by Cliff, Nigel
Gama was asked to name his reward, and he chose the hereditary lordship of Sines, the town where his father had been governor. The title was granted him in December, but the Order of Santiago refused to give up its rights over its fiefdom, even to its own prodigal son. The explorer pressed his case in person, and as the matter dragged on, fights broke out between his servants and the governor’s men. Nearly two years later he was still waiting, and a substantial royal pension was cobbled together to make up for the dues he had been denied.
Meanwhile the king ordered his scribes to draft an elaborate grant letter that formally celebrated Gama’s great feat. The long letter traced the history of the discoveries from Henry the Navigator to Vasco da Gama himself. It recognized that Gama had triumphed over mortal dangers unlike any faced by his predecessors—dangers that had taken the lives of his brother and many of his men. It commended him for performing a “most excellent service” by discovering “that India, which all those who have given descriptions of the world rank higher in wealth than any other country, which from all time had been coveted by the Emperors and Kings of the world, and for the sake of which such heavy expenses had been incurred in this kingdom, and so many captains and others forfeited their lives.” It predicted that great advantages would flow from the discovery, “not only to our kingdoms but to all Christendom: the injury done to the infidels who, up to now, have enjoyed the advantages offered by India: and more especially the hope that all the people of India will rally round Our Lord, seeing that they may easily be led to a knowledge of His holy faith, some of them already being instructed in it.”
Princes, Manuel added, should be generous, and the details followed. Gama, his family, and their descendants were permitted to add the prefix Dom to their names, an honorific comparable to the English “Sir.” The explorer was appointed to the royal council. He was granted another substantial annual pension, to be paid in perpetuity to his heirs, and the right to send money to India every year to buy spices, which he could import free of royal duties. Finally, he was named Admiral of India, “with all the honors, prerogatives, liberties, power, jurisdiction, revenues, quit-rents, and duties that by right should accompany the said Admiralty.” Spain had Christopher Columbus, Admiral of the Ocean Sea; now Portugal had Vasco da Gama, Admiral of India. The title outrageously flouted anything the Indians themselves might have to say about the matter, but to its intended audience nearer home the message was unmistakable: while Columbus had been busy sailing around the Atlantic, Gama had won the prize that both had sought.
It was a handsome settlement; Nicolau Coelho, who was also a fidalgo of the court, received about a tenth the amount. Besides, Gama was widely reported to have returned from India with a lucrative cache of pepper, ginger, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, lac, and precious stones that he had bartered for his personal silverware.
Like every ambitious man of his age, though, he knew that real power lay with land and titles. He kept pressing for his promised estate, and meanwhile he set about courting the well-connected Dona Catarina de Ataíde. When they married, Gama’s pedigree rose another notch. Like most women of her time, Catarina has remained utterly inscrutable to history, though the large brood that gradually surrounded her suggests the match was not purely political.
Gama was a man on the make. When the opportunity to take charge of a great new fleet came his way, he could not resist the chance to redouble his stature.
It was a dangerous move worthy of a gambler who played the odds. If he succeeded in subduing India, he would strengthen his claims on the king’s favor. If he failed, he might suffer, like the hapless Cabral, the ignominy of royal neglect. He calculated the risks and took the bet.
On January 30, 1502, Vasco da Gama was formally commissioned as Admiral of India in Lisbon Cathedral. Among the throng of assembled dignitaries was one Alberto Cantino, the envoy of the Duke of Ferrara, and Cantino carefully reported the important occasion to his employer:
First, every one attended a sumptuous Mass, and when it was over, the above-mentioned Don Vascho, dressed in a crimson satin cape in the French style, lined with ermine, with cap and doublet matching the cape, adorned with a gold chain, approached the King, who was attended by the whole court, and a person came forward and recited an oration, praising the excellence and virtue of the King, and went so far as to make him superior in every way to the glory of Alexander the Great. And then, he turned to the Admiral, with many words in his praise and in praise of his late predecessors, showing how by his industry and vivacity he had discovered all this part of India, [and] when the oration was over, there appeared a herald with a book in his hand, and made the above-mentioned Don Vascho swear perpetual fidelity to the King and his descendants, [and] when this had been done, he knelt before the King, and the King taking a ring from his hand, gave it to him.
The royal standard was carried to the presiding bishop, who solemnly blessed it and returned it to the king. Manuel unsheathed a sword and placed it in his admiral’s right hand. He placed the standard in his left, and Gama rose to his feet and kissed the royal fingers. The rest of the knights and lords filed past and followed suit. “And thus it ended, with the most splendid music.”
Dom Vasco da Gama, Admiral of India, marched out of the cathedral to a trumpet fanfare, a figure far grander than the young adventurer who had set sail less than five years before.
AMONG THE GRANDEES who lined up that day to pay his homage was the young ambassador from Venice.
Spy or not, Pietro Pasqualigo had struck up a cordial relationship with the Portuguese king. Manuel had knighted him, and he had even asked him to be his son’s godfather. The personal warmth between the two men did not disguise the fact that Venice was increasingly horrified by Portugal’s obsession with the East. Nor did the shiny black gondola, its cabin festooned with gold cloth, that Venice sent Manuel in the month of Gama’s departure. The Most Serene Republic was still trying to convince the king to attack Muslims in the Mediterranean, rather than sail halfway around the world and strike at the trade arteries through which its lifeblood flowed.
Two months later, Venice changed tack and recalled its ambassador. Instead, in December 1502, the Signoria established a special giunta of fifteen prominent men to deal with the Portuguese peril.
Since persuasion had failed and cooperation was out of the question, the only remaining option was sabotage.
That same month, the giunta dispatched a confidential agent named Benedetto Sanuto to Cairo. Sanuto’s mission was to convince the sultan of Egypt that the Portuguese were as much a menace to Muslims as they were to the Venetians. He was mandated to suggest two strategies to counter the threat. The first was for the sultan to cut his custom duties so that the Venetians could compete with the Portuguese. Even Venice knew that was a long shot. The second was “to find rapid and secret remedies” to deter the Portuguese from sailing to India. The Venetians could not quite bring themselves to ask their Muslim allies to use force against their Christian competitors, but there was little doubt where their sympathies lay. If the Portuguese met with concerted opposition in India, Sanuto predicted, they would soon think again. Perhaps the sultan could have a word with the Zamorin of Calicut and urge him “to do the things that seemed appropriate to his wisdom and power.” There was little doubt, either, what he meant by that.
PART III
CHAPTER 14
THE ADMIRAL OF INDIA
ONCE AGAIN SEA biscuit was baked, barrels of wine rolled along gangplanks, and the banners, standards, and crosses fluttered in the winter breeze. The usual devotions were made, the artillery fired a farewell salvo, and Vasco da Gama sailed out of Lisbon on February 10, 1502.
Altogether the fleet numbered twenty ships, though only fifteen were ready in time. Gama had chosen as his flagship the sturdy São Jerónimo. From the Esmerelda, his maternal uncle Vicente Sodré, a knight of the Order of Christ, commanded a subfleet of five ships. Also among the captains was Brás Sodré, another of Gama’s maternal uncles, and
Álvaro de Ataíde, Gama’s brother-in-law. Gaspar da Gama, the admiral’s unlikely godson, was again prominent among the personnel. The remaining five vessels were due to leave in early April, with Vasco’s first cousin Estêvão da Gama in command on the big new warship Flor de la Mar. Paulo da Gama’s steadfast support and calm voice would be much missed, but the new mission was even more a family business than the first.
It was also a European affair. Lisbon was buzzing with foreign financiers, merchants, and sailors, all talking India and spices. Englishmen, Frenchmen, Germans, Genoese, Spaniards, Flemings, Florentines, and even a few renegade Venetians were arriving daily to try their luck in the East. The new fleet was too big to be crewed or financed by the Portuguese alone, and large numbers of foreigners signed up.
Gama’s sailing instructions were astonishingly ambitious, though they were at least more specific than the apocalyptic agenda the king had set Cabral. The combined fleet was to shore up the fragile Portuguese factories, force more African and Indian cities to agree to advantageous trade terms, and deal with the truculent Zamorin of Calicut. When it had imposed its will on the Indian Ocean, it was to split in two. Vasco da Gama was to return to Portugal with the main body of the fleet and its precious cargoes of spices. Vicente Sodré’s strongly armed subfleet, meanwhile, was to stay behind and escalate the war against Islam. As well as protecting Portugal’s interests, he was to mount a permanent blockade of Arab shipping, stanch the flow of spices into the Red Sea, and strangle Egypt’s economy. If all went according to plan, before long the Portuguese would sail up the Red Sea, rendezvous with troops trekking east across Africa from Morocco, and march on Jerusalem.
The first fifteen vessels made the customary first stop at the Cape Verde Islands, where the priests said mass. There were plenty of novices among the crews, and a Flemish sailor aboard the Leitoa Nova, one of the ships in Gama’s main fleet, ogled the islands’ inhabitants. “The people there were stark naked,” he blurted out to his diary, “men and women, and they are black. And they have no shame, for they wear no clothes, the women have converse with their men like monkeys, and they know neither good nor evil.”
Even more than usual, the Atlantic passage was a test of nerves. On March 6 the fleet left the Cape Verdes with a fair wind, but it was soon becalmed. For days the men had little to do but reel in huge fish, which one sailor noted had a strange and horrible appearance and were as heavy as Frisian cows. Then the wind picked up and brought with it six weeks of changeable weather marked by heavy seas, violent squalls, and hailstorms that swept the ships in every direction. By the end of March the Great Bear and the Pole Star had disappeared from the night sky, and on April 2 the sun burned so high overhead that nothing could be seen in the shadowless light. Even the nights were stifling, and the whole company was sick from the heat.
Soon the ships crossed the equator, the noon sun swung behind them, and the Southern Cross appeared in the night sky, shining clearly through wispy clouds. For company the men watched huge schools of flying fish leap out of the sea in unison and flocks of gray, white-headed frigate birds keep pace with them, every so often dipping on their huge wings to make a catch in their long beaks. When larger predators appeared on their tail, the schools jumped so high that ten or twenty at a time flopped into the boats. For days on end even the fish and the birds disappeared and there was no living thing to be seen. Only the usual minor disasters broke the eerie silence: a mast breaking, or one ship ramming another so hard that it took hours to disentangle them.
By April 23, St. George’s Day, the fleet finally had a fair wind and was back on track. Gama consulted with his captains, asking how far they thought they were from the Cape, and set a course to the east-southeast. Then the wind turned against them again, and they were driven west toward Brazil. By late May, having once more regained their course, they were far enough south that the early winter days lasted barely eight hours, and amid a spectacular storm of “rain, hail, snow, thunder and lightning” the westerlies drove them past the Cape of Good Hope.
By now the suffocating heat had given way, a German sailor recorded, to “a chill such as in Germany cannot occur. We were all cold, for the sun lay to the north, and many of our men died of the cold. The sea is of such storminess there as it is wondrous to behold.” He pulled his sodden cloak tightly around him, but his shivers sharpened when he was told that four ships—including the vessel captained by Bartolomeu Dias—had been wrecked at this very spot less than two years before. For days the fleet plowed with furled sails through the high seas and driving rain, and nerves were badly frayed by the time the admiral pointed out a flock of birds that fished by day and slept on land at night; a clear sign, he promised, that the coast was near. The captains made what headway they could with shortened sails, and on May 30 they sighted land and dropped anchor. As the relieved sailors celebrated, the pilots peered at the coastline, compared it to their charts, and reckoned they were a hundred leagues past the Cape.
The elements were not ready to let go. “Then we weighed anchor and continued further,” the German sailor resumed; “and when we found ourselves at sea, a great storm overtook us, and the sea was more tempestuous than we had ever seen it.” Bowsprits and masts snapped like twigs, and three of the ships disappeared from sight. Waves pounded the sides and washed over the decks, and as they battled the swells, currents, and winds for three days and nights, even the seasoned mariners were convinced their time was up. At the worst point a giant dolphin leapt out of the sea and almost overshot the masts, panicking the superstitious sailors. Soon after, a humpback whale with fins as tall as sails swam around for so long and made so much noise that they trembled with foreboding. To their intense relief, the visitors turned out to be good omens: the storm gave way to a fair wind, and the men spread out their drenched clothes to dry in the weak sun.
Soon after the fleet sailed into the Indian Ocean, the admiral called a conference of all fifteen captains. They decided to split up: Vicente Sodré’s five ships would head straight for Mozambique, while the rest would stop off at the famed gold-trading town of Sofala. The goods intended for sale at Sofala were transferred to Gama’s ships, and a week later the main fleet arrived there, anchoring well away from the low shifting sands of the shore.
In Western lore, Sofala was believed to be the fabulously wealthy biblical port of Ophir, the location of King Solomon’s Mines, the capital city of the Queen of Sheba, or all three. “Our Captain told us that the king lived here who came to offer gold to our Lord Jesus Christ at Bethlehem; but the present king is a heathen,” the German sailor noted; by heathen he meant, of course, Muslim. The location of the town shifted with the sands; when the Portuguese arrived it was set amid palm groves and plantations on an island at the mouth of a river. The mainland embraced the island to form a broad horseshoe-shaped bay, and boats sailed down the river ferrying gold mined in the hinterland.
Gama called another meeting of the captains. The question, he put it to them, was how to be prepared to respond to hostile action, without appearing so aggressive as to invite a preemptive attack. A decision was reached: each captain would fully arm his boats and his men, but the weapons would be concealed.
At daybreak the boats rowed out. The beach was already full of people, and as the Europeans approached, fifteen or twenty men dragged a canoe into the water. Five or six Arabs climbed inside and pushed off to meet the strangers. When the canoe was within hailing distance, Gama’s spokesman impressively announced that he bore a message from the admiral of Portugal. The Arabs reported back to the sultan and returned with gifts of bananas, coconuts, and sugarcane. The sultan welcomed them, they said, and he was waiting for their message.
Gama was taking no risks, and he asked for hostages before he would let his men land. Two important-looking Arabs soon arrived, and two Portuguese set out for the palace. They came back with more welcoming words, together with more bananas and coconuts and a cow. After a boat had taken soundings of the shallow but navigable harbor
, the flagship and three other ships sailed into the bay. Ten or twelve days of trading began, in the course of which the Europeans loaded a hoard of gold in exchange for simple glass beads, copper rings, woolens, and small mirrors. The exchanges stayed friendly, though according to one report, Gama spent his time secretly surveying the surrounding area for the best place to build a fort.
Financially the mission had got off to a flying start, though its fortunes quickly plummeted when one of the gold-laden ships struck a reef on leaving the harbor and was barely evacuated before it sank. The rest of the fleet sailed on to Mozambique, where a week later it reunited with Sodré’s squadron.
This time around the sultan of Mozambique was all smiles and cooperation. Two of the three ships that had been lost in the storm were also sheltering in the port, while Sodré’s men had been busy constructing an armed caravel, which was to be left to patrol the African coast, from parts that had been brought from Portugal. The fleet loaded fresh water and wood and exchanged more beads for gold, and when all was ready, the admiral dictated a letter outlining the course he intended to follow. He sent it to the town with instructions for it to be delivered to the second wave of ships, and the thirteen vessels sailed on to their next port of call.
Kilwa, the island about which Gama had heard so much on his first voyage, had for centuries been the home of the most powerful sultans in east Africa, the Arab overlords of the entire coast from Sofala and Mozambique in the south to Mombasa and Malindi in the north. The dynasty’s star had been waning for some time—the ruins of a monumental palace, with spacious suites of courtyards, bathing pools, and throne rooms, moldered magnificently on a headland overlooking the Indian Ocean—and three years earlier it had been extinguished for good when the last sultan was murdered by his own emir. Yet the island was still seriously rich. Its heavyweight Muslim merchants acted as middlemen for the gold and ivory trade of Sofala and Mozambique, which were too far south for vessels from India and Arabia to arrive and leave with the turning monsoon; they also shipped the gold that was mined inland on the great granite plateau of Zimbabwe, together with silver, amber, musk, and pearls. The city’s tall houses were handsomely built of stuccoed stone embellished with ornamental niches and set amid fine gardens and orchards. The Great Mosque, with its egg-box roof of concrete domes and forest of coral columns, looked like a miniature version of the Mezquita in Córdoba. Kilwa’s glory days might have gone, but it was still a glittering prize.
