by Cliff, Nigel
336 “nearly 25,000 Christians”: Calcoen: A Dutch Narrative of the Second Voyage of Vasco da Gama to Calicut, trans. J. P. Berjeau (London: B. M. Pickering, 1874), 29.
Chapter 16: Standoff at Sea
337 “This Brahmin”: See “Navigazione verso le Indie orientali scritta per Tomé Lopez,” in Giovanni Battista Ramusio, Navigazioni e Viaggi, ed. Marica Milanesi (Turin: Einaudi, 1978–1988), 724. Correia luridly and no doubt spuriously claims that Gama tortured the Brahmin with burning embers before cutting off his lips and ears and sewing dog’s ears in their place. The sources differ on the number and estate of the messengers, their mission, and their fates.
339 “as if they were ready to fight”: Ibid., 726.
340 Soon there were two hundred: Matteo da Bergamo gives the figure. By the time the fleet was home the count of the enemy boats, according to the Florentine merchant Francesco Corbinelli, had grown to four hundred or even five hundred.
341 “You vile man!”: See Lopes, “Navigazione verso le Indie orientali,” 728.
344 “otherwise he would cut off their heads”: Ibid., 730.
344 little booty: According to Castanheda there was plenty, including much porcelain and silver and a golden idol with emerald eyes and a huge ruby on its chest. Correia adds that the sailors found many women belowdecks, including some pretty girls whom Gama kept for the queen. Neither claim is credible.
345 “for the whole night the wind blew from the sea”: See Lopes, “Navigazione verso le Indie orientali,” 730.
346 chains of unknown islands: The Laccadives and Maldives. Nearer Africa the fleet sailed through the Seychelles, Comoros, and Amirante islands; the last were named after Vasco da Gama, Admiral of India.
347 “It seems to me”: See Paul Teyssier and Paul Valentin, trans. and eds., Voyages de Vasco de Gama: Relations des expeditions de 1497–1499 et 1502–3, 2nd ed. (Paris: Chandeigne, 1998), 338. For unknown reasons, here and throughout his letter the Italian merchant substitutes “Constantinople” for “Lisbon.”
348 The two ships left Mozambique: Lopes says fifteen ships left Mozambique; if his figure is correct, the caravel that had been built there may have replaced the ship that had been lost off Sofala. The accounts disagree about some of the dates of departure and other details of the return journey; Lopes is my primary guide, but eyewitnesses on different ships fill out the story. Lopes and the German sailor left on June 16; though he later muddles his dates, the Flemish sailor almost certainly left with the same group. The Portuguese sailor left with Gama and the final convoy on June 22. Matteo da Bergamo put the finishing touches to his letters on April 18; with his usual confidence, he assured his employer that he expected to leave within six days and to outrun the other, less seaworthy ships on the way home. He dispatched his reports the next day and his testimony ends there, but his patience was doubtless sorely tested one last time.
350 “needed no condiments”: See Lopes, “Navigazione verso le Indie orientali,” 736.
350 “we found an island”: Calcoen: A Dutch Narrative of the Second Voyage of Vasco da Gama to Calicut, trans. J. P. Berjeau (London: B. M. Pickering, 1874), 32.
350 “from which we took flour and baked cakes”: Miloslav Krása, Josef Poli[š]enskyâ, and Peter Ratko[š], eds., European Expansion (1494–1519): The Voyages of Discovery in the Bratislava Manuscript Lyc. 515/8 (Codex Bratislavensis) (Prague: Charles University, 1986), 80–81.
351 “In every place that he has been”: Letter dated Lisbon, August 20, 1503, quoted in Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 225.
351 “Such a strong wind blew”: Krása, Poli[š]enskyâ, and Ratko[š], European Expansion, 81. The German sailor says one ship returned on August 19, one on August 27, one on October 7, nine on October 10, and one on October 14. The old ship was wrecked off Lisbon on the 24th. “One small ship is still out,” the German adds, “and there are fears that it too was wrecked.” According to other sources, though, ships were still arriving as late as November.
353 “the Moors from Mequa”: Grant letter of February 1504, quoted in Subrahmanyam, Career and Legend, 227.
Chapter 17: Empire of the Waves
354 the precinct of the Kaaba in Mecca: While disguised as a pilgrim, Varthema teased a Meccan merchant about the effects of the Portuguese voyages: “I began to say to him, if this was the city of Mecca which was so renowned through all the world, where were the jewels and spices, and where were all the various kinds of merchandise which it was reported were brought there. . . . When he told me that the King of Portugal was the cause, I pretended to be much grieved and spoke great ill of the King, merely that he might not think that I was pleased that the Christians should make such a journey.” Travelers in Disguise: Narratives of Eastern Travel by Poggio Bracciolini and Ludovico de Varthema, trans. John Winter Jones, rev. Lincoln Davis Hammond (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), 82.
355 “subjugating all of India”: Quoted in Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 227. The banker was Bartolomeo Marchionni, the same plutocrat who had issued a letter of credit to Pêro da Covilhã.
356 “without entering them in the books”: Letter from Pêro de Ataíde to Manuel I, dated Mozambique, February 20, 1504, quoted in ibid., 230. Soon afterward, Brás Sodré died in mysterious circumstances; Castanheda and Goís insist that the brothers were condemned by God for the sin of abandoning the king of Cochin. Ataíde took the remaining ships to India and wrote to Manuel asking for a reward, but he died the next year at Mozambique before his letter could do him any good.
357 “sparing the lives of the Moors”: Hans Mayr, in Malyn Newitt, ed., East Africa (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2002), 12.
357 “burned like one huge fire”: Ibid., 15.
358 “O sirs, o brothers”: Travelers in Disguise, 214–19.
359 “a venerable beard”: Manuel de Faria e Sousa, The Portuguese Asia, trans. Captain John Stevens (London: C. Brome, 1694–1695), 1:207–8.
360 the Persian Gulf: Or the Arabian Gulf; the nomenclature is a point of controversy between Iran and the Arab states.
360 “a very large and beautiful edifice”: Walter de Gray Birch, ed., The Commentaries of the Great A. Dalboquerque, Second Viceroy of India (London: Hakluyt Society, 1875–1894), 1:81.
360 the fabled city: Hormuz was quickly lost when several of Albuquerque’s captains rebelled against the heavy work of building the fortress in the parching heat and absconded to India. It was not properly retaken until 1515, again by Albuquerque but with a much larger force. Hormuz gave Portugal overlordship of the ports of the Persian Gulf and eastern Arabia; the island remained under Portuguese rule until it was taken in the seventeenth century by a combined Persian-English force.
360 a garden of balsam trees: See Stefan Halikowski Smith, “Meanings Behind Myths: The Multiple Manifestations of the Tree of the Virgin at Matarea,” in Mediterranean Historical Review 23, no. 2 (December 2008): 101–28; Marcus Milwright, “The Balsam of Matariyya: An Exploration of a Medieval Panacea,” in Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 66, no. 2 (2003): 193–209.
360 the infant Jesus: For the story of Mary washing Jesus’s shirt, see William Schneemelcher, ed., New Testament Apocrypha, vol. 1, Gospels and Related Writings (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003), 460. In another version, Jesus breaks up Joseph’s staff, plants the pieces, and waters them from a well he digs with his own hands; they immediately grow into balsam saplings. See Otto F. A. Meinardus, Two Thousand Years of Coptic Christianity (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1999), 21.
361 a Franciscan friar: The friar was named Fra Mauro; the sultan was Qansuh al-Ghuri, who took power in 1501 after a succession struggle unleashed by the death of the long-reigning Qaitbay saw four sultans dispatched in quick succession. See Donald Weinstein, Ambassador from Venice: Pietro Pasqualigo in Lisbon, 1501 (Minneapolis: University of Mi
nnesota Press, 1960), 78–79.
362 one was unmasked: The spy was named Ca’ Masser; he posed as a merchant and sent his coded reports care of Venice’s ambassador in Spain. The nephew of the Florentine banker Bartolomeo Marchionni exposed him before he even arrived in Lisbon, but Manuel eventually freed him. In his report he correctly predicted that the Portuguese would be able to dominate the waters around India but would not be able to conquer Mecca, blockade all Arab shipping, or permanently monopolize the spice trade. His intelligence encouraged the Venetians to throw in their lot with their Muslim partners and plot reprisals against Portugal. See Robert Finlay, “Crisis and Crusade in the Mediterranean: Venice, Portugal and the Cape Route to India, 1498–1509,” in Studi Veneziani n.s. 28 (1994): 45–90.
363 Flor de la Mar: The big carrack was one of the most famous ships of the Age of Discovery. After returning to Lisbon with Gama, she went back east with Almeida in 1505; besides winning the day at Diu, she took part in the conquest of Hormuz, Goa, and Malacca. The aging ship sank in a storm while carrying a vast haul of treasure back from Malacca; many of the crew died, and Albuquerque, who was on board, had to paddle to safety on a makeshift raft. Despite the best efforts of treasure hunters the wreck has never been found.
363 The papacy, meanwhile: The three powers formed the League of Cambrai; the decisive encounter was the Battle of Agnadello in 1509. The league soon disintegrated and Venice recovered many of its losses, if not all of its pride. In the end, it was the revolution in global trade instigated by the Portuguese that condemned Venice—like its Ottoman ally—to a slow decline.
364 a man suspected of being a marrano: Many of the New Christians, or conversos, were suspected of being secret Jews and were labeled marranos, from the Spanish for “pig.” Some did indeed continue to observe Jewish precepts in private, though many became fully signed-up Catholics. Paranoia mounted during periods of social upheaval; shortly before the Lisbon Massacre the plague hit the city, and suspected marranos were the scapegoat. As well as executing the ringleaders, Manuel extended the moratorium on investigations into the conversos’ religion by twenty years. Estimates of the dead range as high as four thousand.
365 he replaced the reluctant Almeida: Albuquerque was appointed in 1508, but the outgoing viceroy refused to accept the appointment and slung his successor in jail. The canny Albuquerque bided his time and finally took office in November 1509. Almeida was killed on his way home when his men engaged in some unwise cattle rustling near the Cape of Good Hope.
365 he hatched a plot to steal the body of the Prophet Muhammad: For Albuquerque’s schemes, see Birch, Commentaries of the Great A. Dalboquerque, 4:36–37. Albuquerque was not the first Crusader to contemplate the theft of Muhammad’s remains. Back in the time of the Second Crusade, a particularly unhinged Frenchman named Reynaud de Châtillon had launched an outrageous plot to invade the Red Sea. Reynaud had married into the lordship of Transjordan, a barren corner of the Kingdom of Jerusalem that stretched south toward the Gulf of Aqaba and straddled the trade and pilgrimage routes from Syria to Arabia and Egypt. In an uncanny anticipation of Venice’s later activities at Suez, he had a fleet of galleys constructed in prefabricated sections and transported on camels to the gulf port of Eilat, where they were assembled and launched on the Red Sea. Along with intercepting merchant shipping from India and Africa, Reynaud planned to track down Muhammad’s tomb, dig up his body, and bring it back to be reburied in his backyard. That way, he predicted, the hajj would be diverted to Transjordan and he would become fantastically rich. A detachment of Crusaders landed in Arabia and began plundering and raping pilgrims; by the time they were finally cornered they were within a few miles of Medina. An outraged Saladin sent orders to kill every last man, not least to stop them spilling the secrets of the Red Sea trade; four years later, at the Horns of Hattin, he fulfilled his pledge to behead the truculent Frenchmen. By drawing Saladin out, Reynaud had sabotaged the entire Crusading movement.
366 “On one night”: Manuel de Faria e Sousa, in Robert Kerr, A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1811–1824), 6:137.
367 “Whoever is lord of Malacca”: The Suma Oriental of Tomé Pires, trans. and ed. Armando Cortesão (London: Hakluyt Society, 1944), 2:287. Malacca owed its wealth to Tamerlane, who wreaked such destruction on the cities of the Silk Road that, in 1402, China rerouted its exports by sea.
368 the false and diabolical religion: Ibid., 1:2.
368 Eventually the Portuguese: The merchants reached Japan in 1542; the Portuguese were permitted to establish a permanent settlement at Macao in 1557. The shipping lane between the two was the key to a hugely lucrative trading loop. From Goa, merchants shipped ivory and ebony to Macao, where they bought silks and porcelain. Since China had banned direct trade with Japan they headed to Nagasaki, where they exchanged the prized goods for a small fortune in silver. Since silver was worth much more in China than in Japan, on their way home they returned to Macao and purchased vast quantities of Chinese luxuries for onward shipment to Europe.
368 “It appears to me”: Travelers in Disguise, 230.
369 ten thousand Portuguese soldiers landed in Morocco: Their objective was to establish a fortress at Mamora (now Mehdia), which commanded the route up the Sebou River to Fez. Despite his setbacks in Africa, Manuel was still hoping to march through southern Morocco and onward to Egypt and Palestine.
370 The fleet arrived in Aden: In 1513, in the only signal failure of his governorship, Albuquerque’s forces were beaten back from the high walls of Aden; the defenders were steeled by the knowledge that their defeat would threaten the holy cities of Mecca and Medina themselves. That failure only made the lapse of judgment four years later even more galling, and in 1538 Aden fell to the Ottomans. Without complete control of the Aden–Hormuz–Calicut trade triangle, Portugal was never fully able to stop spices reaching the Muslim world.
372 America was still seen as a barrier to reaching the East: It was during Charles I’s reign that Cortés and Pizarro destroyed the Aztec and Inca empires and began to export Christianity to South America. Even so, they were still hankering after the East. In 1526 Cortés felt it necessary to apologize to the Spanish monarch for not finding a western route to the Spice Islands, and in 1541 Pizarro’s brother Gonzalo mounted a disastrous expedition across Ecuador in search of the fabled Country of Cinnamon. Cortés likened the Aztec cities to Muslim Granada and called their temples mosques; in the conquistadores’ onslaught, the holy vengeance against Muslims fanned by the Iberian Reconquest was visited on a new world where Islam had never existed.
373 the dispute was only settled: As well as ceding the Moluccas to Portugal, the Treaty of Zaragoza (1529) confirmed Spain’s rights over the Philippines. They, too, would turn out to be in the Portuguese hemisphere.
373 “the evil sect of Mafamede”: Quoted in Subrahmanyam, Career and Legend, 283. Manuel was still under the common misapprehension that Muhammad was buried at Mecca.
Chapter 18: The King’s Deputy
375 “meted out”: Royal order dated Tomar, March 21, 1507; see A. C. Teixeira de Aragão, Vasco da Gama e a Vidigueira: Estudo Histórico, 2nd ed. (Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional, 1898), 250–52.
376 “by which time”: Letter of Manuel I to Gama dated August 1518; see ibid., 257–58.
376 “especially in the discovery of the Indies”: Letter of Manuel I dated December 17, 1519, quoted in Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 281. Subrahmanyam notes that Portugal could then only muster “two Dukes, two Marquises, a Count-Bishop, and twelve other Counts.”
376 Vasco da Gama set sail for India: Gaspar Correia, a fanciful chronicler of Gama’s first two voyages, is more reliable on the third. By 1524 he had been in India for more than a decade; he first arrived, aged sixteen, as a soldier, but to his relief he was instead appointed secretary to Afonso de Albuquerque. As usual, the official chronicles and contemporary docu
ments fill out the story.
376 two of his sons: Paulo da Gama died in a naval battle off Malacca in 1534. Estêvão da Gama became governor of India in 1540; in 1541 he led a naval expedition into the Red Sea to attack the Ottoman fleet, but when he reached Suez he found he had been expected and was forced to retreat. His younger brother Cristóvão disembarked to lead a Crusade in Ethiopia, which had been invaded by a Muslim army that had declared holy war and was equipped with Ottoman cannon. Cristóvão was captured and executed the next year, but his intervention was instrumental in Ethiopia’s successful defense. Estêvão died in Venice, where he had absconded to avoid marrying the wife chosen for him by the king. Of the other brothers, the eldest, Francisco, succeeded as Count of Vidigueira, while the two youngest, Pedro and Álvaro, served in turn as captains of Malacca.
377 “kept a Concubine”: 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), 207.
377 “should be publicly scourged”: Henry E. J. Stanley, trans. and ed., The Three Voyages of Vasco da Gama, and His Viceroyalty (London: Hakluyt Society, 1869), 394.
