For the first time they met ‘Christians’, ‘who showed them a paper, an object of their adoration, on which was a sketch of the Holy Ghost’. It was to prove one of the deepest, almost comical, early misconceptions of the Portuguese that Hindus, of whom they apparently had no knowledge, with their own images of gods, were Christians of a deviant sect. The Portuguese had come into the Indian Ocean expecting to find estranged Christians; these men with their unfamiliar anthropomorphic images neatly fitted a fixed preconception.
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