City of Macao, owner and captain of the brig Caçador, who, returning from Damão to Macao, died off Malacca on the twentieth day of the month of July, 1834...") The final lines, giving his age, are too weathered to read with confidence.

Two details are worth pulling out. First, casado was not a throwaway word — it was the formal legal category used across the Portuguese empire in Asia for a married settler with an established household, as opposed to a soldado (a single soldier passing through) or a morador living informally on the margins of colonial society. The term had structured Portuguese communities in Malacca, Goa and Macao for three centuries by the time this stone was cut; carving it onto a tombstone in Singapore was a way of stating, precisely, what kind of Portuguese man this was — not a drifter, but a settled householder of standing in Macao.

Second, the voyage itself is a small lesson in geography. Damão (Daman) was a Portuguese enclave on the west coast of India, north of Bombay; Macao sat on the south China coast. Da Silva was captaining a Macao-registered vessel on the India–China run when death overtook him in the waters off Malacca — a reminder that "the Portuguese in Asia" was never a single settlement radiating outward from Malacca, but a network of ports strung from Goa to Damão to Macao, with ships and captains moving constantly between them. I've found no surviving record of the brig Caçador or its owner beyond this stone; if anyone has come across mention of either in Macanese or Goan archives, I would like to hear about it.

Two children

Two of the five stones mark the deaths of children, and together they are a blunter reminder of nineteenth-century mortality than any statistic could be.

Paula Tereira — the surname is very likely a stonecutter's rendering of Teixeira, in the same way Oliveira became "Oliveiro" on Nicolau's stone — died on "Saturday Morning, 15 August 1834," aged four. Her death came just weeks after Januario Agostinho da Silva's, in the same cemetery, in the same year.

Luiza de Nazareth died on 3 September 1850 — the same year both José d'Almeida and Nicolau de Oliveiro passed away — aged one year, eight months and thirteen days, according to her Portuguese-language inscription ("Memoria de Luiza de Nazareth, faleceu a 3 de Setembro 1850, edade 1 anno, 8 mezes e 13 dias"). Nazareth, a devotional surname referring to Our Lady of Nazareth, was and remains common among Malacca's Kristang Catholic families.

Two women

Joaquina Da Silva — Da Silva being, incidentally, the same surname carried by José d'Almeida himself (born José d'Almeida Carvalho e Silva) and one of the most common names among Portuguese-Eurasian families across Asia — died on 27 May 1839. Her stone gives her age, badly weathered, as somewhere in her thirties; we can't read the exact figure with confidence.

Caibarina Pestana has the fullest biography of the two. Her stone records that she was born at Malacca on 28 January 1812, was the widow of one A. A. Pestana, and died on 26 August 1861 aged 49 years, 8 months and 29 days — "in peace, in the self-same I will sleep and I will rest." The inscription is signed at the bottom by "D. A. Ferreira," presumably the mason or engraver responsible for the stone. At 1861, hers is the latest-dated burial among all six — closer to the cemetery's closure than to its founding, and a reminder that the wall spans nearly the entire working life of the old Christian cemetery, from 1834 to 1861.

What the wall adds up to

Read together, these five stones don't give us biographies in the way José d'Almeida's newspaper notices and consular appointments do. But they give us something the Alliandre stone couldn't: dates, ages, relationships, occasionally a cause and a place. A sea captain from Macao, dead in the Malacca Strait on his way home from India. A widow born in Malacca who outlived her husband by years unknown. Two children who did not live to see five. Between them, the stones sketch the ordinary texture of a Portuguese-Asian diaspora community in early Singapore — its trade routes, its naming patterns, its very high price for infancy — in a way that no single grand biography could. It is, in its own modest way, a fuller kind of memory than the wall usually offers.

A postscript: Sibrino Alliandre, revisited

While photographing these six stones, I also went back to Sibrino Alliandre. The stone reads, in Portuguese:

SAGRADO MEMORIA DE SIBRINO ALLIANDRE, FALICIDO aos 26 de Janeiro 1853, IDADE de 33 ANOS.

("Sacred [to the] memory of Sibrino Alliandre, deceased on the 26th of January 1853, aged 33 years.") That gives us a death date, an age, and by extension an approximate birth year of 1819–1820 — none of which appeared in any transcription project or database I had searched. It also tells us something the earlier post couldn't: that Alliandre's stone, like Januario Agostinho da Silva's and Luiza de Nazareth's, was inscribed entirely in Portuguese rather than English, which puts him in the same linguistic company as the more clearly "Portuguese-identified" burials in this cemetery, rather than the Anglicized Straits-Eurasian mainstream that produced "Oliveiro" and "Tereira."

The surname itself is worth a second look, too. "Alliandre" isn't a form I could find attested anywhere as a genuine Portuguese or Goan surname — but by the same logic that turns Oliveiro into Oliveira and Tereira into Teixeira elsewhere on this wall, it reads very plausibly as a stonecutter's rendering of Alexandre, a common Iberian surname derived from Alexander. The given name "Sibrino" is harder to place; it doesn't correspond cleanly to any standard Portuguese first name I could find, though it's tempting — and no more than a guess — to wonder whether it began life as Severino and drifted in the carving. Neither reading is more than informed speculation, but they're a start.

If any reader recognizes a name here, or has come across the brig Caçador, the Pestana family of Malacca, or anyone by the name Alexandre in the Straits Settlements around 1820–1853, I would be glad to hear from you.