by Cliff, Nigel
378 they murdered him: The captain was known as Mossem Gaspar Malhorquim; the caravel was captured the following year and was taken to India, where many of the crew were hanged.
378 “each time during the space of a Credo”: Stanley, Three Voyages, 383.
379 “Courage, my friends!”: Various versions of the quotation are attributed to Gama; this is from Manuel de Faria e Sousa, The Portuguese Asia, trans. Captain John Stevens (London: C. Brome, 1694–1695), 1:280.
379 a second Great Flood: The belief was widespread across Europe. Fifty-six authors rushed 133 books into print, thousands of Londoners fled to higher ground, and numerous arks were constructed. See Lynn Thorndike, History of Magic and Experimental Science, vols. 5 and 6, The Sixteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941), 5:178–233.
380 “would make the King rich”: Stanley, Three Voyages, 396.
380 “great evil doings”: Ibid., 390.
380 a palatial hospital: Grand though it was, the hospital’s effectiveness was limited by the fact that its chief doctors were subject to the same three-year term limit as other Portuguese officials. Just as they got the hang of the unfamiliar tropical diseases, they went home.
381 “The justice of the King”: Stanley, Three Voyages, 394–96.
382 The members of Goa’s Municipal Council wrote: See ibid., Appendix, pp. x–xvi, for the original text and pp. 385–90 for Stanley’s translation. The new captain of Goa had a different take on the colony’s troubles: he thought Goa was too full of priests and men too comfortably married with local women to mount a proper defense. See Subrahmanyam, Career and Legend, 316.
384 “He had it proclaimed”: Stanley, Three Voyages, 397–98.
385 “Sir, I will build you brigantines”: Ibid., 405.
385 The Spanish had to be confronted: Juan de Zúñiga, the Spanish ambassador in Portugal, reported to Charles I that Spain could expect no quarter from Gama. According to Zúñiga, in addition to threatening to sink Spain’s ships, the viceroy had vowed to disregard any agreement that gave Spain rights over the Moluccas and to do whatever it took to keep the islands in Portuguese hands. Letter dated Tomar, July 21, 1523, quoted in Subrahmanyam, Career and Legend, 299–300.
385 a bishop had written to the Portuguese king: Ibid., 325. The main church at Cranganore had been attacked and burned down in 1523.
385 “he would go and destroy Calicut”: Stanley, Three Voyages, 412.
386 Gama sent a delegation: Even with the powers vested in him as viceroy, Gama overstepped his authority. According to Castanheda, a royal letter was handed to Dom Duarte that exempted him and his men from Gama’s jurisdiction and gave him permission to stay in India until the homebound fleet was ready; if necessary he was to bide his time at the Cannanore fortress, which would become his personal fiefdom for the duration. Correia says that Duarte refused to board the ship Gama specified and Gama threatened to sink the ship he was on; after a raging argument with the viceroy and a tearful farewell to his dining companions, Luís joined his brother and persuaded him to disembark. Ibid., 417–20.
387 “great fits of irritation”: Ibid., 422. One theory is that Gama was suffering from oropharyngeal anthrax.
387 He asked for his bones to be returned to Portugal: Gama’s remains were not repatriated until 1538. In the nineteenth century they were moved with great ceremony to Lisbon and were reburied in the monastery at Belém that had been built to commemorate his first voyage. Some years later it was discovered that the wrong set of bones had been disturbed, and a more discreet ceremony was held to rehouse the correct remains.
388 “The captains”: Letter of Pêro de Faria, dated Cochin, December 28, 1524, quoted in Subrahmanyam, Career and Legend, 343.
388 “as was reasonable”: Stanley, Three Voyages, 427.
389 a French pirate: In retribution for his brother’s behavior the pirate and his crew had their hands cut off and their ship burned, an act that set off years of cruel reprisals by French pirates against the Portuguese.
Chapter 19: The Crazy Sea
391 the most devastating of many exposés: The following quotations 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), 246–46v, 267–68, 249–52v, 259–60, 262–63. Jan Huygen van Linschoten and François Pyrard paint only slightly less lurid portraits of Goa.
391 Goa had grown into a colonial city: For Old Goa, see José Nicolau da Fonseca, An Historical and Archaeological Sketch of the City of Goa (Bombay: Thacker, 1878); Anthony Disney, The Portuguese in India and Other Studies, 1500–1700 (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2009).
392 a Hindu temple: The temple was near Cochin; the Portuguese attacked it even though it was sacred to their allies.
396 One captain of Sofala: The captain was Dom Jorge Teles de Meneses; the factor was João Velho, who in 1547 dispatched a long and vehement letter about his mistreatment to the king. See M. D. D. Newitt, A History of Mozambique (London: Hurst, 1995), 1–3.
397 “The Portuguese are much detested”: Gasparo Contarini, address to the Venetian Senate on November 16, 1525, quoted in Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 350.
397 seeking martyrdom: A Mappila epic titled The Gift to the Holy Warriors in Respect to Some Deeds of the Portuguese chronicles and glorifies the campaign of defiance. As many as 10,000 may have died in a Mappila uprising of 1921–1922. See Stephen Frederic Dale, “Religious Suicide in Islamic Asia,” in Journal of Conflict Resolution 32, no. 1 (March 1988): 37–59.
398 died while trying to reach China: The pioneering missionary died of fever in 1552 and was buried on a beach; the next year his body was taken to Goa. It still rests in a magnificent tomb in the Basilica of Bom Jesus in Old Goa, except for two arm bones, one of which was taken to the Gesù in Rome and the other of which was intended for Japan, where Xavier had worked for two years, but only made it as far as Macau.
399 The Goan Inquisition: The tribunal was not abolished until 1812. Most of its records were destroyed; the number of its victims is unknown, though at least sixteen thousand cases are believed to have been brought to trial. See A. K. Priolkar, The Goa Inquisition (Bombay: Bombay University Press, 1961). L’inquisition de Goa: La relation de Charles Dellon (1687), ed. Charles Amiel and Anne Lima (Paris: Chandeigne, 1997), is a modern edition of the famously chilling account of a French eyewitness.
401 “holy war”: Quoted in K. M. Mathew, History of the Portuguese Navigation in India, 1497–1600 (New Delhi: K. M. Mittal, 1988), 214.
401 a young Portuguese king: King Sebastian, who succeeded to the throne at three years of age in 1557, was heavily influenced by his Jesuit tutors and was determined to stiffen efforts to spread the faith. In 1569 he took up a plan that had been heavily touted by Portugal’s merchants to seize the legendary African gold mines of Monomotapa, but before proceeding he put the question of the morality of the enterprise to a committee of lawyers and theologians. The answer came back that the proposed war was just on the grounds that a Jesuit priest had been murdered in the region and that the local king harbored Muslims, providing that spreading the gospel and saving souls was its primary objective. Sebastian dispatched Francisco Barreto, a former governor of Portuguese India, at the head of a large army; with him went a Jesuit priest whose advice Barreto was under royal orders to heed. Instead of heading for the mines, they spent a year and a half massacring Muslims on the coast and then set off on the trail of the priest’s murderers. Before they reached their goal Barreto and most of his men died of fever, but the expedition marked the beginning of a concerted campaign of colonization and evangelism in the African interior.
402 “it seems that—on account of our sins”: João de Barros, quoted in Peter Russell, Prince Henry ‘the Navigator’: A Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 343.
403 the São João left Cochin: For its story, see M. D. D.
Newitt, ed., East Africa (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2002), 99–103. The account first appeared in Bernardo Gomes de Brito’s História Trágico-Maritima, a two-volume collection of marine disasters published in Lisbon between 1729 and 1736. For a partial English translation, see C. R. Boxer, ed. and trans., The Tragic History of the Sea, 1589–1622 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1959) and Further Selections from ‘The Tragic History of the Sea,’ 1559–1565 (Cambridge: Hakluyt Society, 1968).
405 another Portuguese ship was wrecked: Newitt, East Africa, 105–6.
406 “I started to complain”: Ibid., 65. Gomes was shipwrecked shortly before 1645.
Epilogue
407 “There had never been another man”: As reported by the sculptor Benvenuto Cellini; cited in A. Richard Turner, Inventing Leonardo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 52.
409 Christians teamed up with Muslims to fight Christians: “I cannot deny,” Francis told the Venetian ambassador Giorgio Gritti in 1531, “that I wish to see the Turk all-powerful and ready for war, not for himself—for he is an infidel and we are all Christians—but to weaken the power of the emperor, to compel him to make major expenses, and to reassure all the other governments who are opposed to such a formidable enemy.” Quoted in André Clot, Suleiman the Magnificent, trans. Matthew J. Reisz (London: Saqi, 1992), 137.
409 “Are you seamen to fill your casks”: Harold Lamb, Suleiman the Magnificent: Sultan of the East (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1951), 229.
410 the Protestant Reformation: Martin Luther rejected the whole notion of holy war as contrary to the teachings of Christ, though he did revise his early view that the Turks were the scourge that would destroy the Antichrist—the pope—and so should not be resisted.
410 “Elizabeth, the pretended Queen”: Quoted in Kate Aughterson, ed., The English Renaissance: An Anthology of Sources and Documents (London: Routledge, 1998), 36.
410 “the pride of the women”: Quoted in Susan A. Skilliter, William Harborne and the Trade with Turkey, 1578–1582: A Documentary Study of the First Anglo-Ottoman Relations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 123. Both English and Turks wrote in Latin. For the Anglo-Ottoman entente, see Albert Lindsay Rowland, England and Turkey: The Rise of Diplomatic and Commercial Relations (New York: Burt Franklin, 1968); for a broader view, see Nabil Matar, Islam in Britain, 1558–1685 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
410 “the most august and benign Caesar”: Susan A. Skilliter,
“William Harborne, the First English Ambassador, 1583–1588,” in Four Centuries of Turco-British Relations, ed. William Hale and Ali Ihsan Bagis (Beverley, UK: Eothen, 1984), 22.
412 “The Madre de Dios taken”: Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation (Glasgow: MacLehose, 1903–1905), 7:116–17. The discovery of the document is revealed in “The Epistle Dedicatorie in the Second Volume of the Second Edition, 1599” (1:lxxii).
413 an instant bestseller in three languages: In 1595 Linschoten published a description of Portuguese navigation in the East; the following year he capitalized on his instant fame by rushing into print a full account of his travels. An English translation of the latter, titled Iohn Huighen van Linschoten his Discours of Voyages into ye Easte & West Indies, was published in 1598; a German edition appeared the same year. A Spanish sailor and priest named Bernardino de Escalante beat both Fitch and Linschoten into print; his revelations about Portugal’s route to China were published in an English translation in 1579.
414 the first English fleet returned home from India: Sir James Lancaster, an Englishman who had sailed with and fought for the Portuguese, set out in 1591 with three ships and reached Zanzibar, Malacca, and Ceylon; a single ship limped home in 1594 with twenty-five survivors on board. In 1600 Lancaster took command of the East India Company’s first fleet and reached Indonesia, where he established the first English factory, at Bantam in west Java. The Dutch expedition of 1595 was led by Cornelius de Houtman, who had earlier been sent to Lisbon to dig up information on the Spice Islands. The voyage was beset by scurvy, murderous brawls, pirate attacks, and battles that Houtman largely incited. Two-thirds of the crew died, and Houtman returned home only to find he had been preceded and trounced by Linschoten. In 1599 he was reportedly killed by the female admiral of Aceh and her all-woman navy.
415 Sir Thomas Roe: For the accomplished ambassador’s life, see Michael J. Brown, Itinerant Ambassador: The Life of Sir Thomas Roe (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1970). The journals and letters pertaining to his Indian journey are in The Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe to the Court of the Great Mogul, 1615–1619, ed. William Foster (London: Hakluyt Society, 1899).
416 the handsome redbrick Jesuit College: The building, which dominates the old administrative heart of the town, was commandeered for the governor’s palace when Portugal outlawed the Society of Jesus. It is now a sleepy museum.
417 Ceuta’s “liberation”: Time, June 26, 2007.
418 “We have succeeded”: The Times (London), March 13, 2004.
418 President George W. Bush: At a press conference on September 16, 2001, George W. Bush referred to the newly declared war on terror as a “crusade.” His spokesman later expressed regret for his terminology, but the next year the president again called the ongoing war a crusade. Ron Suskind, “Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush,” New York Times Magazine, October 17, 2004.
418 “Crusader-Zionist alliance”: The statement, released in February 1998, was titled “Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders.” The Arabian Peninsula, it also declared, “has never—since Allah made it flat, created its desert, and encircled it with seas—been stormed by any forces like the Crusader armies spreading in it like locusts, eating its riches and wiping out its plantations.” Peter L. Bergen, The Osama Bin Laden I Know: An Oral History of Al Qaeda’s Leader (New York: Free Press, 2006), 195.
418 “a haemmorhage”: Sunday Times (London), November 28, 2010.
419 “the greatest event since the creation of the world”: Francisco López de Gómara, “Dedication” to Historia general de las Indias (Saragossa, 1552).
419 “The discovery of America”: Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. Edwin Cannan (London: University Paperbacks, 1961), 2:141.
420 hold off and eventually repel the Ottoman challenge: Other factors, of course, were at play, not least the Ottomans’ unshakable belief, even as their empire was hamstrung by harem intrigues and endemic patronage while the West emerged into the Enlightenment, that their way was best. In the long run, though, the global pressure exerted by the voyages of discovery crucially tipped the balance. The point is well made by Bernard Lewis, a leading scholar of Islam and the Middle East. “The final defeat and withdrawal of the armies of Islam was no doubt due in the first instance to the valiant defenders of Vienna,” writes Lewis, “but in the larger perspective, it was due to those self-same adventurers whose voyages across the ocean and greed for gold aroused [the ire of their European rivals]. Whatever their motives, their voyages brought vast new lands under European rule or influence, placed great wealth in bullion and resources at European disposal, and thus gave Europe new strength with which to resist and ultimately throw back the Muslim invader.” Islam and the West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 16.
420 Western imperialism in Asia: In India, the entire colonial era from Gama’s arrival to independence has been labeled the Vasco da Gama epoch of history; see K. M. Panikkar, Asia and Western Dominance: A Survey of the Vasco da Gama Epoch of Asian History, 1498–1945 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1959). It has conversely been argued that the Portuguese had little direct impact on the great empires of South and East Asia. Narrowly speaking, yes; but then the balance of trade with India, never mind with China, was never a factor in Portugal’s calculations. India was the destination, but to weaken Islam was the aim. On a broader view, the impact of the discoveries was profound; when Vasco da Gama sailed east, India a
nd China between them accounted for half the world economy.
420 joined forces to fight a common enemy: In the Crimean War of 1853–1856, Anglican Britain and Catholic France joined forces with the Muslim Ottomans to fight the Orthodox Russians. The British and French were not just keen to halt Russia’s expansion; they deliberately set out to support Islam’s fight with Eastern Christianity, which Western clerics readily denounced as a semi-pagan heresy. Ever since 1453, the Russians had claimed they were the rightful heirs of the Byzantine Empire; tsar is Russian for “Caesar,” and Moscow was declared the third Rome. The Western allies were particularly aghast at the prospect of the Russians reversing the Muslim conquest of Constantinople and installing themselves—and the Orthodox Church—in the second Rome.
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
Alam, Muzaffar, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, eds. Indo-Persian Travels in the Age of Discoveries, 1400–1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Altabé, David F. Spanish and Portuguese Jewry Before and After 1492. Brooklyn, NY: Sepher-Hermon, 1983.
Alvares, Francisco. Narrative of the Portuguese Embassy to Abyssinia During the Years 1520–1527. Translated and edited by Lord Stanley of Alderley. London: Hakluyt Society, 1881.
———. The Prester John of the Indies: A True Relation of the Lands of the Prester John, Being the Narrative of the Portuguese Embassy to Ethiopia in 1520. Revised and edited by C. F. Beckingham and G. W. B. Huntingford. 2 vols. Cambridge: Hakluyt Society, 1961.
Ames, Glenn J., trans. and ed. En Nome De Deus: The Journal of the First Voyage of Vasco da Gama to India, 1497–1499. Leiden: Brill, 2009.
Armstrong, Karen. The Battle for God: Fundamentalism in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. London: Harper Collins, 2000.
———. Islam: A Short History. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2000.
———. Muhammad: A Biography of the Prophet. London: Gollancz, 1991.
