1492
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To undertake voyages into such hostile seas, Indian Ocean navigators would need a big incentive. The Indian Ocean was an arena of such intense commercial activity, and so much wealth, that it would have been pointless for indigenous peoples to look for markets or suppliers elsewhere. When merchants from northern or central Asia or Europe or the African interior reached the ocean, they came as supplicants, generally despised for their poverty, and found it hard to sell the products of their homelands.
Chinese disengagement from the wider world was not the result of any deficiency of technology or curiosity. It would have been perfectly possible for Chinese ships to visit Europe or the Americas, had they so wished. Indeed, Chinese explorers probably did get around the Cape of Good Hope, sailing from east to west, at intervals during the Middle Ages. A Chinese map of the thirteenth century depicts Africa in roughly its true shape. A Venetian mapmaker of the mid–fifteenth century reported a sighting of a Chinese or, perhaps, Javanese junk off the Southwest African coast.8 But there was no point in pursuing such initiatives: they led to regions that produced nothing the Chinese wanted. Although the evidence that Chinese vessels ever crossed the Pacific to America is, at best, equivocal, it is perfectly possible that they did so. Again, however, it would have been folly to pursue such voyages or attempt systematic contacts across the ocean. No people lived there with whom the Chinese could possibly wish to do business.
To a lesser—but still sufficient—extent, the same considerations applied to other maritime peoples of the Indian Ocean and East and Southeast Asia. The Arabs, the Swahili merchant communities, Persians, Indians, Javanese and other island peoples of the region, and the Japanese all had the technology required to explore the world, but plenty of commercial opportunities in their home ocean kept them fully occupied. Indeed, their problem was, if anything, shortage of shipping in relation to the scale of demand for interregional trade. That was why, in the long run, they generally welcomed interlopers from Europe in the sixteenth century, who were truculent, demanding, barbaric, and often violent, but who added to the shipping stock of the ocean and, therefore, contributed to the general increase of wealth. Paradoxically, therefore, poverty favored Europeans, compelled to look elsewhere because of the dearth of economic opportunities at home.
The Indian Ocean was by no means unknown to Europeans. The widespread assumption that Vasco da Gama was the first to penetrate deep inside it when he rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1498 is a vulgar error. Italian merchants often plied their trade there during the late Middle Ages. Typically, they traveled across the Ottoman and Persian empires, in the rare interstices of war and religious hostility. Or else, even more commonly, they undertook a long and arduous journey upriver along the Nile from Alexandria, and overland by camel caravan from the first or second cataract to the Red Sea coast, where they awaited the turn of the monsoon before shipping for Aden or Socotra. It was inadvisable to attempt to join the Red Sea farther north because of the formidable hazards to navigation.
Most of the Western venturers who worked in the Indian Ocean are known only from stray references in the archives. Merchants rarely wrote up their experiences. But two circumstantial accounts survive from the fifteenth century: the first by Niccolò Conti, who had been as far east as Java, and had returned to Italy by 1444; the second by his fellow Florentine Girolamo di Santo Stefano, who made an equally long trading voyage in the 1490s. Conti knew something of the Near East as a result of working as a merchant in Damascus, and therefore chose to travel overland via Persia to the Gulf, where he took ship for Cambay in the Bay of Bengal. Santo Stefano used the other main route. In company with a business partner, Girolamo Adorno, he traveled up the Nile and joined a caravan bound for the Red Sea. He crossed the ocean from Massawah—a port generally under Ethiopian control at the time.
On his return, Conti sought papal absolution for having abjured Christianity in Cairo in order to save the lives of his wife and children, who traveled with him. In Rome, he was able to enhance geographers’ knowledge of the East, adding glosses, derived from experience, to the available traditions, which derived in part from the sometimes obscure texts transmitted from classical antiquity, and sometimes from the dubious claims of travelers and pseudo-travelers, like Marco Polo, whom the learned were disinclined to believe. Exchanges of geographical lore had constituted leisure-time conversation for delegates at the Council of Florence in 1439 and had excited much interest in new discoveries: it was an ideal moment to share revelations. Conti told his story to a Florentine humanist, who made a record of it as a morally edifying tale of changing fortunes.
The convention Conti’s work established was of “the inconstancy of fortune.” When Santo Stefano wrote up his experiences of the Indian Ocean in 1499, he, too, focused on lamentations against ill luck and sententious reflections on the “disastrous journey” he endured “for my sins.” Had he eluded his sufferings, he might have retired on the riches that slipped through his hands during his career as a merchant in the Indies and would have avoided the need to throw himself on the mercy of patrons—the obvious subtext of his work. “But who can contend with fortune?” he asked, rhetorically, concluding with “infinite thanks to our Lord God, for that he has preserved me, and shown me great mercy.” 9 He and Adorno got as far east as an emporium in northern Sumatra, where they took ship for Pegu, in Burma, apparently with the idea of engaging in trade in gems. It was painfully slow doing business there. In Sumatra on the way back a local ruler confiscated their cargo, including the valuable rubies they brought from Burma. Adorno died in 1496, “after fifty-five days’ suffering” in Pegu, where “his body was buried in a certain ruined church, frequented by none.” 10
The Indian Ocean with the route of Niccolò Conti.
In the Maldives, in an attempt to head homeward with what little fortune he had salvaged from his adventures, Santo Stefano waited six months for the monsoon to turn. When it did, it unleashed so much rain that his deckless ship sank with the weight of it, “and those who could swim were saved and the rest drowned.” 11 After floating on wreckage from morning to evening, the merchant was rescued by a passing ship. No tale of the ocean would be complete without a shipwreck and a dramatic escape, but if Santo Stefano embellished the truth, he also, like Conti, managed to convey a great deal of representative information about how Westerners perceived the ocean and the lands that lined its rim.
Naturally enough, as they were merchants, both Conti and Santo Stefano inventoried trade goods of all kinds wherever they went, and took special interest in spices and aromatics. Santo Stefano described the drying of green peppercorns at Calicut, the profusion of cinnamon in Sri Lanka, the availability of pepper in Sumatra, the location of sandalwood in Coromandel. Conti’s description of aromatic-oil production from cinnamon berries in Sri Lanka reflects personal observation (whereas some of his purported observations seem rather to have been culled from his reading). He reported camphor and durians (“the taste varies, like that of cheese” 12) in Sumatra. As specialists in gems, both travelers were always interested in where rubies, garnets, jacinths, and crystals “grew.” Both showed some interest in military intelligence. Santo Stefano was interested in elephant breeding for war and confirmed Conti’s claim that ten thousand war elephants were maintained in the stables of the ruler of Pegu.
These were hardheaded observations. But the writers seemed to go soft in the head when they succumbed to the lure of exotica. They crowded their narratives with descriptions of improbable marvels—the travelers’ tidbits that readers at the time called “mirabilia.” No one was expected to believe them, but readers demanded them. Around the Indian Ocean, Conti and Santo Stefano described a topsy-turvy world in which murder is moral, serpents fly, monsters trap fish by lighting irresistible magnetic fires on shore, and miners use vultures and eagles to gather diamonds.13 Some of the tales echo stories in the Sinbad corpus, and should be seen as evidence that the authors really did know the East at first hand.
The taste fo
r sensationalism was most apparent in the travelers’ obsessions with sex. Santo Stefano devoted much space to polygyny and polyandry. He described how Indian men “never marry a virgin” and hand prospective spouses over to strangers for deflowering “for fifteen or twenty days” before the nuptials. Conti was scrupulous in enumerating the harems of great rulers and commending the sangfroid of wives who committed suti, flinging themselves on their dead husbands’ funeral pyres. In India he found brothels so numerous, and so alluring with “sweet perfumes, ointments, blandishments, beauty and youth,” that Indians “are much addicted to licentiousness,” whereas male homosexuality, “being superfluous, is unknown.” 14 In Ava, in Burma, the women mocked Conti for having a small penis and recommended a local custom: inserting up to a dozen gold, silver, or brass pellets, of about the size of small hazelnuts, under the skin, “and with these insertions, and the swelling of the member, the women are affected with the most exquisite pleasure.” Conti refused the service, because “he did not want his pain to be a source of others’ pleasure.” 15
On the whole, the merchants’ reports were of a world of abundance and civility. Beyond the Ganges, according to Conti, in a translation made in the reign of Elizabeth I, people “are equal to us in customs, life, and policie; for they have sumptuous and neat houses, and all their vessels and householde stuffe very cleane: they esteeme to live as noble people, avoided of all villainie and crueltie, being courteous people & riche Merchauntes.” 16 But if there was one thing the civilizations of the East lacked, it was shipping adequate to meet the huge demands of their highly productive economies and active trades. Santo Stefano marveled at the cord-bound ships that carried him along the Red Sea and across the Indian Ocean. He noted the bulkhead construction that divided ships’ hulls into watertight compartments. But while ships were well designed, well built, and ingeniously navigated, there were never enough of them to carry all the available freight.
As a result, in the 1490s the Indian Ocean was trembling on the brink of a new future in which European interlopers would cash in on their advantages. For that future to happen, Europeans needed to penetrate the ocean with ships. Because they lacked salable commodities, they had to find other ways of doing business; shipping and freighting were their best resources. Without ships of their own, visitors such as Conti and Santo Stefano were reduced to little better than peddlers. But the Indian Ocean region was so rich and productive, so taut with demand, and so abundant in supply that it could absorb hugely more shipping than was available at the time. Any European who could get ships into the zone stood to make a fortune.
There was only one way to do it: sail the ships in around the southern tip of Africa. But was such a long and hazardous journey possible? Were the ships of the time equal to its strains? Could they carry enough food and water? In any case, it was not even certain that an approach to the ocean lay along that route. The geographer the age most revered was the second-century Alexandrian Claudius Ptolemy. His Geography, which became the favorite book on the subject in the West when the text became widely available in the early fifteenth century, was generally read to mean that the Indian Ocean was landlocked, inaccessible by sea. Maps of the world made to illustrate his ideas—and there were many of them at the time—showed the ocean as a vast lake, cut off to the south by a long tongue of land protruding from southeastern Africa and curling round to lick at the edges of East Asia. The fabled wealth of India and the spice islands lay enclosed within it, like jewels in a strong room.
Although this was an erroneous view, it was understandable. Indian Ocean merchants kept to the reliable routes, served by predictable monsoons, that guaranteed them two-way passage between most of the trading destinations of maritime Asia and East Africa. There was little reason to venture below about ten degrees south, where the belt of tempests girds the sea, or to risk the coasts south of Mozambique, where the storms tear into lee shores. There were no potential trading partners in the region, no opportunities worth braving those dangers for. From within the monsoonal system, the way in and out of it did seem effectively unnavigable.
For anyone who tried to approach from the Atlantic, by contrast, no such inhibitions applied. In 1487 the Portuguese explorer Bartolomeu Dias managed to struggle around the Cape of Storms. The king of Portugal is supposed to have renamed it the Cape of Good Hope in a promotional exercise of brazen chutzpah. But the hope was weak, the storms strong. Beyond the cape, Dias found an adverse current and dangerous lee shores. The way to the Indian Ocean still seemed to be barred. Nor had Dias really gone far enough to prove that the ocean was not landlocked. All he had achieved was to demonstrate how laborious was the journey to the southernmost tip of Africa: to avoid the adverse current along the West African shore, his successors would have to strike far into the South Atlantic—farther from home, longer at sea, than any voyagers had ever been—to find the westerly winds that would carry them around the cape.
So, while Dias explored the way by sea, the Portuguese crown sent agents overland to the Indian Ocean by traditional routes to gather intelligence and, in particular, to settle the question of whether the ocean was open to the south. Pero da Covilhão led the effort. He was one of the many indigent but talented noblemen to cross and recross the permeable border between Portugal and Castile. He spent years in Seville, where he served in the household of the Castilian nobleman the Count (later Duke) of Medina Sidonia. This was probably a useful apprenticeship. The count was an investor in the conquest of the Canary Islands and a major figure in the Atlantic tuna fishery and sugar industry. But when war broke out between the two kingdoms in 1474, Covilhão returned to his native Portugal to serve his king. Missions of an unknown nature—perhaps espionage, perhaps diplomacy—took him to Maghrebi courts, where he learned Arabic.
The Portuguese embassy to Ethiopia in 1520 found Covilhão at the court of the Negus. The official Ethiopian account stresses “Prester John’s” magnificence.
C. F. Beckingham and G. W. Huntingford, The Prester John of the Indies (Cambridge: The Hakluyt Society, 1961). Courtesy of The Hakluyt Society.
At about the time Bartolomeu Dias left to explore the approach to the Indian Ocean from the Atlantic, Covilhão, with a companion, Afonso de Paiva, set off up the Nile and across the Ethiopian desert to Zeila on the Red Sea. His inquiries took him east to Calicut and south, perhaps as far as Sofala on the coast of Mozambique—the emporium from which East African gold was traded across the Indian Ocean. By the end of 1490 he was back in Cairo, from where he sent a report of his findings home. It has not survived. But it surely summarized knowledge gleaned on the spot: the Indian Ocean was indeed open to the south. Covilhão then turned to a further aspect of mission: establishing diplomatic contact with the court of the ruler of Ethiopia, who retained the Portuguese visitor in his service. Covilhão was still there when the next Portuguese mission got through in 1520.
Policy makers in Portugal thought the Ethiopian ruler was important to their plans to send ships to the Indian Ocean, because they knew that his realm was Christian, and they identified him as “Prester John”—a legendary potentate of supposedly fabulous wealth whom Westerners had sought at intervals for three and a half centuries in the hope of securing an ally against Islam. For between the withdrawal of the Chinese in the 1430s and the arrival of the Europeans in the 1490s, the Indian Ocean was a Muslim lake. Most of the states that lined it were under Muslim rule or dominance and had substantial, usually majoritarian, Muslim populations. Muslim merchants—Arabs, Gujaratis, Persians—carried much of the commerce that crossed the ocean, though Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist merchants were also of great importance. The latest sailing directions, on which pilots relied, were the work of the great Muslim oceanographer Ahmad ibn Majid, who compiled his account of the East African coast from personal surveying expeditions. His reputation grew to the point where sailors from Aden regarded him as a saint and offered him prayers for their safety when they launched their boats.
There were, of course, regi
ons intractable to Islam. In some circles, Islam met a skeptical reception. Kabir of Benares was a poet of secularist inclinations.
Feeling your power, you circumcise—
I can’t go along with that, brother. If your God favoured circumcision
why didn’t you come out cut?
Hindus fared little better in the face of Kabir’s skepticism:
If putting on the thread makes you a brahmin,
What does the wife put on?…Hindu, Muslim, where did they
come from? 17
Fanaticism was more effective than skepticism in setting limits to the spread of Islam. Hindus generally resisted Muslim proselytization with tenacity. In southern India, the warlike state of Vijayanagar proclaimed its defiance in its name, which means “city of victories.” In 1443 it impressed a Muslim visitor as “such that the eye has seen nothing like it,” inside its sixty-mile ring of sevenfold walls. Vijayanagar’s rajahs called themselves “Lords of the Eastern and Western Oceans.” According to the maxims of an early sixteenth-century ruler,
[a] king should improve the harbours of his country and so encourage its commerce that horses, elephants, precious gems, sandalwood, pearls and other articles are freely imported…. Make the merchants of distant foreign countries who import elephants and good horses attached to yourself by providing them with villages and decent dwellings in the city, by affording them daily audience, presents, and allowing decent profits. Then those articles will never go to your enemies.18