by Cliff, Nigel
Gama slowly began to unbend. His men set about repairing the ships and clearing space for the bumper cargo they expected. Three days after their arrival the king sent word that it was an auspicious day to start loading, and hillocks of pepper began to pile up on the docks. The prices, though, had yet to be fixed, and the merchants soon went on strike. After four days Gama was forced to ask the king for a meeting. His holds were still empty, and he was running out of places to do business.
The meeting was arranged for the fourteenth, a week after the fleet’s arrival. The admiral set out in a caravel with the usual trumpets, bombards, and standards, and he and his captains sailed into the mouth of the harbor. The king came down to the shore in his palanquin, accompanied by six war elephants and—so claimed a Portuguese sailor—ten thousand men. With his servants fanning him and his ushers holding back the crowds with maces, he drew to a halt. The royal trumpeters lifted their instruments and tooted a tune, and a few cannon fired a salute. The Portuguese responded with their own fanfare and a great blast of their guns. Envoys shuttled back and forth to finalize the diplomatic niceties, but just as the meeting was about to go ahead, the wind whipped up, rumbles of thunder burst the air, and the inky heavens opened. The king sent word that it was a bad omen, and the meeting was rescheduled for two days later.
When Gama returned, the raja was already out in the harbor, seated on a large raft made from four sambuks lashed together and covered with planks. Tomé Lopes noted that the crowds had lost interest, or had not been summoned, and there were only four or five guards with him.
As soon as the admiral’s caravel drew alongside, the king came beamingly on board. In a replay of the scene at Cannanore, Gama gave him—again, with his own hands—more silver basins, jugs, and saltcellars gilded to look like solid gold, together with a throne embellished with silver, a hundred cruzados, a piece of velvet, and two rich brocade cushions. The raja presented the admiral and his officers with more jewels. After a long, cheerful conversation, he agreed to Gama’s conditions and signed off on his schedule of prices, and the admiral accompanied his floating platform back to the palace jetty.
The merchants grumbled about the prices, but sellers clustered on the shore. The Portuguese began to fill their holds day and night with the exotica of the East: pepper, ginger, cardamom, myrobalans, canafistula, zerumba, zedoary, wild cinnamon, cloves, benzoin, and alum.
Soon Vicente Sodré sailed into view with three of the ships that had stayed at Calicut. It turned out they had had a narrow escape. The Zamorin had secretly prepared another armed fleet of twenty large sambuks to attack them. When it was ready, a flotilla of fishing boats had lured the Christians into the mouth of the river that Gama had crossed in great state on his first visit. The fleet was lying in wait among the palm trees, and the Indians quickly surrounded the European boats on every side, unloosing volleys of arrows. The trapped and wounded men panicked, and they were saved only when a gunner tried to shoot one of the fishing boats, aimed too high, and sent a cannonball smashing down onto the sambuk carrying the captain of the fleet. As it capsized, the Indians went to the rescue, and the Portuguese had enough time to extricate themselves.
With Sodré was an envoy from Cannanore who had arrived in Calicut and had asked to be taken to the admiral. His king, he told Gama, had sent him to say that he would match the prices the Europeans had been given anywhere else, if necessary by making up the difference out of his own pocket; moreover, he would buy any goods they had for sale at the price they set.
Gama dispatched Sodré to check out the story and load the king’s ships. His high-stakes gamble had paid off in the nick of time: instead of letting the European merchants compete to buy spices, he had made the Malabar kings compete for their business. Still, Matteo da Bergamo and his fellow traders continued to grumble about conditions in Cochin. The consignments of pepper had begun to run out, and the European merchandise was as impossible as ever to shift. The city’s merchants were always asking for more money or finding another reason to stop loading, and more than once they rebelled against the king’s orders and refused to trade at all. Several times Gama was forced to pull out his factors and rant to the raja about the dastardly behavior of the Muslims: one day he crept up to his palace and fired off his bombards, in the guise of a fete, while the king pretended to be entertained on his terrace. Nothing was enough for Matteo da Bergamo and his profit-hungry colleagues. “We kept asking ourselves,” the Italian noted, “whether we would be able to load our ships even half full on this voyage.” They were no more enthused by the offer from Cannanore. “The admiral sent three royal ships,” he added, “because no one among us wanted to go there, since from what we had learned they had too little pepper and the cinnamon was of bad quality.”
With the king firmly on the side of the Portuguese, the Muslim merchants hatched a plot. Three farmers approached the Julioa, which was in the harbor to load spices, and sold the sailors a cow. The Hindu king, naturally, got wind of the matter and made a forceful complaint to the admiral; like the Zamorin, on taking the throne he had sworn to protect cows first and Brahmins second. Gama promptly had it proclaimed that his men, on pain of being beaten, were forbidden to buy cows and were immediately to arrest and bring to him anyone who tried to sell anything remotely bovine. The three men came back with another cow and were dragged before the admiral, who sent both cow and captives to the king. They were instantly impaled without trial, reported Tomé Lopes, “in this way, that each one had a stake thrust up through the kidneys and chest that propped up the face, and they were set in the ground, as high as a lance, with the arms and legs splayed and tied to four poles, and they could not pull down the post, because there was a piece of wood across it that held them in place. And so they carried out justice on them, because they sold the said cows.”
It was at that satisfying moment of cross-cultural cooperation that a large party of Indians turned up and announced they were Christians.
THE NEW ARRIVALS told Dom Vasco that they had come on behalf of thirty thousand Christians who lived farther down the coast. They were the descendants, they explained, of the followers of the Apostle Thomas, who was buried in their city. They were, reported Tomé Lopes, “most honorable in appearance,” and they brought offerings of sheep, chickens, and fruit.
Gama’s voyages had revolutionized Europe’s maps, but much of the West’s world picture was still colored by the surmises of scriptural geographers. There was thus nothing in the least surprising about the notion that one of Jesus’s disciples had traveled to India. Farther south, the newcomers explained, was a great trading city called Quilon, and nearby, where the land projected into the sea, the apostle had miraculously built a great church just before he died. St. Thomas, the story went, had arrived dressed in rags on a mission to convert the lowest castes of Indians to the new religion. One day a gigantic log had floated into the harbor and had lodged on the strand. The king had sent many men and elephants to drag it inland, but it refused to budge. The ragged apostle swore he could move it, if the king would give him a piece of land on which to build a church in honor of his Lord. He summoned every carpenter he could find, and they sawed away at the log until they had fashioned the frame and the cladding for the church. At midday Thomas took a scoop and filled it with sand; the sand turned into rice, and the workers were fed. When their work was done, he transformed a wood chip into money to pay them. Soon afterward the apostle assumed the form of a peacock and was shot by a hunter. Having risen into the air as a bird, he had fallen back to earth as a man. He was buried, but his right arm refused to stay in the ground. Every time someone pushed it back under the soil it popped up again the next day. Eventually the grave diggers gave in and left it poking out, and pilgrims flocked to see the miracle from many lands. Some Chinese visitors tried to cut off the arm and take it home, but when they struck it with a sword it finally drew back into the grave.
A touch more prosaically, the visitors explained that the saint’s followers had s
ent five men out into the world to make contact with their fellow Christians. They had eventually arrived in Persia, where a community of Christians who spoke Syriac, a language similar to Jesus’s Aramaic tongue, had flourished independently of the rest of Christendom for centuries. Ever since, the Persian Church had sent bishops to tend to its Indian flock.
After the long, fruitless search for Prester John, after the initial euphoria at finding countless Christians in India and the dawning realization that they belonged to an entirely different religion, here, at last, were real Indian Christians. True, like their Persian mentors they were Nestorians who emphasised the distinction between the human Jesus and the Son of God, and so strictly speaking, they were heretics. True, their priests wore turbans, went barefoot, and, the German sailor noted, were as black as the other Indians. But they had six bishops, they said mass at an altar before a cross, and they took communion, albeit with soaked raisins instead of wine. It was a start.
Gama welcomed the visitors with great joy and gave them gifts of silk cloth. They asked about Europe’s churches and priests and about the sailors’ homes and habits, and they were astonished to hear how far they had come. They offered to become vassals of the Portuguese king, and as a symbol of their allegiance they brought the admiral a scarlet crook tipped with silver and adorned with little bells, together with a letter from their leaders. Though they were hardly huge in number, they were clearly ready to support their fellow Christians against their Hindu rulers and the Muslims who dominated their cities. If the Portuguese king built a fortress in their neighborhood, they bravely suggested, he could dominate the whole of India.
As the news traveled back to the Christian communities, a second delegation arrived from Quilon in mid-December. They told the admiral that there were plenty of spices in their city, and Gama dispatched three ships down the coast. The Flemish sailor was on board, and he reported that there were “nearly 25,000 Christians” in Quilon who worshipped at “nearly 300 Christian churches, and they bear the names of the apostles and other saints.” When he visited the church of St. Thomas he found it cut off by the sea, and the nearby town, which the Christians inhabited on condition of paying a tribute, was mostly ruined. Still, the Europeans loaded large quantities of pepper and some cinnamon and cloves, which they paid for with cash, copper, and the opium seized from the Mîrî.
Back in Cochin the new pepper harvest had at last arrived. Matteo da Bergamo was still complaining that he had to sell his wares at a loss, that Cochin was badly supplied with drugs and precious stones, and that he was being given short measure by the merchants, but the holds were filling up fast. Meanwhile, a caravel returned from Cannanore with the news that Vicente Sodré had not only loaded a bumper haul of spices but had also captured and looted three large vessels at sea. One had had more than a hundred men on board, and most had been captured or killed. If honest trade failed, piracy was always another way to make ends meet.
CHAPTER 16
STANDOFF AT SEA
CHRISTMAS PASSED IN high spirits for the Europeans in Cochin and Quilon. The festive mood was only slightly spoiled on December 29, when the soundly sleeping sailors on the Santo António woke up with a jolt to find their anchor rope had snapped, they had hit the coast, and they were letting in water at an alarming rate. They fired off two shots and the boats raced to their aid, but the ship stayed beached all night until it could be towed off for emergency repairs in the morning.
As the year 1503 began, even the excruciating display of barbarity that Gama had inflicted on Calicut seemed to be paying off. The Zamorin had already sent two sambuks to spy on the fleet; the Portuguese had captured them and had summarily executed their crews. Now, though, an embassy arrived with a new letter from the Zamorin and renewed assurances of friendship. If the admiral would come back, the Zamorin promised to make restitution for the seized goods; for his security, he would give him anyone he named to keep as a hostage until he was completely satisfied.
A Brahmin delivered the letter, and his son and two Nairs accompanied him. “This Brahmin,” noted Lopes, “is like a bishop and a monk, and is a man of great estate.” Like the rest of his caste, he added, the Brahmin was able to travel in perfect safety even if the country was at war, because anyone who harmed him would immediately be excommunicated with no possibility of absolution. The Portuguese were flattered all the more when the Brahmin announced that he wanted to go to Portugal with them. He had brought enough jewels, he explained, to pay his way, and if they would allow him, he would buy some cinnamon to do a little trading. He even asked if his sons and nephews could come with him to learn Latin and be instructed in the Christian faith.
This was music to Gama’s ears, and he was coaxed out of his professional distrust. Clearly, he thought, he had bombarded some sense into the Zamorin, and he decided to return with the ambassador in person. When his captains protested, he bluntly replied that if the Zamorin broke his word he would hang the Brahmin and his fellow messengers. The risk was worth taking: if he humbled Calicut and turned it over to Portuguese control, he would go home in triumph.
The admiral had the distinguished visitor’s jewels and spices secured on the flagship. He boarded the Flor de la Mar, his cousin Estêvão’s ship, and accompanied by a solitary caravel he set sail for Calicut.
The merchants of Cochin watched the admiral leave and immediately put down their scales. All their king’s blandishments had failed, they complained: the fickle Christian was headed back to Calicut to buy spices. Gama had given command of the Cochin fleet to Dom Luís Coutinho, a wealthy nobleman who was captain of the Lionarda, and Coutinho went to reason with the merchants. By two o’clock in the morning he had still failed to hammer out an agreement, and he sent Giovanni Buonagrazia after the admiral with letters asking for his orders. On board was Buonagrazia’s brother in arms Tomé Lopes, and once again Lopes recounted the story.
The winds were feeble, and it took the Italian captain three days to reach Calicut. When he arrived he edged within half a league of the shore, but the Flor de la Mar was nowhere to be seen. He sailed straight on to Cannanore, thinking the admiral had already made peace and had left to join his uncle, but since a strong northeast wind made it impossible to approach the harbor he returned to Calicut, still convinced that all was well. Luckily the wind again refused to cooperate, and he headed back to Cannanore, where he finally found the missing vessels in full battle rig, “as if they were ready to fight with a thousand ships.” The captains sent up the flags and banners, and the crews exchanged stories.
As soon as Gama had arrived outside Calicut, Lopes heard, he had dispatched the caravel to Cannanore to fetch his uncle. With only a few dozen sailors left to protect him, he had made a warm speech to the Brahmin and had asked him to repeat it to the Zamorin. It often happened, he said, that two enemies became great friends, and so the Christians would become to the Zamorin. From this moment on, they would do business as if they were brothers.
The Brahmin promised to return by nightfall, but in his stead a different messenger arrived. The money and spices were ready for the admiral, he announced, if he would send a man of quality to the city to settle their accounts.
Gama began to suspect that he had been taken for a fool. He wouldn’t even send the smallest ship’s boy, he furiously replied. For the umpteenth time, he told the Zamorin to send what he owed or forget the whole thing.
The messenger advised him to stay at least another day; he knew the will of the Zamorin and his people, he added, and it would soon become clear. He, too, promised to return with an answer.
That night, during the last quarter before dawn, the watchkeepers sighted a sambuk setting out from the shore. When they took a second look, they saw that what looked like one boat was really two tied together, and they were now heading straight for their ship.
The officers woke up the admiral. He threw on some clothes and came on deck, confident that the Zamorin was at last sending the long-awaited goods. Instead he made out seventy
or eighty more sambuks rowing silently from the shore. He decided it must be the fishing fleet heading out for its morning catch.
Without warning the two leading boats opened fire. Iron cannonballs skipped across the sea and smashed into the Flor de la Mar. The rest of the war fleet came up behind and fired at will. As soon as one of the Christians showed himself, arrows thudded from the moonlit sky like black rain. The enemy was already too close for the bombards to be of any use, and the Europeans could only climb up the masts and throw back stones.
Along the way Gama had seized a sambuk, and it was tied to the stern of the Flor de la Mar. The Indians filled it with wood and gunpowder and set it on fire. The flames leapt up the sternpost, and the sailors scrambled to cut the rope. The current took the blazing boat away just in time.
As dawn glowed on the horizon, more boats were still starting out from the shore. Soon there were two hundred swarming around the lone Portuguese vessel, all shooting as soon as they were in range. Their guns were small, but the vengeful Zamorin had clearly gone all out to procure every weapon he could find.
The Flor de la Mar was in desperate straits. The slow business of hauling in the anchors would have exposed the sailors to lethal fire, and instead they dashed to hack at the cables.
The sails were set, but the ship did not budge. The night before, Gama had secretly ordered a special anchor to be dropped in case the Zamorin’s men tried to cut the others loose. It was attached with several iron chains. Cowering beneath the relentless barrage of arrows, the men had no choice but to take a hatchet to each in turn.
