This article intends to point out some relations that can be established between two principal vehicles of the Portuguese expansion: the fortress and the ship. These two spaces of reclusion can be understood like "total institutions", in the form as Erwing Goffman defines them, and present deep similarities, principally when moments-limits survived by the individuals are analysed, during the shipwrecks and during the situations of siege. For this effect the Portuguese presence is privileged in the Indian Ocean, characterized by the construction of a net of fortresses without a significant penetration in the territory.
Portuguese expansion; "total institutions"; fortress; ship.