Fifteen Years Under the Portuguese.
Portuguese captain Andreas Andre — known in Dhivehi as Andiri Andirin — seizes Malé in 1558. Forced conversions, brutal taxation and pork imposed on mosque grounds follow. The fifteen-year occupation is remembered in oral tradition as the darkest chapter of Maldivian history.
By the mid-16th century, the Portuguese Estado da Índia had turned the Indian Ocean into a commercial war zone. The Maldives — strategically placed on the pepper and textile routes to Malacca — were too valuable to leave independent. In 1558 a heavily armed fleet under Captain-General Andreas Andre sailed into Malé, defeated and killed the reigning sultan, Ali VI, and installed a Portuguese garrison.
What followed is still told in Maldivian oral tradition as the darkest fifteen years in the nation's memory. The Portuguese imposed crushing taxes, destroyed Islamic sites, installed a Catholic mission, and reportedly forced pork onto mosque grounds as a deliberate desecration. Resistance was met with public executions.
It was from this that the Utheemu insurgency grew. Three brothers from a small island in the north — Hassan, Ali and Muhammad Thakurufaanu — built a boat called the Kalhuohfummi, designed for extreme speed in shallow reef channels, and began a guerrilla war that would end the occupation.
The women are better swimmers than the men, and swim with such grace that one would take them for fish of the sea.