by Cliff, Nigel
163 the novice Crusader: Sanjay Subrahmanyam gives a comprehensive survey of the handful of documents bearing on Gama’s family and early life: see Career and Legend, 58–68.
165 the full company: Of the chroniclers, Castanheda and Goís say 148; Barros says 170. There are other, unlikelier, estimates, ranging from the Florentine merchant Girolamo Sernigi’s 118 to the Portuguese historian Gaspar Correia’s 260. Correia and the later Portuguese historian Manuel de Faria e Sousa each have a (different) priest aboard, though Correia’s was likely a clerk and no contemporary mention is made of either.
166 the Chronicler: A remarkable quantity of ink has been spilled since the journal was discovered in 1834 on theories about the author’s identity. By a process of elimination, two candidates emerged as front-runners: João de Sá, the clerk of the São Rafael and later treasurer of the Casa da Índia, and Alvaro Velho, a soldier. A minor conflict between the author’s credulity that India was full of Christians and the more skeptical viewpoint later ascribed to Sá has gone against the clerk, and most Portuguese historians have definitively named Velho as the diarist. The evidence is circumstantial at best, and the attribution remains speculative. A standard Portuguese edition is Diário da viagem de Vasco da Gama, ed. António Baião, A. de Magalhães Basto, and Damião Peres (Porto: Livraria Civilização, 1945); an English translation by E. G. Ravenstein was published as A Journal of the First Voyage of Vasco da Gama, 1497–1499 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1898) and is hereafter cited as Journal. Any other diaries, logbooks, or reports that once existed were lost, perhaps, along with countless other documents, in the devastating Lisbon earthquake of 1755, and the Journal remains the only eyewitness source for the voyage. To complete the picture I have drawn selectively on the early Portuguese chronicles, especially those of João de Barros and Fernão Lopes de Castanheda, and on the accounts of near-contemporary travelers. As usual the literature disagrees on virtually everything, including the types and names of the ships; the dates of the mission’s preparation, departure, and return; the numbers, names, and survival statistics of the crews; and the route the fleet followed. I have only noted discrepancies from my account where they add interest to the story.
166 “Praised be God”: Barros gives the fullest report of the royal audience; see Ásia de João de Barros, Dos feitos que os Portuguezes fizeram no descobrimento e conquista dos mares e terras do Oriente, ed. Hernani Cidade and Manuel Múrias, 6th ed. (Lisbon: Divisão de publicações e biblioteca, Agência geral das colónias, 1945–1946), 1:131.
167 the Order of Christ: Manuel had been grand master of the order since 1484, and though John II’s will stipulated that on his coronation he should hand over to John’s illegitimate son Jorge, he refused to let go.
167 Belém: The village was formerly known as Restello; it was renamed Belém by Manuel I, who commissioned the great monastery that was built there to commemorate Vasco da Gama’s voyage.
169 The seamen wore loose shirts: For the sailors’ garb, see A. H. de Oliveira Marques, “Travelling with the Fifteenth-Century Discoverers: Their Daily Life,” in Anthony Disney and Emily Booth, eds., Vasco da Gama and the Linking of Europe and Asia (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000), 34.
169 “weeping and deploring”: Fernão Lopes de Castanheda, in Robert Kerr, A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1811–1824), 2:303. Castanheda’s account of Gama’s first voyage is based on a version of the Journal but adds much valuable detail. His História do descobrimento e conquista da Índia pelos Portugueses was translated into English by Nicholas Lichfield and was published in 1582 as The First Booke of the Historie of the Discoverie and Conquest of the East Indias, Enterprised by the Portingales, in their Daungerous Navigations, in the Time of King Dom John, the Second of that Name: Which Historie Conteineth Much Varietie of Matter, Very Profitable for all Navigators, and Not Unpleasaunt to the Readers. A revised version of this text was reprinted in Kerr’s collection.
170 the fleet edged forward: A fifth ship left Lisbon with Gama’s fleet; commanded by Bartolomeu Dias, it was headed to the Gold Coast, where Dias was to take up an appointment as captain of the fort of São Jorge da Mina.
170 “May God our Lord”: Journal, 1.
Chapter 8: Learning the Ropes
171 the first of the islands: The Ilha do Sal, or Salt Island, named by the Portuguese after the mines they had dug there.
172 off the known face of the earth: Gama’s bold move is a main plank in the argument advanced by the Portuguese historian Armando Cortesão and others that a series of exploratory fleets set out in the years following Bartolomeu Dias’s voyage. The author of the Journal tacitly adds to the speculation by showing scant interest in the course Gama followed. The complete silence of the record has been ingeniously adduced as evidence that something important enough to demand strict secrecy was afoot, but a sudden obsession with investigating the sailing conditions of the southern Atlantic does not fit in with the pattern of the discoveries. It seems likeliest that Gama’s course was determined by the lessons learned from Dias’s voyage, the limitations of his ships, and the vagaries of the weather. Whatever the level of premeditation, the execution by a fleet equipped with rudimentary navigational devices of a three-month sweep around the Atlantic that ended a mere hundred miles north of the Cape of Good Hope was a historic feat of navigation by any yardstick.
173 on another voyage: The Voyage of François Pyrard of Laval to the East Indies, the Maldives, the Moluccas and Brazil, trans. and ed. Albert Gray and H. C. P. Bell (London: Hakluyt Society, 1887–1890), 1:325.
173 “The watch is changed”: Quoted in John Villiers, “Ships, Seafaring and the Iconography of Voyages,” in Anthony Disney and Emily Booth, eds., Vasco da Gama and the Linking of Europe and Asia (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000), 76.
173 “And while this Prince”: Quoted in Peter Padfield, Tide of Empires: Decisive Naval Campaigns in the Rise of the West, vol. 1, 1481–1654 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), 33. Padfield gives a useful summary of the few known facts about the munitions carried by the fleet.
174 the same basic daily rations: The quantities varied between voyages; the biscuit ration ranged from less than a pound to nearly two pounds. See Oliveira Marques, “Travelling with the Fifteenth-Century Discoverers,” 32. Also among the foodstuffs commonly carried were salted or smoked fish, flour, lentils, onions, garlic, salt, mustard, sugar, almonds, and honey.
177 “Amongst us was the greatest Disorder and Confusion”: Jean Mocquet, Travels and Voyages into Africa, Asia, and America, the East and West Indies; Syria, Jerusalem, and the Holy Land, trans. Nathaniel Pullen (London, 1696), 203–4.
178 thirty leagues north of the Cape of Good Hope: St. Helena Bay is thirty-three leagues north of the Cape, or about one hundred miles: Pêro de Alenquer, who made the estimate, was less than ten miles out.
178 ninety-three restless days: The time Gama and his crews went without seeing land was unprecedented as far as we know; it was certainly much longer than the five weeks endured by Columbus’s mutinous crews.
179 a group of locals: The Bushmen or San people, hunter-gatherers and pastoralists who had lived in southern Africa since the late Stone Age.
179 “The inhabitants of this country”: Journal, 6.
180 “one of the sheaths”: Ibid., 7.
182 a paste of urine: A common remedy; the Portuguese had dealt with poisons made from snake venom or deadly sap from their first encounters with hostile forces in sub-Saharan Africa.
182 “All this happened”: Journal, 8.
183 ninety or so men emerged from the hills: The people were the Khoikhoi, pastoralists who had migrated to southern Africa by the fifth century CE and had intermixed with the San; the name for both is the Khoisan. Hottentot, the old name for the Khoikhoi, is now considered pejorative.
184 “We found him very fat”: Journal, 11.
184 “but to prove that we were able”: Ibid., 12.
185
“as big as ducks”: Ibid., 13. After several months of punishing conditions at sea, sailors invariably took out their pent-up aggression on defenseless animals.
186 a terrifying storm: At this point the sixteenth-century chronicler Gaspar Correia confronts Gama with a full-scale mutiny that dramatically ends when he summons the ringleaders to the flagship on pretense of charting the course home, claps them in irons, and flings their navigational equipment overboard. God will be their master and pilot, he vows; as for himself, he will never give up until he finds what he has come to seek. Correia’s account of Gama’s first two voyages is peppered with flights of fancy and no other source has the story, though Osorius briefly mentions a mutiny near the Cape of Good Hope. See Henry E. J. Stanley, trans. and ed., The Three Voyages of Vasco da Gama, and His Viceroyalty (London: Hakluyt Society, 1869), 56–64.
187 the last pillar: Gama had bypassed a bay that Dias christened Bahia da Roca (Bay of Rocks; later renamed Algoa Bay) and the largest of those rocks, where Dias celebrated mass and which he named Cross Island. The low islands—Dias’s Flat Islands—were five leagues past Cross Island and 125 leagues from the Cape. The headland where Dias erected his pillar was formerly known as False Inlet and is now called Kwaiihoek; the river that marked the point where Dias turned home is either the Great Fish River or the Keiskamma River.
187 “Henceforth,” noted the Chronicler: Journal, 16.
Chapter 9: The Swahili Coast
188 All were remarkably tall: The Bantu, a large family of African peoples who moved into southern Africa from around the fourth century CE and displaced many of the indigenous population; they were farmers, herders, and metalworkers. The river was probably the Inharrime, in southern Mozambique; Gama named it the Rio do Cobre, or Copper River.
189 “Look what I have been given!”: Journal, 17.
189 a much larger river: The Qua Qua River, in Mozambique. About ten miles upstream was the Muslim trading settlement of Quelimane, which was doubtless where the two distinguished visitors came from. The rest of the people, as before, were Bantu.
190 “These tokens”: Journal, 20.
191 “a man of such unprepossessing appearance”: Wilfrid Blunt, Pietro’s Pilgrimage: A Journey to India and Back at the Beginning of the Seventeenth Century (London: James Barrie, 1953), 10.
192 the local sultan: The sultans of the Swahili Coast were sole governors of their lands; they controlled trade, exacted a levy on imports and exports, and provided warehouses, pilots, and facilities for repairing ships. With extensive links to inland trading networks, often forged through polygamous marriages, they were also the coast’s dominant merchants in their own right. They were powerful men, and they were not used to being ordered around by foreigners. See Malyn Newitt, A History of Mozambique (London: Hurst, 1995), 4.
193 “a jar of bruised dates”: Journal, 28. The details of the street life are from Jean Mocquet, Travels and Voyages into Africa, Asia, and America, the East and West Indies; Syria, Jerusalem, and the Holy Land, trans. Nathaniel Pullen (London, 1696), 215.
194 “gold, silver, cloves, pepper”: Journal, 23.
194 “great merchants and owned big ships”: Ibid., 24.
195 “This information”: Ibid., 25.
196 “But when they learned”: Ibid., 28.
198 warring tribes of naked tattooed men: The Dutch traveler Jan Huygen van Linschoten was unusually perceptive about the cultural norms that made white people caricature black people as figures out of hell—and vice versa. Some of the Bantu, he noted, seared their faces and bodies with irons until their skin looked like raised satin or damask, “wherein they take great pride, thinking there are no fairer people than them in all the world, so that when they see any white people, that wear apparell on their bodies, they laugh and mocke at them, thinking us to be monsters and ugly people: and when they will make any devilish forme and picture, then they invent one after the forme of a white man in his apparel, so that to conclude, they thinke and verily perswade themselves, that they are the right colour of men, and that we have a false and counterfeit colour.” The Voyage of J. H. van Linschoten to the East Indies, ed. Arthur Coke Burnell and P. A. Tiele (London: Hakluyt Society, 1885), 1:271.
198 The pilot whom Gama had hired from the sultan: Most likely the pilot who was so keen to get away was the local man, not the Meccan pilot who had asked for passage, though the sources do not specify one or the other.
199 “When we were weary with this work”: Journal, 30. Estimates of the islanders’ strength range from a hundred to Barros’s two thousand; the lower estimate, as usual, is probably nearer the mark.
200 “Pisce Mulier, which is to say Women Fish”: Mocquet, Travels and Voyages, 233–35. The fishermen, Mocquet reports, were also said to cut the throats of humans and drink their blood while it was still hot. The king was the ruler of Matapa, a state of the Karanga (now Shona) people that stretched between the Limpopo and Zambezi rivers and flourished from around 1200 to 1500 CE on the back of its trade in gold and ivory. Great Zimbabwe, a monumental stone city on the Zimbabwe plateau, was the royal palace and trading center. The Portuguese called the kingdom Monomotapa, which they derived from the Karanga royal title Mwene Matapa, or “Ravager of the Lands,” and which they initially thought was the personal name of the ruler. Though Matapa had declined by the time the Portuguese arrived, the latter long believed it was a great power and went to great lengths to infiltrate it.
201 “Chaine of mens members”: Linschoten, Voyage, 1:275.
201 a large archipelago of tropical islands: The Quirimbas Archipelago, which stretches for sixty miles along the northern coast of Mozambique. The low-lying mainland is virtually hidden from view when coasting outside the reefs.
202 a large island ahead: Probably Mafia Island, which was likewise perfectly free of Christians. By standing out to sea Gama missed Zanzibar, a hundred miles to the north.
204 the Holy Ghost painted as a white dove: Castanheda says the merchants were Indian; Sir Richard Burton suggested the drawing was of a Hindu pigeon-god. Journal, 36.
205 “These and other wicked tricks”: Ibid., 37–38. According to Castanheda, the Mombasans tried further attempts at sabotage during the two following nights.
208 huge horns: The Siwa, or Royal Trumpet, was imported to East Africa by Persians from Shiraz, who settled along the coast in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Siwas were made of copper and wood as well as ivory.
211 “Our Lady at the foot of the cross”: Journal, 44.
212 the pilot appeared to be another Christian from India: The pilot has often been romantically misidentified as the great Arab navigator Ahmad ibn Majid. The only plausible evidence is a short passage in a mid-sixteenth-century Arabic chronicle that calls the arrival in India of the “accursed Portuguese” one of the “astounding and extraordinary occurrences of the age” and in passing claims that the Portuguese—“may they be cursed!”—only made it across the Indian Ocean by getting Ibn Majid drunk. Castanheda, Barros, and Goís all say the pilot was from Gujarat. Barros and Goís say he was a Muslim, but given the explorers’ ongoing confusion about India’s religions, the Journal’s line—“We were much pleased with the Christian pilot whom the king had sent us” (46)—can be taken to imply that he was a Hindu. For the Arabic chronicle, see Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 124.
212 Indians preferred another device: The kamal, an Arab invention that the Portuguese developed in the early sixteenth century into the cross-staff.
212 “would never leave his heart”: Gaspar Correia, in Henry E. J. Stanley, trans. and ed., The Three Voyages of Vasco da Gama, and His Viceroyalty (London: Hakluyt Society, 1869), 143. Colorful as always, Correia paints a picture of “true friendship and sincere love” developing between Gama and the sultan of Malindi, so much that on their departure he “could not endure it, and embarked in his boat and went with them, saying very affectionate things” (141, 144).
> Chapter 10: Riding the Monsoon
213 scorching temperatures: The Great Indian Desert, or Thar Desert, reaches 50 degrees Celsius during summer; the sea temperature remains in the low 20s Celsius. The dates and intensity of the monsoon vary widely from year to year, but the Malabar Coast is always the first area to receive heavy rain. The rest of the air mass flows over the Bay of Bengal, where it picks up more moisture and roars into the eastern Himalayas at speeds of up to twenty-five miles an hour before turning west and drenching the Indo-Gangetic Plain.
214 “As soon as I caught the smell of the vessel”: “Narrative of the Journey of Abd-er-Razzak,” in R. H. Major, ed., India in the Fifteenth Century: Being a Collection of Narratives of Voyages to India in the Century Preceding the Portuguese Discovery of the Cape of Good Hope (London: Hakluyt Society, 1857), 7–8.
215 Mount Eli: Also known as Mount Dely and now as Ezhimala; the hill, which stands out prominently into the ocean, is now the construction site of a naval academy and is inaccessible to the public.
215 “saying the salve”: Castanheda, in Robert Kerr, A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1811–1824), 2:344.
215 the Promised Land: On a recent visit, paradise was tainted with a liberal scattering of discarded sandals, ointment tubes, and medicine bottles. The surf rolls heavily on the sand, whipped up by treacherous-looking rocks in the shallows. Just behind the coast is an unprepossessing concrete post bearing the inscription:
VASCO-DA-GAMA
LANDED
HERE
KAPPKADAVU
IN THE YEAR
1498
Kappad, which the Portuguese called Capua or Capocate, is ten miles north-northwest of Calicut, which is now known as Kozhikode. Strictly speaking, Gama did not land there; he first set foot on Indian soil at Pantalayini Kollam, the Portuguese Pandarani, four miles farther up the coast. Pantalayini Kollam was later supplanted by the nearby town of Quilandy, now known as Koyilandy.
