The Boundless Sea

by David Abulafia

  Some Italian businessmen did, however, benefit from the new opportunities. Bartolomeo Marchionni was a very wealthy Florentine businessman who had been based in Lisbon for nearly thirty years when da Gama first set out; he traded in sugar, slaves and wheat and built up interests in both Madeira and the Guinea Coast before he became an enthusiastic backer of the India project. He was a naturalized Portuguese subject, and he believed that his family’s future lay in the booming city of Lisbon, where, by about 1490, he was the richest merchant in the city. He had a long history of supporting India ventures even before da Gama; he had provided the letters of credit that Pero da Covilhã cashed as he travelled eastwards on his spying mission. Marchionni was the proud owner of the Annunciada, one of Cabral’s ships, which returned carrying gems obtained in India, and he also funded de Nova’s expedition.31

  II

  The Swahili coast also entered the consciousness of the Portuguese. Although the Swahili population was not much interested in taking to the sea, the Portuguese could hardly prevent Arab dhows from carrying on their trade down the east African coast; Arab, Indian and quite probably Malay ships used to visit the ports along this shore, stopping at Kilwa, Mombasa and other towns, whose faraway links extended, according to Tomé Pires, the early sixteenth-century Portuguese writer, all the way to Melaka.32 The main aim of the Portuguese was to intimidate local Muslim rulers, so that they had free passage through their waters; they needed stopping points where ships could be careened and leaks could be plugged; and above all they hoped to blockade the Red Sea, cutting off the supply routes that brought the spices of the Indies to Alexandria. There was one place along this coast that really did attract them: Sofala, in modern Mozambique, which was a terminal point for the gold that was brought from the African interior towards the coast. By controlling the coast of Mozambique, the Portuguese would be able to block Arab access to Sofala, while the region was within surprisingly easy sailing distance of India, once the monsoon winds were blowing in the right direction. Otherwise, they were not enormously interested in what they could buy and sell along this coast: the aroma of Indian spices was addictive.33

  Most histories of da Gama and his successors pay rather little attention to Portuguese projects in east Africa, but success there was vital if the Portuguese were to master the route to India and gain some degree of control over an ocean so far from home. There was no point in creating bases in India, at Cannanore and Cochin, and later at Goa and Diu, if the route past Africa was not protected by strong alliances and by impregnable forts that would remind local rulers how important it was not to irritate the Portuguese; much the same policy had guided them down the coast of Morocco and all the way to Elmina, so fortress-building far from home was in their bones. This understanding of how east Africa fitted into their wider plans was apparent as early as 1503, when Manuel sent António de Saldanha into the Indian Ocean with three ships. Such a tiny squadron might seem laughably small, but the firepower of the Portuguese was terrifying; the cannons on board were the weapons of mass destruction of the early sixteenth century, as one of Saldanha’s captains showed when he seized some ships based at Mombasa and then blockaded Zanzibar. However, the attack on Zanzibar is a perfect example of the repeated failure of the Portuguese to think their actions through. The sultan of Zanzibar had never opposed the Portuguese. When the Portuguese bombarded the beach they killed the sultan’s son; they also captured three ships standing in Zanzibar harbour, whereupon the sultan felt obliged to make a humiliating peace agreement, consisting of a large tribute in gold and thirty sheep each year, as well as a hefty ransom payment for one of the ships that had been seized.34

  Local rulers hoped that the Portuguese would go away within a few years, once they discovered how unwilling the Muslim and Hindu rulers were to host them, after which they would leave the Indian Ocean in relative peace. Yet they kept returning for more, and began to dig themselves into east Africa by constructing Portuguese forts at Sofala and Kilwa. The commander who was sent out to build these forts, Francisco de Almeida, exploited the fact that the local sheikhs had accepted the overlordship of the king of Portugal, but it was clear that they would only be permitted to stay in power so long as they continued to pay tribute and to help the Portuguese.35 This type of relationship was inspired by the surrender treaties that the Christian rulers in medieval Spain and Portugal had forged with Muslim princes: a combination of an alliance, into which the Muslims had been coerced, with loosely defined submission.

  Almeida, who became the first Portuguese viceroy in the Indian Ocean, was sent to the Indian Ocean with the largest Portuguese fleet so far: there were 1,500 men aboard twenty-two or twenty-three ships, and those on board included many high-ranking Portuguese and captains with experience of these waters (such as João de Nova), because the aim, set out in a 30,000-word set of instructions, was to gain mastery over the western half of the Indian Ocean.36 When he found that the sheikh of Kilwa was less than welcoming – the sheikh argued that he could not meet Almeida as a black cat had crossed the road in front of him – Almeida’s willingness to compromise turned into fury at obvious delaying tactics, and Portuguese troops were unleashed on the town. Almeida’s men overran the town, the sheikh fled through a postern gate, and the next day the victorious Almeida began to build the promised fort. Still, he had to sort out the government of what could become a restive city. A compliant Muslim leader whom the Portuguese knew as Anconi was installed as king of Kilwa; conveniently, Almeida had brought along a crown that Manuel was sending to the rajah of Cochin, and this was used in Anconi’s lavish coronation ceremony, which was attended by the Portuguese commanders all dressed up to the nines.37

  A similarly revolting story can be told of the attack that was now launched against Mombasa: intimidation followed by ruthless bombardment, the landing of troops, the looting and burning of the city, and the massacre of many of its inhabitants. The sultan wrote to another Arab ruler: ‘in this city the stench of death is such that I dare not enter it.’ The victors divided up loot, some of it from as far away as Persia, that included gold, silver, ivory, silk, camphor and slaves, as well as a carpet so magnificent that it was set aside as a gift to King Manuel. So much was seized that loading the ships took a fortnight.38 The Portuguese preferred to be feared rather than loved. They were particularly interested in Sofala, with its reputation as a centre of the gold trade, even though its harbour was difficult to enter, making it less suitable as a supply station. Their reputation had preceded them, and the sheikh, aged about eighty and blind, was hardly in a position to resist them, especially when they offered to defend Sofala against attacks by African raiders from the interior. They were allowed to build a fortress and commercial base, which they created from scratch in a couple of months during the autumn of 1505. This gave them charge of the gold trade out of Sofala, from which the Arab traders were now excluded.

  The Portuguese also began to eye the great inland empire of Monomotapa, the source of much of the gold they craved; in 1506 a report by a Portuguese agent demonstrated that the gold lay in a kingdom ruled from a place called Zimbaue, which it took about three weeks to reach – the first European reference to a successor kingdom to the empire of Great Zimbabwe, whose rulers had once dominated large stretches of south-east Africa. Clearly, the more gold they could extract from this area (later the Portuguese colony of Mozambique), the more easily they could pay for the spices of the Indies, and a lively exchange network developed, linking Portuguese Sofala with India and importing into Africa Indian cloths and carpets, ranging from the finest silks to linen shirts.39

  One of the most striking features of this Portuguese takeover in the Indian Ocean is that they were confidently seizing control while they still knew little about the geography and resources of the lands where they were building their forts. One of the ships in da Cunha’s fleet landed by chance in Madagascar, which had already been discovered by the Portuguese, but was still unknown territory. When they saw that young men on the islan
d wore silver bracelets, and realized that cloves and ginger could be found there as well, the Portuguese became very excited. Maybe there was no reason to go all the way to India and fight wars against the Muslims and Hindus, when the spices and precious metals of the Indies were accessible on this massive island inhabited by generally friendly inhabitants. João de Nova informed King Manuel that ‘great ships’ arrived every other year in Madagascar from further east, and that it would therefore be possible both to exploit the island’s own riches and to tap into the trade between Madagascar and Melaka in the Far East; as one historian has said, ‘it would be a case of large profits, quick returns’. Manuel became very excited. In 1508 an expedition was sent out to see if these expectations were realistic. But no silver and no cloves were found; interestingly, the Portuguese came to the conclusion that the cloves they had been shown had been collected from the wreck of a Javanese junk. In the years around 1500, traffic continued to ply between the East Indies and south-east Africa, especially Madagascar, which had not lost its connection to the islands far to the east from which its own population had originated.40

  The Portuguese had scored remarkable successes in east Africa and India. Yet the waters of the Indian Ocean could never be entirely theirs: not just Javanese junks but Arab dhows and Ottoman war galleys had to be taken into account, for, as will become clear, the Turks had their own ambitions in this vast arena.

  30

  To the Antipodes

  I

  It seemed that Asia could be reached in two directions. But gradually doubts began to accumulate. Amerigo Vespucci’s writings were distributed and translated even more widely in Europe than those of Columbus, thanks to ever more energetic printing presses; they suggested that there really was a New World that might not even be connected to Asia. Vespucci’s claim to have taken part in four transatlantic voyages does not have to be taken at face value. His letters describing the New World, some of which survive in manuscript and some in print, combine the tendentious with the factual, for he had a very good eye for his market, which consisted of readers as interested in feasts of human flesh as in the geography of the world. The printed versions, which play up this theme in especially lurid detail, may well have been rewritten by his editors, and the real question is not whether Vespucci saw what he claimed, so much as how his works influenced Europeans at a time when awareness was growing that access to Asia through the Atlantic was blocked by massive continents. One of his admirers was Sir Thomas More; the fictitious narrator of his description of an ideal society somewhere out in the Atlantic was Raphael Hythloday, who ‘accompanied Amerigo Vespucci on the last three of his four voyages, accounts of which are now common reading everywhere’.1

  Vespucci claimed that he joined a Spanish expedition across the Atlantic in 1497, led by Alonso de Hojeda, who had been entrusted with the command of the first small fleet to break Columbus’s monopoly on exploration.2 These ships were heading into areas which lay beyond the area opened up by Columbus’s first two voyages, and were therefore not automatically part of the massive grant of dominion and rights of exploration that had been made to him by the Catholic Monarchs. The rival voyages gave rise to lawsuits between the Columbus family and the Crown that lasted a generation; the Columbuses saw the newcomers as interlopers in their own Caribbean. It is quite possible that Vespucci did not actually accompany Hojeda, and that he first crossed the Atlantic two years later; however, whether his first voyage took place in 1497 or 1499, he was drawn across the Atlantic by news that there were pearl fisheries in the southern Caribbean, and he may have fancied himself as a jewel merchant.3 But it became clear that the real source of profit was to be found not in pearls but in human bodies: the crew carried off more than 200 slaves.4

  As Hojeda’s ships coasted along the southern shores of the Caribbean, they entered a land where the natives lived in villages built above the water, just like Venice; this was the origin of the name ‘Venezuela’, which means ‘little Venice’.5 Admittedly, the houses were not Venetian palazzi but huts raised on stilts and linked to one another by drawbridges which could be raised in times of danger – as on this occasion.6 When the Indians turned hostile, Vespucci blandly reported that it had been necessary to massacre them, though the explorers resisted the temptation to burn down the village, ‘since it seemed to us something that would burden our consciences’.7 The goods they found in the village were not worth much, and they pressed on.8 By and large, though, the people in this area were friendly, offering food, performing dances; ‘there we spent the night, where they offered us their women, and we were unable to fend them off’.9 These people did suffer from raids by aggressive neighbours, who also attacked the Europeans, and Hojeda decided that he had seen enough and that the time had come to return home with his cargo of slaves.

  How new this New World was to Europeans became obvious when they studied the flora and fauna they saw. For this was a fertile land, rich in wild animals such as ‘lions’ (that is, jaguars), deer and pigs, even though they were rather different in appearance to the animals of the Old World.10 Knowledge of the southern hemisphere was only acquired piecemeal during Vespucci’s seagoing career. On his second, or maybe his first, trip, in 1499, Vespucci probably still thought that the mainland was simply an extension of Asia; his sense that the New World was physically separate developed over the next few years. His third (or was it really his second?) voyage apparently took him very far down the coast of South America, giving him the chance to admire the Southern Cross hanging in the night sky. If he reached as far as he claimed, then it was with a mixed sense of achievement and disappointment. He had visited lands no one suspected were there, full of people living a simple life on the edge of what seemed to be impenetrable forests. But there were no great cities. And where was the route to China and Japan? Where was the gold that always seemed to come from over the hills and far away?

  Eventually Vespucci concluded that this was the southern continent. ‘We learned that the land was not an island but a continent, both because it extends over very long, straight shorelines, and because it is filled with countless inhabitants.’11 As has been seen, the term ‘continent’ did not have quite the meaning it has now, and in a general sense indicated a large area of mainland that could be part of Asia, Africa or Europe, the three known continents in the modern sense of the term. However, Vespucci concluded that this was indeed a separate landmass; he was convinced these were the ‘Antipodes’, the southern continent that had occasionally been mentioned by geographers but that were assumed to be not just uninhabited but uninhabitable, in view of the torrid heat of southern climes: ‘I have discovered a continent in those southern regions that is inhabited by more numerous peoples and animals than in our Europe, or Asia or Africa.’12 So how had the people arrived there? As the puzzle grew, later commentators would sometimes suggest that God must have created them separately, and that even if they were somehow descended from Noah, the common father of all mankind, they were not fully rational beings but were destined to serve their European masters as ‘natural slaves’. These views were still being promoted in the seventeenth century.13 Vespucci’s descriptions of cannibal peoples reinforced the idea that the inhabitants of the southern continent were human in shape, but monster-like in behaviour.

  Others came to the conclusion that these lands were not Cathay or Cipangu with the help of their mercenary instincts. The silks and spices of the East were not to be had; but slaving expeditions became more and more frequent. Vicente Yáñez Pinzón had captained the Niña on Columbus’s first voyage; in 1499 he set out under royal licence for the New World. He was ordered not to bring back Caribbean natives as slaves, though Africans were acceptable if he entered eastern Atlantic waters; in fact he took thirty-six slaves from the New World.14 But the most persistent slavers were the Guerra brothers. Luis Guerra and a colleague went to Brazil in 1500–1501, taking slaves from ‘Topia’, the land inhabited by the Tupí Indians; they sold one girl named Sunbay in Spain for 6,000 ma
ravedís, though this was an exceptionally high price, and it was not a good deal – Sunbay fell ill. The Guerras raided into Topia with impunity, because this land lay in the Portuguese sphere, and therefore the natives had no right to the protection of the Spanish monarchs.15 These captives were called indios bozales – the term bozales indicated that they were primitive, even savage, and was also used of untrained black slaves from west Africa. In 1504 the Guerra brothers were allowed to go slaving anywhere except the lands of Columbus and the king of Portugal, which concentrated their efforts on Carib territory in the southern Caribbean; the Spanish historian Oviedo wondered about this: ‘I do not know if these merchants were authorised to enslave the people of that land because they are idolaters, savages, sodomites, or because they eat human flesh.’16 Thus, a sad routine of slave-raiding developed.

  Linked to the slave-raiding was the incessant search for sources of gold; one Spanish explorer, Juan de la Cosa, met people along the coast of South America who went around naked, though the men wore penis sheaths, sometimes made of gold.17 The explorers begged some gold off them, but when the natives asked for it back they wisely agreed; rumours reached the Europeans of a great temple with gold-plated idols, suggesting that the real riches lay a little further inland. These rumours coalesced into the story of El Dorado, the kingdom awash with gold. De la Cosa had accompanied Columbus, Hojeda and Vespucci on voyages to the New World, and is best known for his remarkably well-informed world map of 1500, showing great stretches of the South American coast and daring also to include what looks like the coast of Texas and areas still further north. Without engaging in the argument that Hojeda or others penetrated that coastline to keep the English at bay, as defenders of Cabot’s reputation like to think, one can still see that de la Cosa had clever intuitions: he realized that Cuba was not Japan nor part of the Asian mainland, showing it as a humpbacked island looking not vastly different from its real shape.