The initial phase of Portuguese political domination over East Timor, occurring more or less in the seventeenth century, is relatively ill chronicled. The official Goa-based Estado da Índia was not steadily established on Timor until 1702. The Portuguese letters and reports preserved for posterity only present a fragmented picture of the process, and much of the story depends on chronicular texts authored by the Dominican missionaries. Nevertheless, the scattered material at hand has inspired a series of Portuguese historians since the late nineteenth century to produce scholarly syntheses of the early colonial intrusion, most notably Affonso de Castro (1867), Humberto Leitão (1948) and Artur Teodoro de Matos (1974). Thes eaccounts tend to emphasize Portuguese agency, while the interplay with the Dutch East India Company(VOC) and indigenous polities remains comparatively vague. To a large extent this style of historiography is due to the nature of the source material, although the political discourses of pre-1974 Portugal obviously played a role, too. The present study surveys and evaluates the picture of the early colonial phase provided by Portuguese materials, and confronts it with the resources offered by the VOC archives, issued and preserved on a regular basis. The paper discusses how the two colonial funds of knowledge reflect the mutual rivalry of the Estado and the VOC; but also how they can expand our knowledge of early Timorese society when read in concert and thus avoid the image of Timor as merely the arena for competing colonialisms.