Last Crusade, The

by Cliff, Nigel

  It was now June 1. The three scouts had not been found, and Gama assumed they had got away with Coelho. Once again he asked for boats, but rather than agree, the wali’s men began to whisper among themselves. Eventually they said they would provide them, if the captain-major ordered his fleet to anchor nearer the shore.

  This was tricky, since the Zamorin had made the same request, but Gama was determined not to put his ships and crews in harm’s way. If he gave any such order, he replied, his brother would assume he was a prisoner and would immediately set sail for home.

  Unless he gave exactly that order, the Indians countered, he and his men would not be allowed to leave.

  The two sides seemed to have reached an impasse, and Gama reddened with indignation. In that case, he said tersely, the best thing was for him to return to Calicut. If the Zamorin wanted him to stay in his country and refused to let him leave, he added, that was one thing; he would gladly oblige. If not, the Zamorin would doubtless be interested to know that his orders had been blatantly disobeyed.

  The Indians seemed to relent, but before anyone could make a move, a large force of armed men appeared in the house and the doors banged shut. No one was allowed out, even to relieve himself, without his own personal detachment of guards.

  The officials soon came back with a new demand. If the ships were not going to come in to shore, they said, they would have to give up their sails and rudders.

  They would do no such thing, Gama retorted. The Indians could do what they liked with him, but he would give up nothing. His men, though, he added, were starving; if he was going to be detained, surely they could be let go?

  The guards refused to be moved. The Portuguese must stay where they were, they answered. If they died of hunger, so be it; it meant nothing to them.

  The captain-major and his men were starting to fear the worst, though they did their best to put on a brave face. While they were awaiting their captors’ next move, one of the missing sailors showed up. The three scouts, he reported, had indeed found Nicolau Coelho the night before, but rather than keeping out of the way, as Gama had urged, Coelho was still stationed off the beach and was expecting them.

  Gama quietly told one of his men to slip away and pass on to Coelho strict orders to return to the ships and move them to a safer place. The sailor sneaked out, ran down the beach, and jumped in one of the boats, which immediately set off to the fleet. The guards, though, had spotted him, and they raised the cry. Suddenly the missing Indian boats appeared and the guards dragged a sizable flotilla into the water. They rowed furiously after the retreating Portuguese, but they soon realized they could not overtake them. Instead they returned to the shore and directed the captain-major to write to his brother, commanding him to bring the ships into port.

  Personally, Gama replied, he was perfectly willing to comply, but as he had already explained, his brother would never go along with it. Even if he did, his sailors were not keen to die and they would not budge.

  The Indians refused to believe him. He was the commander, they protested; surely any order he gave would be obeyed?

  The Portuguese huddled together and talked things over. Gama was now resolved to keep the ships out of the port at any cost; once inside, he explained, their long-range guns would be useless and they could easily be captured. When the Indians had seized the fleet, he added, they would undoubtedly kill him first and the rest of them after. His men agreed; they had already reached the same conclusion.

  The day wore on and the tension rose. That night a hundred guards clustered around the prisoners and took turns to keep watch. They were armed with swords, two-edged battle-axes, and bows and arrows, and they were getting restless. The Portuguese were convinced they would be marched off one by one and roughed up at the very least, though they still managed to make a good supper off more of the local produce.

  The next morning, the wali returned and proposed a compromise. Since the captain-major had informed the Zamorin that he intended to land his goods, he should order it done. It was the custom of Calicut for every ship to unload its cargo without delay, and for the crews and merchants to stay on land until their business was over. This time they would make an exception, and he and his men could return to their ships as soon as the merchandise arrived.

  Gama had promised no such thing, but since he was in no position to argue he sat down and wrote a letter to his brother. He explained that he was being held, though he was careful to say he was being well treated, and he told Paulo to send over some—not all—of their trade goods. If he failed to return shortly, he added, Paulo should assume that he was still a prisoner and that the Indians were trying to hijack the ships. In that case, Paulo was to sail for Portugal and explain everything to the king. He trusted, he added, that Manuel would dispatch a great war fleet and his liberty would be restored.

  Paulo immediately had some merchandise loaded in a boat, though after a heated discussion with the messengers he sent back word that he could not live with the dishonor if he went home without his brother. He trusted, he added, that with God’s help their small force would be able to free him.

  The boat arrived at the shore, and the goods were transferred to an empty warehouse. The wali held true to his word, and Gama and his men were let go. They returned to the fleet, leaving behind the clerk Diogo Dias and an assistant to look after the merchandise.

  “At this we rejoiced greatly,” the Chronicler recorded, “and rendered thanks to God for having extricated us from the hands of people who had no more sense than beasts.”

  CHAPTER 12

  DANGERS AND DELIGHTS

  THE SUN SETS on the Malabar Coast in a giant orange fireball that majestically drowns itself in the Indian Ocean. The sky is striated with orange and lemon, cream and blue. Out at sea puffs of cumulus cloud are caught in the glow, lit from beneath like the lumpy underside of heaven. Over land, wispy cirrus clouds turn a delicate but intense violet and seem to brush the tops of the palm forests. The soft waves send bronzed ripples to the shore; the floating clumps of weed, the last few boats out at sea, and the crows flying between the branches of shoreline trees are all silhouetted against the dying fire. Day fades in a riot of turquoise, cerulean, sherbet yellow, salmon pink, umber, and sand, and as the clouds darken, then turn a watercolor smudge of blues, grays, and white, night falls over Calicut.

  Not even the toughest sailor was immune to the beauty of India. Yet the old tales that talked of dangers lurking in Paradise had turned out to be true. To the Portuguese, there were, after all, snakes guarding the pepper plantations of the East.

  In the days following Gama’s return to his ship, the Portuguese warehouse received a steady trickle of visitors but no buyers. The Muslim merchants seemed to come only to scoff, and after a few days Gama sent a messenger to the palace with an official complaint about the way he, his men, and his goods were being treated. He awaited the Zamorin’s orders, he pointedly added; he and his ships were at his service when he decided what action to take.

  The messenger quickly returned with a Nair noble who was to guard the warehouse, as well as seven or eight merchants who were to inspect the goods and buy any they thought fit. The Zamorin, he reported, was angry with the men who had detained the captain-major, and he intended to punish them for being bad Christians. As for the Muslims, he authorized the Portuguese to kill any who entered their warehouse without fear of reprisals. Not knowing just how powerful the king of Portugal might be, the ruler had decided to hedge his bets.

  The merchants stayed for eight days, but they, too, took a dim view of the European merchandise and bought nothing. The Muslims kept their distance, but the mood had turned ugly. Every time the sailors landed, their rivals spat on the ground. “Portugal, Portugal,” they hissed, turning the name of their country into a jeer. Gama ordered his men to laugh it off, but tempers frayed.

  It was painfully clear that no one in Pantalayini was going to buy a single bale of cloth, and Gama sent another message to the Zamorin asking h
is permission to forward the merchandise to Calicut itself. Once again the ruler obliged, and he had the wali assemble a team of porters to carry the whole lot on their backs. This, the Zamorin reassured the captain-major, was to be done at his own expense; nothing belonging to the king of Portugal would be burdened with costs in his country.

  It was now June 24. Heavy swells were pitching the ships up and down, and fat raindrops crashed on the decks like marbles. The unsold goods were on their way to Calicut by back and by boat, but few expected much to come of it. Gama concluded that his brother had been right all along, and he vowed never again to set foot on a foreign shore. In the circumstances, he decided it was only fair to let his men try to rescue something from the debacle by bartering their few belongings for spices. The safest course, he told them, was for one man from each ship to go ashore at a time; that way everyone would have his turn without putting a temptingly large body of hostages in harm’s way.

  Off they went, in twos or threes, past the boats pulled up on the beach and the fishermen’s shacks and small temples, past children playing and dancing in the rain, along the long path to Calicut. They caught glimpses of arcaded pavilions painted in fresh greens and blues set amid lush gardens and orchards, and they watched with delight as the ubiquitous gray monkeys stood on their hind legs, ground their teeth, and sneaked inside. Whether grand or simple, each house had a large entrance porch with a gleaming wood floor as clean as a table where strangers were readily given food and drink and a place to rest. After their recent experience, the Portuguese were relieved to find that the locals, at least, were warmly hospitable to their brothers. The sailors, noted the Chronicler, “were made welcome by the Christians along the road, who showed much pleasure when one of them entered a house, to eat or to sleep, and they gave them freely of all they had.”

  After a year wedged into an all-male tub, the explorers stared unabashedly at the Indian women. They went naked from the waist up, though they wore much jewelry around their necks and on their legs and arms, hands and feet. Gaping holes in their ears were filled with gold and precious stones, and it was clearly the height of fashion to stretch the earlobes to the greatest possible length; the Zamorin’s queen, one traveler reported, wore her ears down to her nipples. To their undoubted delight, the sailors soon discovered that marriage was not a sacred union among most of the higher and middle castes. Women could take several “visiting husbands” at once; the most popular had ten or more. The men pooled their resources to keep their wife in her own establishment, and when one husband came for an overnight visit, he left his weapons propped up outside the door as a signal to the others to stay away.

  The women stared back at the Portuguese; they were equally mystified by the way they tangled themselves up in cumbersome clothes and sweated like sponges in the heat. Perhaps some took their mutual investigations further; if not, “public women,” some of whom were also part-time wives, were everywhere to be had. Between the system of socialized courtesanship, the skilled prostitutes, and the oriental aromas of perfumes and ointments, European men thought they had arrived in a kind of sexual paradise, a discovery that elicited much moral bellyaching and more indulgence. Satisfaction, though, had its price. Niccolò de’ Conti had come across many shops run by women who sold strange objects, the size of a small nut and made of gold, silver, or brass, that tinkled like a bell. “The men,” he explained, “before they take a wife, go to these women (otherwise the marriage would be broken) who cut the skin of the virile member in many places and put between the skin and the flesh as many as twelve of these ‘ringers’ (according to their pleasure). After the member is sewn up, it heals in a few days. This they do to satisfy the wantonness of the women: because of these swellings, or tumor, of the member, the women have great pleasure in coitus. The members of some men stretch way down between their legs so that when they walk they ring out and may be heard.” Not Conti: the Italian, though “scorned by the women because he had a small member and invited to rectify this,” was not willing to give others pleasure through his pain.

  The more curious sailors reported even stranger customs. Cows wandered everywhere, including into the royal palace, and were treated with great honor; even the Zamorin ceded place to them. Yet many men and women were shunned as if they were lepers. As the Brahmins and Nairs walked along the streets they cried out “Po! Po!”—“Go! Go!”—a warning to the lower castes to get out of the way. If an inferior failed to shrink to the side and bow his head, however rich and influential he might be, his superior could “freely thrust him through, and no man aske him why he did it.” Once touched—even by the Portuguese—the highborn had to purify themselves with a ritual bath; if they didn’t take precautions, they explained, they would have been bathing all day.

  The lowest castes were not allowed anywhere near the city; they lived in the fields and ate dried mice and fish, and if they touched their betters, both they and their relatives were fair game. Unsurprisingly, many converted to Islam. One of the most polluting of all castes, though—the sorcerers and exorcists—came into their own when the Zamorin was sick. They set up a tent at his gate, painted their bodies in a rainbow of color, donned crowns made from grasses and flowers, and lit a bonfire. To a cacophony of trumpets, kettledrums, and cymbals, they leapt out of the tent yelling and pulling faces, breathing fireballs, and jumping in naked flames. After two or three days they drew circles on the ground and spun around inside until the devil entered them and revealed how to cure the royal ailment. Without fail, the Zamorin did as he was told.

  Stranger still, even to Europeans brought up on stories of saintly self-abuse, were the Indians’ religious rituals. Some ecstatics, they discovered, presented themselves to priests already prepared for self-immolation:

  These have on their neck a broad, circular piece of iron, the front part of which is round and the back part extremely sharp. A chain attached to the front part hangs suspended on the breast. Into this the victims insert their feet, sitting down with their legs drawn up and their necks bent. Then, when the speaker pronounces certain words, they suddenly stretch out their legs and at the same time, drawing up their neck, cut off their own heads, yielding up their lives as a sacrifice to their idols. These men are regarded as saints.

  Festivals were a particularly popular time for suicidal acts of devotion. On one day of the year, an idol accompanied by bejeweled girls singing hymns was pulled through the street on a wagon drawn by a file of elephants. A European onlooker reported that numerous Indians, “carried away by the fervor of their faith, cast themselves on the ground before the wheels, in order that they may be crushed to death, a mode of death which they say is very acceptable to their gods. Others, making an incision in their sides and inserting a rope through their bodies, hang themselves to the chariot by way of ornament, and thus suspended and half dead accompany their idol. This kind of sacrifice they consider the best and most acceptable of all.”

  Yet to foreign eyes—Muslim as much as Christian—the ceremony of suttee was the most alien custom of all. By law, the first wife was compelled to be burned, while further wives, one traveler reported, were married “under the express agreement that they should add to the splendor of the funeral ceremony by their death, and this is considered a great honor for them. . . . When the pile is lighted the wife, richly dressed, walks gaily around it, singing, accompanied by a great concourse of people, amid the sounds of trumpets, flutes and songs . . . and springs in the fire. If some show fear (for it frequently happens that they become stupefied by terror at the sight of the struggles of the others suffering in the fire), they are thrown into the fire by bystanders, whether willing or not.” Westerners found the spectacle morbidly fascinating. “ ’Tis remarkable,” another onlooker observed, “that the Body of the Woman hath such an Oyley Property, that one Body will serve like Oil or Greese to consume the Bodies of 5 or 6 men.”

  After their crash course in Indian culture, the sailors headed to the teeming market squares and bazaars behind th
e harbor. There they tried to sell their few belongings—a brass or copper bracelet, a new shirt, or even the old linen shirts off their backs. They, too, found they had been wildly optimistic about the value of Portuguese goods in the East: what in Portugal counted as a very fine garment was worth a mere tenth of the price it would fetch at home. Here they sold them for whatever they could—a handful of cloves, a bundle of cinnamon, perhaps one or two garnets, sapphires, or tiny rubies—if only to take back souvenirs. At night the merchants locked up their shops with bars and heavy iron padlocks, the Zamorin’s officials lowered barriers around the business area, and the sailors started back to the ships.

  While the crews were making themselves at home in the town, the townsfolk rowed out and climbed on board the ships, offering coconuts, chickens, and fish in exchange for bread, biscuits, or coins. Many brought their sons and children to see the outlandish vessels. Some were clearly hungry and Gama ordered his men to feed them, not so much from an outbreak of generosity but “for the sake of establishing relations of peace and amity, and to induce them to speak well of us and not evil.” The public relations exercise went so well that it was often late at night before the visitors left, and the captain-major took heart. He decided to leave a factor, a clerk, and a small staff in Calicut to bypass the merchants and sell direct to the people. With the help of the friendly local Christians, he hoped the Portuguese might put down roots in India after all.

  By the time every man had taken his turn it was well into August, and Gama was more than ready to head for home. Before giving the order he dispatched his clerk Diogo Dias to inform the Zamorin that the fleet was preparing to depart and to ask for the promised ambassadors. Dias was also to offer one last gift to the ruler—a chest full of amber, corals, scarves, silks, and other pretty things—and in return he was to request large quantities of cinnamon and cloves, together with samples of other spices. If necessary, he was to say, the factor who was staying behind would pay for them when he had the funds. It was a long shot, but Gama was well aware that Christopher Columbus had returned without clear proof that he had reached the Indies, and he was not keen to make the same mistake.