by Cliff, Nigel
Gama watched, hidden from sight, through a loophole in the side of his ship. Tomé Lopes was stunned: shocked by the admiral’s refusal to relent, and amazed that he was willing to turn down such wealth. There was no doubt in his mind that the ransom would have been enough to buy the freedom of every Christian prisoner in Morocco and still leave great treasure for the king. Bergamo and his fellow factors were no doubt wondering just how much of their profit would go up in smoke. Yet there were plenty of zealous Christians among the crews who had no more qualms than their Crusader forebears about killing peaceful merchants and pilgrims. The dehumanizing notion that their enemies in faith were somehow not real people was too deeply ingrained to be shaken. Like holy warriors before and after, they avoided looking into the whites of their victims’ eyes and got on with their godly business.
The Mîrî was still afloat. The desperate Muslims had dragged their mattresses and the mats that covered the cargo into the center of the deck, and they kept up their barrage from behind their makeshift shelters. Tomé Lopes’s ship was nearest, and he and his crew could see their comrades in the boats waving flags and calling them to come to the rescue. They sailed over and took the soldiers on board, half on the ship itself and half on the sambuk they had seized earlier, which they were still towing along. The gunners trained a large bombard on the Mîrî and the cannonball crashed into the base of its mast, splintering the wood. Thinking they had the situation under control, they sailed right up to the enemy ship.
The Mîrî was much the bigger and taller of the two, and the Christians turned their ship astern so that the top of its castle came up against the waist of the Arab vessel. The Muslims sprang into action. They threw ropes onto Lopes’s ship, and so quickly that the sailors had no time to act, they leapt across the gap. They clung to the netting that was meant to ward off boarders, climbed up the rigging, and threw the ropes back. The men on the Mîrî grabbed the ends and pulled the two vessels tight against one another.
Suddenly the Christians were in deep trouble. At such close quarters their guns were useless. The forty or so sailors were heavily outnumbered, and every time they poked their heads out into the open, a hail of stones thudded around them. A few soldiers scrambled up to the crow’s nest and returned fire with their meager supply of lances and arrows, but the Muslims picked them up and sent them thwacking back into the decks. Lopes and his comrades were forced to cower out of sight: only one soldier armed with a crossbow stopped the men on the Mîrî from swarming aboard.
It was the longest day of the year, Lopes later noted—it certainly felt like it—and yet as the light finally began to fade the battle showed no sign of letting up. The Muslims were still fighting “with such vehemence that it was marvelous to see, and even though we wounded and killed many, it seemed as if no one was dying and no one felt their wounds.” They tore arrows from their skin, flung them back at their attackers, and threw themselves back into the action without a second’s pause. Fourteen or fifteen Muslims jumped on the Portuguese ship and hurled themselves at the sterncastle with the superhuman force of men who knew they were wronged. The victims were now the avengers, and they pushed at the door, brushing away the lances that pierced their chests. The officers and soldiers who had barricaded themselves inside beat a bruised and bloody retreat down the ladder to the main deck. Only Tomé Lopes and Giovanni Buonagrazia, the ship’s captain, stayed to fight on. The cuirass the captain had strapped around his torso was already dented and broken from the barrage of stones, and as he stood there the straps gave way and his breastplate fell to the ground. He turned to the faithful friend at his side.
“O Tomé Lopes, scribe of this ship,” he said, “what are we doing here, while everybody has left?”
They quit the castle, too, both heavily wounded. The Muslims charged in and raised a triumphant cry. The men on the Mîrî took heart and rushed the decks of the Portuguese ship. By now most of the Europeans were wounded and several were dead. The rest cowered behind the sails, the only cover they had left.
With the wind against them the rest of the armada had been unable to act, but eventually a few ships closed in on the action. They were powerless to fire lest they hit their own men, and as they looked on, several of their comrades abandoned all hope and threw themselves in the sea. Some of the wounded and exhausted men of the Mîrî lost their footing as they tried to drag themselves back to their ship and fell into the sea, too, but still new waves of attackers took their place.
Finally one of the larger Portuguese ships caught a breeze and headed straight for the Mîrî. The Muslims scrambled back to their decks, cut the ropes, and pushed off. The Julioa was bigger than its stricken sister ship, but the men on board took one look at the fired-up enemy and decided to leave them alone. The Mîrî was getting away.
It was only then that Vasco da Gama managed to arrive on the scene on the Lionarda. The principal warships were close behind, and they set off in pursuit of their fleeing quarry. The wind was now gusting and the sea was swelling in great waves, and as they pitched up and down they were driven far ahead of the Mîrî and then blown far back behind. As they swayed within range they let loose a few off-target cannonballs and veered off again. The ghastly chase continued for four days and nights, the wounded men and women on the Mîrî lying prone on the deck, calling to the Prophet to deliver them from the hands of the Christians.
The end was as sordid as the whole engagement. A young Muslim jumped off the side of the Mîrî and swam through the rough sea to the nearest Portuguese ship. He would give them the secret of how to sink the Arab vessel, he blurted to the captain, if they promised to save his life. He would tie a rope to her rudder, and with the Mîrî crippled they would no longer have to follow her all over the sea.
The traitor carried out his task and the cannons fired. “And so,” recorded Tomé Lopes, “after all those battles, the Admiral ordered the ship burnt with the men who were on it, very cruelly and without the slightest pity.” Screams rent the air. Some of the Muslims leapt in the sea with hatchets in their hands and swam to the boats, but they were killed in the water as they tried to hack at the bottoms or clamber on board. Almost all the rest—nearly three hundred men and women—were drowned.
The young traitor was sufficiently chastened by the ghastly sight to relish a small moment of revenge. There had been great treasures on the Mîrî, he told the Christians, that they had never found. Gold, silver, and jewels had been hidden in casks of oil and honey, and when the merchants had realized their lives were lost, they had thrown them all in the sea.
The Portuguese had shown one small sign of mercy, and one of pragmatism. Before they sank the Mîrî, they had taken off seventeen children. They believed they were saving their souls when they baptized them by force. They had also seized the ship’s pilot, a hunchback with useful experience of sailing the Indian Ocean, and they found an immediate job for him.
With grim satisfaction, Gama dictated a letter to the Zamorin of Calicut and handed it to the pilot to deliver. The letter explained that of all the souls on board the Mîrî, the admiral had spared the lives of only some children and the man who was now his messenger. The rest, Gama declared, had been killed in revenge for the Portuguese who had been murdered in Calicut, and the children had been baptized as reckoning for a Portuguese boy whom the Moors had taken to Mecca to make a Muslim. This, he added, “was a demonstration of the manner that the Portuguese had in amending the damage that they had received, and the rest would be in the city of Calecut itself, where he hoped to be very soon.”
Vasco da Gama had returned to India in the service of a king who dreamed of ushering in a universal Christian age. A visionary’s sense of proportion lessens as his vision grows in grandeur, and world domination and fair play have no common border. If the admiral had any notion of natural justice, it, too, was sacrificed to the call of holy war.
CHAPTER 15
SHOCK AND AWE
THE CRUSADER FLAGS snapped boldly from the masts and the crow�
�s nests of the European fleet. On the unfurled sails the crimson Crusader crosses could be seen from far away. They were not there for decoration, or simply as signs of piety and pleas for protection. Not everyone had enlisted for the voyage knowing of Manuel’s mad ambition to crush Islam and anoint himself Universal Emperor, but few if any had believed they were going on a peaceful trading trip.
The vast majority of Vasco da Gama’s men knew exactly where their sympathies lay. To the sailors and soldiers, the admiral was a proven leader who had earned their unblinking loyalty. To the captains, he was an astute commander who consulted them regularly and passed no bucks. To the priests, he was a Crusader engaged in God’s work. Civilians had always been swept up in war, enemy peoples had always been caricatured as scarcely human, and war’s inhumanity had often escalated when men believed they were fighting for their faith. In an age when it was commonplace for conquerors to slaughter entire cities, Gama’s followers and foes alike did not see his attack on the Mîrî as an unconscionable act. Only a few contemplative men, like the clerk Tomé Lopes, were struck by the human tragedy of holy war.
The merchants’ representatives had different reasons to prefer caution. Their employers had funded a large part of the fleet, and yet Matteo da Bergamo privately noted that the admiral appeared determined to put Crusade before trade. Dom Vasco had made it clear that he would only allow a few of them to leave the ships, and he had suggested in no uncertain terms that they buy their spices in the places he arranged and at the prices he fixed. They had little choice; as Bergamo put it, “we knew his will and didn’t want to oppose him. So we were all agreed, with lively voice.” If there were more episodes like the brutal attack on the Mîrî, though, they wondered if they would have anything at all to take home.
Crusading might be bad for business, but Gama had a longer prospect in view. The hard-nosed captain had become an iron-fisted admiral. He had no qualms about being more feared than loved, and he had no intention of slackening his attacks on anyone who hindered the Portuguese cause. He was, though, quickly reminded that nature had no truck with the aspirations of admirals and kings.
Within days four more big dhows appeared on the horizon, and the São Paulo set off in pursuit. The Arab ships fled toward land, and three disappeared down a river. In its haste the fourth hit a shoal, and the São Paulo came alongside and grappled it, lowering its anchors to keep clear of the shoal. A boarding party swung onto the deck, and many of the Muslims jumped in the sea. Yet no sooner were the Christians on board than the captive ship creaked alarmingly and rolled over onto its side. The São Paulo tipped with it, and the crew was forced to uncouple the two vessels. The stricken ship lurched into the waves, and the marooned men hung on to anything they could and waited to be rescued. The Europeans put out their boats, but in the heavy swells their oars were useless. The waves began to break up the lightly built dhow, and with the boarding party still beyond rescue, it filled with water and sank. Its cargo, including a large cache of shields and swords, washed toward the shore, where a crowd of locals emerged to scavenge the wreckage.
On October 13 the last of the three ships that Gama had lost at the Cape of Good Hope sailed into view. It had been missing so long that everyone had assumed it had foundered, and as so often happens at sea the mood instantly switched from dismay to celebration.
The fleet had been hunting Arab ships for a month, and no more had fallen into its net. The whole time the admiral had been receiving letters from the Kolattiri of Cannanore, who repeatedly assured him that he was at his service and would give him all the spices in his land at the price he named. The time for loading the ships was running out, and Gama reluctantly gave the order to set sail. On October 18 the nineteen vessels rounded a rocky headland, passed a jutting promontory, and moored within sight of the secluded harbor of Cannanore.
The Kolattiri had been markedly friendly to the Portuguese on their last two sorties. He became even better disposed when the ambassador he had sent to Portugal sailed up with the twenty-four men who had been seized in the sambuk. They had heard the battle with the Mîrî at close quarters—they had been battened under the hatches of their boat, which had been tied to Tomé Lopes’s ship—and as they arrived home their trumpets pealed their relief.
Soon envoys bearing gifts approached the Christian fleet. They were at the service of the king of Portugal, they bowed, and they added that the Kolattiri was most eager to meet the admiral. Gama was equally keen to meet the Indian king, but he refused to step onshore. He was determined to trust no one; possibly he realized that his recent behavior might not incline them to trust him, either.
If Gama was not going to leave his floating realm, the Kolattiri was not going to set foot outside his kingdom. To solve the dilemma an elaborate compromise was drawn up. Elephants appeared on the shore dragging dozens of tree trunks, and a team of carpenters set to work constructing a sturdy wooden pier. In no time it reached well out to sea.
The next day the admiral took charge of one of the caravels. He seated himself on the poop deck, on a fine cushion set on a richly carved chair under a crimson and green velvet awning. He was wearing a silk robe and two heavy gold chains, one around his neck and the other slung across his chest. Twenty-six boats accompanied him, each decked out with the flags of the Order of Christ and the full panoply of arms. The pages struck up a dignified tune on their trumpets, drums, and castanets, the sailors danced a jig, and the flotilla set off toward the pier.
On land the Kolattiri appeared accompanied by four hundred Nair soldiers—most likely not, as a Portuguese chronicler claimed, ten thousand—and a menagerie of exotic animals that the wide-eyed Flemish sailor found it impossible to name. The newcomers to India were equally surprised to see that all the dignitaries, including the king, were naked from the waist up.
At each end of the pier the workmen had erected a pavilion draped with painted cloths. The soldiers halted in front of the shore side pavilion, and the Kolattiri and thirty of his attendants disappeared inside. It took them a while to emerge: the sun was scorching, the Kolattiri was seventy years old, and the party had run out of puff.
When the admiral’s caravel drew alongside the seaside pavilion, the Kolattiri moved off down the pier. Two men went in front of him swinging heavy sticks decorated with bull’s heads, and two more men danced around with sticks painted with white sparrow hawks; Tomé Lopes mockingly noted that they looked like a couple of Portuguese girls.
The Kolattiri dismounted from his palanquin and arrayed himself on a sumptuously draped daybed. Still Gama refused to disembark, and the perplexed king was forced to bend down and shake his hand across the water. The audience went ahead with the interpreters shouting diplomatic niceties back and forth between the pier and the poop deck.
Since the Kolattiri had been so accommodating, Gama passed him with his own hands—a diplomatic breach that set tongues wagging—a lavish set of gilded silver tableware filled with saffron and rosewater. The Kolattiri gave the admiral, through the more humble hands of his servants, a collection of enormous gems. Smaller precious stones—mere trifles, he let it be known—were handed out to the captains and officers.
Gama moved swiftly on to business, but his attempts to fix a tariff for the spices he wanted to buy were royally rebuffed. The visitors had come too early in the year, the king replied, and the spices hadn’t yet arrived. In any case, he did not concern himself with such matters. He would command merchants to call on them, and then they could discuss trade.
After two hours the Kolattiri left, saying he was tired. The Portuguese fired a ceremonial salute as he retreated down his pier, and when Gama returned to the fleet he informed the merchants’ representatives that complete accord had broken out. The Kolattiri, recorded Matteo da Bergamo, would do everything the king of Portugal and his admiral asked, including making war on the Zamorin of Calicut and compelling his merchants to sell spices at the price the admiral had set. Gama was determined to call the shots and get the best deal for his
king, but in reality the Kolattiri had agreed to nothing of the sort.
The merchants arrived the next day, and to Gama’s dismay they all turned out to be Muslims. As usual they turned up their noses at the European goods—a bargaining strategy, the Portuguese were convinced—but worse, the prices they asked were a great deal higher than before. After much haggling the negotiations fell apart, and Gama began to detect a fiendish conspiracy at work.
The admiral was in severe danger of losing face, and he worked himself into a professional rage against foreigners who refused to play by his rules. He dismissed the merchants and immediately dispatched a warning message to the Kolattiri. Clearly, he railed, the king was not a true friend of the Portuguese. There was no other explanation for his sending Muslim merchants to them, “who as he well knew had an ancient hatred for the Christians and were our greatest enemies.” He would return the small quantities of spices that had already been loaded, he darkly added, with a great fanfare of bugles and plenty of salutes from his guns.
As the tension mounted, the Portuguese factor who had been left behind by the last fleet showed up in a fluster. Paio Rodrigues and his men had been in Cannanore for nearly a year and, he assured the admiral, they had found its king and people extremely obliging. Gama told him to stay on the ship; he was done with the Kolattiri, he fumed. Paio, who was not under Gama’s command, point-blank refused: he was going back, he insisted, whether the admiral liked it or not.
Gama bristled, then stepped back an inch. Instead he gave Rodrigues a new message for the Kolattiri. The fleet, he announced, would sail off and buy spices at a friendlier port, but the Muslims of his land had better not think they were safe any longer. Moreover, if the Christians who were staying on were hurt or dishonored in any way, his people would pay the price.
