by Cliff, Nigel
By June 15 conditions had become so bad that Gama ordered three of the ships to leave immediately for home. They set out early the next morning, and after surviving a blizzard that separated and nearly sank them, they finally came within sight of the Cape of Good Hope. There, as if to show just how much had changed in the five years since Vasco da Gama had first sailed into the Indian Ocean, they ran into two Portuguese ships newly bound for India. The bombards fired and the boats went out. News of a prince born to the king passed one way, and sacks of bread passed the other. The homeward-bound crews went on their way, watching pods of whales swimming around the Cape, shooting large, sleek tuna with their artillery, and stopping on an island to trap and roast flocks of birds that had never learned to beware of humans. According to the Flemish sailor, birds were not the only victims. By mid-July the provisions were again running out, and on the thirtieth, he matter-of-factly reported, “we found an island, where we killed at least 300 men, and we caught many of them, and we took there water.” No doubt he was exaggerating as usual, though Tomé Lopes, whose ship was waiting offshore, was unusually reticent about what went on.
The flotilla sailed on toward the Cape Verdes. The islands were still some way off when it ran into a raging storm and was forced to anchor in the pitching sea. All the men fell ill, and for twenty days they had no bread to eat. The German sailor was among them. In the nick of time, he reported, another Portuguese ship sailed past, “from which we took flour and baked cakes and made porridge, and helped ourselves as best we could. Every second or third day a man died, and the rest were ever sicker and more despondent from the change of air.” Eventually the three vessels reached the Azores, took on plenty of fresh food, and scudded on the westerlies to Lisbon.
Back in Mozambique, the remaining ships set out in twos and threes as soon as they could be provisioned. The Admiral of India waited for the very last departure and left on June 22. Two of the ships lost the rest on a dark, stormy night and limped home taking in water, accompanied by nothing, recorded a Portuguese sailor, but their fears. As they headed to the Azores, the entire company sickened and no one was left to sail the ships. There was nothing to eat but moldy biscuits crawling with maggots, and the ailing men devoured two dogs and two cats that had been taken on board to eat rats.
THE SCENT OF spices reached land before the ships. Seventeen hundred tons of pepper, cinnamon, cloves, ginger, nutmeg, cardamom, brazilwood, aloeswood, myrobalans, canafistula, zerumba, zedoary, benzoin, camphor, tamarind, musk, and alum perfumed the holds and masked the odors of men who had been nearly two years at sea.
The first vessels reached Lisbon in late August, and the news they brought set the seal on Vasco da Gama’s fame. “In every place that he has been,” Matteo da Bergamo’s boss Gianfranco Affaitati reported to Pietro Pasqualigo, who was then in Spain, “either through love or through force, he has managed to do everything that he wanted.”
On October 10, the Admiral of India sailed triumphantly into Lisbon. By the end of the month at least thirteen ships had returned. One vessel had come aground off Sofala early in the voyage; another, the oldest and smallest of the fleet, arrived home during a fierce storm and had to anchor five miles off Lisbon. “Such a strong wind blew,” a witness reported, “that all the anchor lines broke and the waves dashed the ship to pieces, and the men saved themselves on these pieces, so that not more than four were drowned.” Otherwise, Gama had not lost a single vessel.
His success stood in stark contrast to the disasters that had befallen his great rival. Three months after the Admiral of India had embarked on his second voyage, the Admiral of the Ocean Sea had set out from Spain for the fourth and final time. When Christopher Columbus arrived at Hispaniola, the governor ignored his warning that a hurricane was brewing and refused him entry to the port. Two days later the first Spanish treasure fleet left the colony and sailed straight into the tropical storm. Twenty of the thirty ships foundered, taking a vast haul of gold and five hundred men, including the governor himself, to the bottom of the sea. Columbus’s four venerable vessels had taken refuge in an estuary, and when the storm passed he set off to explore the mainland he had struck on his previous voyage. In Panama he learned that a whole new ocean lay a few days’ march away, and he was convinced he was close to finding a strait through which he could sail directly to India.
He was never able to search for it. Having evaded the hurricane, his fleet was pummeled by an even fiercer storm. One of the damaged ships was trapped in a river, and under attack from a nearby tribe, he was forced to abandon it. The three remaining vessels were riddled with wormholes and were leaking fast, and they had barely set sail for home when another had to be abandoned. As the last two ships headed for Cuba they were lashed by another tempest, and Columbus was forced to beach them in Jamaica before they sank. There were no Spaniards on Jamaica, and the men were marooned. One of the captains bought a canoe from a local chief and paddled to Hispaniola, where the new governor promptly threw him in prison for seven months. Columbus was still stuck on Jamaica, trying to put down a mutiny among half his crew and startling the islanders into feeding the castaways by predicting a lunar eclipse, when Vasco da Gama arrived home.
The court came down to the sea to welcome Dom Vasco and accompany him to the palace. He paraded through the streets to drumrolls and fanfares, preceded by a page boy carrying a huge silver basin filled with the golden offering from Kilwa. When he arrived at the palace, he presented the heap of gold to Manuel.
For the first time, a valuable tribute had been brought back from a celebrated Eastern city. For the first time, a Muslim ruler had made himself a vassal of the Portuguese king. For the first time, Manuel had thousands of Christian subjects in India. The doubts sown by Cabral’s troubled mission were silenced.
Manuel praised his admiral in unstinting words that redounded to his own credit. Vasco da Gama had outmatched the ancients, he rhapsodized. He had attacked “the Moors from Mequa, enemies of our Holy Catholic Faith,” he had made solemn treaties with two Indian kings, and he had brought his fleet safely home, “well-laden and with great riches.” As for the gold from Kilwa, Manuel had it melted down and made into a glittering monstrance for the vast monastery church that was rising at Belém, its lavish detailing a candy store of African carvings and Eastern marvels, proof in soaring stone of Portugal’s new power and the profit from spices.
CHAPTER 17
EMPIRE OF THE WAVES
JUST A FEW years earlier Lisbon had been a city on the edge of the world. Now it was transformed into a commercial hub that rivaled the richest entrepôts of the East. Ships from three continents crowded its harbor. Bulging sacks of pepper filled its warehouses. Carts heaped with muslins and brocades, musk and ambergris, frankincense and myrrh, cloves and nutmeg rumbled through its alleys. Persian carpets covered its floors and oriental tapestries lined its walls. Men from across Europe flocked to look, to buy, and to taste the thrill of the new.
To the footloose, the newly expanded world brought a heady surge of freedom. The chance to see new lands, meet new peoples, and bring home eyewitness accounts, striking souvenirs, and even exotic pets was irresistible to Europe’s adventurers, and a steady stream of latter-day Marco Polos abandoned their homes and set out on lengthy journeys to the East. These were men like Lodovico de Varthema, who quit Bologna in 1502 with a raging thirst for adventure, fame, and exotic sexual encounters. According to his riveting Travels, Varthema disguised himself as a Mamluk soldier in Syria, fought fifty thousand Arabs at a time while guarding a camel caravan, slipped into the precinct of the Kaaba in Mecca and the tomb of Muhammad in Medina, conducted an impassioned affair with a wife of the sultan of Aden, and achieved a reputation as a Muslim saint before returning to Europe on a Portuguese ship.
The doughty Portuguese had not opened a path to the East for the titillation of a few daredevils. The little nation had set itself a task of monumental proportions, and the work had just begun.
Vasco da Gama had sailed
east, declared an Italian banker in Lisbon, with the express object of “subjugating all of India” to his master’s will. His own iron will had set the course for decades of ruthless battles for domination. Yet India was no longer an idea, a glorious figment of the European imagination. It was a vast subcontinent, beset by its own internal strife, vibrant with its own intricate complexities, and disconcertingly oblivious to the foreigners scratching at its shores. The Portuguese had only begun to chart the coastline, while the interior was still an impenetrable mystery: that was the limitation of conducting warfare by sea.
To be fair, the banker had jumped ahead of the game. For Vasco da Gama and his men, India was a means to an end. That end was Manuel’s vaulting ambition to install himself as king of Jerusalem, and the first step in that Crusade was not the conquest of India but the expulsion of its Muslim merchants. Gama had thrown everything at the task, yet his royal nemesis was still ensconced in his Calicut palace and the merchants were still plying their trade. As for the path ahead, the Portuguese had found no Prester John waiting to put his cohorts at their command, and the few Christians they had met were powerless to rally to their cause. They had yet to stanch the flow of spices to Egypt, and they had come nowhere near the Red Sea, the channel they believed would deliver them to the Holy Land. To all but the most credulous in faith, it was clear that Manuel’s master plan would require a vast commitment of time, manpower, and wealth that would draw Portugal ever deeper into the East.
The king was undeterred. Faith, and artillery, would conquer all. Yet India was halfway around the world, and without the right man in charge the crown was impotent to control the actions carried out in its name.
The rot set in with Gama’s own relatives.
Vicente Sodré and his brother Brás had stayed on in India with a broad remit to protect the Portuguese factories and despoil Muslim shipping. As soon as their stern nephew left they decided the second of those tasks was more profitable than the first, and they sailed off to loot ships carrying spices and silks to the Red Sea. Their crews were furious, not from moral outrage but because the brothers refused to share out the spoils. One irate captain denounced the brothers to King Manuel himself; Brás, he wrote, had made off with all manner of goods “without entering them in the books of Your Lordship, besides many others that he took when he wanted, for no one dared to go against him, since his brother permitted him to do whatever he wanted.” The cocky siblings got their comeuppance when they laughed off the advice of some Bedouin herders to move their ships out of the path of an oncoming gale, and the captain self-righteously reported the consequences to the king:
“So that, my lord, the next day, the wind rose so high and the sea became so rough that the ship of Vicente was dashed against the shore, and after it that of Brás Sodré with its mast broken, each of them having six cables for the prow.” Vicente was immediately killed; the thuggish Brás scrambled ashore and thrust his sword first into a pilot he had seized from one of the vessels he had looted, and then into the hunchback pilot who had been taken from the Mîrî. The admiral himself had instructed his uncles to make use of the hunchback’s expertise; he was, Manuel’s informant added, the best pilot in the whole of India, and “most necessary for Your Lordship.”
With the fleet absent, the Zamorin seized his chance. He turned his wrath on the rebellious king of Cochin, who was still stubbornly refusing to break his treaty with the Christians, and marched across the border with a large army. The raja and the Portuguese factors, clerks, and guards were forced to flee the ruined city and hide out on a nearby island. They were still there when the next Portuguese fleet arrived, and when they reinstalled the raja on his throne, the first European fort in India, a hastily constructed wooden structure named Fort Manuel, went up at Cochin.
It was fast becoming clear that only a permanent armed occupation could hope to achieve Manuel’s aim of clearing the seas of Muslim trade. That called for a commander who could make decisions on the ground, and in 1505 Manuel appointed the first Viceroy of India. Like the titles the king had concocted for himself and his admiral, it was a signal of intent rather than an expression of reality, but it marked the beginning of a mission drift that saw the Portuguese move inexorably from sea to land. Manuel chose Dom Francisco de Almeida, a tried and trusted old soldier who had fought at the siege of Granada in 1492, and besides giving him full powers to make treaties, wage war, and dispense justice, Manuel ordered him to construct a chain of forts around the Indian Ocean.
Almeida began at Kilwa. His soldiers landed and made straight for the palace of the usurping emir, benevolently “sparing the lives of the Moors along the way who did not show fight.” A courtier furiously waved the flag left by Gama from a window and shouted “Portugal! Portugal!” The Portuguese ignored him, broke down the palace doors, and hacked and looted away while a priest and a party of Franciscan friars held crosses aloft and chanted the Te Deum. The emir fled, and Almeida appointed a puppet in his place. He commandeered the strongest seafront house, razed the buildings around it to the ground, and turned it into a heavily armed fort manned by a captain and eighty soldiers.
The Europeans moved on to Mombasa. The sultan had been expecting them, and cannonballs whistled toward them from the bastion at the harbor entrance. They shot back until the fort’s gunpowder store ignited and the building went up in flames, then sailed into the harbor with all guns blazing. The soldiers landed in force, advanced through a hail of stones and arrows, and torched the city’s wooden houses. The walls and thatched roofs went up like kindling, taking nearby masonry buildings with them; Mombasa, reported a German sailor named Hans Mayr, who was with the expedition, “burned like one huge fire that lasted nearly all night.” The surviving inhabitants fled to the palm groves outside the city, and after breakfast the next day the invaders ransacked the smoldering ruins, breaking down doors with axes and battering rams and stopping to pick off the last defenders on the rooftops with their crossbows. When they reached the palace they smashed through its sumptuous rooms, while a Portuguese captain climbed to the roof and ran up the royal standard. Great heaps of treasure were carted away, including a magnificent carpet that was sent to King Manuel. According to the German sailor, when it was all over fifteen hundred Muslim men, women, and children lay dead but only five Christians had been killed, a disparity he put down more to divine grace than human skill.
The fleet headed for India, and after putting up a fort at Cannanore the Portuguese set off for their annual confrontation with the Zamorin.
In March 1506, fully 209 vessels from Calicut—84 of them big ships—attacked the 11-strong Portuguese fleet. The Bolognese adventurer Lodovico de Varthema happened to be passing by at the time, and he threw himself into the fray.
The Zamorin had finally managed to arm himself with efficient artillery—ironically for Varthema, the cannon were of Italian manufacture—and the odds were stacked against the Europeans. Almeida’s son Lourenço, who was in command, called together his men and steeled them to their sacrifice in the words of a true Crusader:
“O sirs, o brothers, now is the day that we must remember the Passion of Christ, and how much pain He endured to redeem us sinners. Now is that day when all our sins will be blotted out. For this I beseech you that we determine to go vigorously against these dogs; for I hope that God will give us the victory, and will not choose that His faith should fail.” Then a priest, crucifix in hand, gave a rousing sermon and granted a plenary indulgence. “And he knew so well how to speak,” Varthema later recalled, “that the greater part of us wept, and prayed God that He would cause us to die in that battle.”
The drums rolled, the guns boomed, and, wrote Varthema, “a most cruel battle was fought with immense effusion of blood.” The fighting raged on into a second day. “It was a beautiful sight,” the Italian remembered, “to see the gallant deeds of a very valiant captain who, with a galley, made such a slaughter of the Moors as it is impossible to describe.” Another captain leapt on board an enemy
boat. “Jesus Christ, give us the victory! Help thy faith,” he cried, and he hacked off some more heads. The Indians fled before the relentless assault, and the Europeans mercilessly hunted them down. When they returned to the scene, the young commander sent his men to count the corpses. Varthema recorded the outcome: “They found that those who were killed on the shore and at sea, and those of the ships taken, were counted at three thousand six hundred dead bodies. You must know that many others were killed when they took to flight, who threw themselves in the sea.” The would-be martyrs had to make do with victory, because according to Varthema, the Italian guns notwithstanding, not a single Christian died.
While the victor was still celebrating his triumph, a Portuguese captain who was barely younger than Lourenço’s father was busy stealing his thunder.
Afonso de Albuquerque was already fifty when he first arrived in the Indian Ocean. He was of middling height, with a ruddy complexion, a large nose, and “a venerable beard reaching below his girdle to which he wore it knotted.” As a nobleman who was distantly related to the royal family he had been well educated, and he was noted for his elegant turn of phrase. He was also a confirmed Crusader who as a young man had served for ten years in the Moroccan wars. He was a commander of the Order of Santiago, the same Moor-slaying society into which Vasco da Gama had been inducted as a boy, and he had decided the future lay in the East. There was more than a touch of Gama in the determined set of his eyes, but if he was a match for his predecessor in personal courage and sheer force of personality, the older man outstripped the younger in his capacity for unflinching cruelty—and left him behind in his willingness to turn his temper on his own people.
