Hi Alan
The registration process sounds worse than it actually is. I think they do it to prevent a vast number of random university students registering and to protect their collections from damage.
The records there aren't dependent on nationality but by religion, most of them are Anglican in nature but there are some Catholic ones as well as other denominations. I've seen some entries for the Church of Scotland and baptisms for the children where the mother is noted as being a 'native woman' and without a name. But there is a huge bias to those whose families were in someways connected to the East India Company.
A Catholic Portuguese sea captain might just fall into that category.
Dawn
