For Münzer, Lisbon was a city of marvels. Here he could see an impressive synagogue with ten great chandeliers holding fifty or sixty candles each; the body of a crocodile hanging as a trophy in the choir of a church; the beak of a pelican and the enormous serrated saw of a swordfish; mysterious outsized canes gathered on the shores of the Canary Islands (which Columbus had also inspected and taken as proof of lands in the far west). He also got to see “an enormous and extraordinarily well-made golden map, fourteen palms in diameter”—it was Fra Mauro’s map of 1459, displayed in the city’s castle. He could meet seamen who could tell hair-raising tales of survival and escape, and talk with a contingent of German cannon founders and artillery men, held in great esteem with the king.
The wealth of produce for sale in the port startled him: great piles of oats, walnuts, lemons, and almonds, enormous quantities of sardines and tuna for export across the Mediterranean world. He visited the offices that controlled the import of goods from this new world, where he saw the merchandise of Africa: dyed cloth from Tunis, carpets, metal basins, copper cauldrons, beads of colored glass, and, from the Guinea coast, big bunches of fiery pepper, “of which they gave us a lot,” the tusks of elephants, and black slaves.
What Münzer witnessed was not just a glimpse of an exotic world beyond the earth’s curve but the industrial infrastructure of shipbuilding, seafaring provision, and arsenal facilities that gave Portugal its maritime punch. He saw
an enormous workshop with many furnaces where they make anchors, colubrinas [cannons] and so on, and everything necessary for the sea. There were so many blackened workers around the furnaces that we thought ourselves to be among the Cyclops in the cave of Vulcan. Afterward we saw in four other buildings innumerable very large and superb colubrinas, and also throwing weapons, javelins, shields, breastplates, mortars, hand guns, bows, lances—all very well made and in great abundance…and what enormous quantities of lead, copper, saltpetre and sulfur!
The ability to produce high-quality bronze cannons and techniques for deploying them effectively at sea had probably been developed by the energetic King João, whose inquisitive mind and wide-ranging interests included practical experiments in shipborne artillery. He had developed the use of large bombards on caravels and carried out test firings to determine their most effective use on the decks of pitching ships. The solution was to fire the guns horizontally at water level; any higher and the likelihood was that the shots would whistle overhead. In some cases, if the guns were positioned sufficiently low down in the bows, the cannonballs could be made to ricochet off the surface of the water, thus increasing their range. The Portuguese also developed berços, lightweight breech-loaded bronze swivel guns, which could be carried by ship’s boats and had the advantage over the conventional muzzle-loaders in their rate of fire—up to twenty shots an hour. The superiority of their artillery, which was augmented by recruitment of German and Flemish cannon founders and gunners, was to prove a telling advantage in the events about to unfold.
The expedition in prospect was modest in scale but carefully prepared. It was based on decades of incremental learning. All the skill and knowledge acquired over many years in ship design, navigation, and provision for Atlantic voyages went into building two stout ships, and Manuel drew on a talented generation of practical experience in their construction. The caravel had been the agent and instrument of all this exploration, ideal for nosing up tropical rivers and battling back up the African coast against the wind, but horribly uncomfortable on long voyages across huge seas. Dias’s rounding of the Cape had exposed their operational limits: the crews would go no farther.
Building carracks in the Lisbon shipyard.
A caravel is beached in the center right of the picture.
It was Dias who was charged with designing and overseeing the construction of two stout carracks, the sailing ships the Portuguese called naus, to lead the voyage. The brief was clear: they had to be durable enough to withstand the pounding seas of the southern Atlantic; roomy enough to accommodate and provision the crews better than the rolling decks of a caravel; small enough to maneuver in shallows and harbors. The ships under construction on the banks, their frameworks chocked up by wooden scaffolding, had tubby rounded hulls, high sides, a tall aftercastle, and three masts; they were nevertheless of shallow draft, and not outsized. They were about eighty feet long, and each probably weighed about 100 to 120 tons. Their square sails made them less maneuverable in a contrary wind; the compensation was their sturdiness against the unpredictable battering of unknown seas. A supply ship, intended to be broken up near the Cape, was also constructed.
It seems that no expense was spared in the construction or provisioning of these ships, or the recruitment and payment of the crews. “They were built by excellent masters and workmen, with strong nails and wood,” remembered the mariner Duarte Pacheco Pereira.
Each ship had three sets of sails and anchors and three or four times as much other tackle and rigging as was usual. The cooperage of the casks, pipes and barrels for wine, water, vinegar and oil was strengthened with many hoops of iron. The provisions of bread, wine, flour, meat, vegetables, medicines, and likewise of arms and ammunition, were also in excess of what was needed for such a voyage. The best and most skillful pilots and mariners in Portugal were sent on this voyage, and they received, besides other favors, salaries higher than those of any seamen of other countries. The money spent on the few ships of this expedition was so great that I will not go into detail for fear of not being believed.
The barrels rolled up the gangplanks on the shores of the dockyard contained sufficient food for three years. Gama received two thousand gold cruzados for the venture, a huge sum; his brother Paulo, the same. The seamen’s wages were raised, and some of the money paid in advance to support their families. It was perhaps a recognition that many of them would not be coming back. No detail was omitted. The ships carried the best navigational aids available: as well as sounding leads and hourglasses, astrolabes and the most up-to-date maps—and possibly copies of Abraham Zacuto’s recently printed tables for determining latitudes from the height of the sun. Twenty cannons were hoisted aboard, both large bombards and the smaller breech-loaded berços, along with plentiful supplies of gunpowder tightly sealed against the sea air and quantities of cannonballs. The skilled craftsmen—carpenters, caulkers, forgers of iron, and barrelmakers—who would ensure the security of the ships were recruited in pairs, in case death thinned out their ranks. There were interpreters to speak Bantu and Arabic; musicians to lead sea chanteys and blow ceremonial fanfares; gunners and men-at-arms and skilled seamen, supported by an underclass of “deck fodder.” These comprised African slaves, orphans, converted Jews, and convicted men, enrolled for the menial heavy work: hauling on ropes, raising anchors and sails, pumping out the bilges. The convicts were particularly expendable; they had been released from prison specifically to be put ashore to make first inquiries on uncharted and potentially hostile coasts; priests also went, to lead the prayers and consign the souls of the dead to the sea with a Christian burial.
There were four ships in all: the two carracks, christened São Gabriel and São Rafael after the archangels, according to a vow made by King João before his death; with them went a caravel, the Bérrio, and the two-hundred-ton supply ship. Gama called on seamen he knew and relatives he could trust, to lessen the possibility of dissent in a tightly knit expedition. These included his brother Paulo, commander of the Rafael, and two Gama cousins. His pilots and leading seamen were the most experienced of the age. They included Pêro de Alenquer and Nicholas Coelho, who had rounded the cape with Bartolomeu Dias, and Dias’s own brother Diogo. Another pilot, Pêro Escobar, whose name was carved at the Yellala Falls, had been a navigator with Diogo Cão. Bartolomeu Dias was also scheduled to accompany the expedition on the first leg of the voyage in a ship bound for the Guinea coast.
The expense of this modest, speculative, but high-cost probe into the unknown was met with gold fr
om the Guinea coast—and a windfall: in 1496 the reluctant expulsion of the Jews who would not convert to Christianity had been the bride price of Manuel’s marriage to Princess Isabella of Spain. Their goods and property provided unexpected resources.
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It was midsummer 1497 by the time the expedition was ready; the sails emblazoned with the red cross of the crusading Order of Christ, the barrels rolled aboard, the heavy cannons winched into position, the crews assembled. The small flotilla was floated out from the shipyards and anchored off the beach at Restelo, a fishing village downstream from Lisbon. In the stifling heat, Manuel had retreated to his hilltop castle at Montemor-o-Novo, some sixty miles inland, and it was here that Vasco da Gama and his captains made their way to receive their sailing instructions and a ritual blessing from the king. On bended knees, Gama was solemnly invested with the command of the expedition and a silk banner also emblazoned with the cross of the Order of Christ. He was given his instructions: to seek out Christian kings in India at a city called Calicut, to whom he was to hand a letter written in both Arabic and Portuguese, and to establish a trade in spices and “the oriental riches so celebrated by ancient writers, but which have made such great powers as Venice, Genoa and Florence.” Another letter was addressed to Prester John. The mission was both sacred and secular, overtones of crusade mixed with commercial rivalry.
Restelo, on the banks of the Tejo outside the city walls, had been the traditional point of departure for Portuguese voyagers since the time of Henry the Navigator; its gently shelving beach provided a wide stage for the religious ceremonies and emotional rituals of departure: “a place of tears for those going, of joy for those who return.” On the hill above, surveying the wide sweep of the Tejo that led west to the open sea, was Henrique’s chapel, dedicated to Santa Maria de Belém, “Our Lady of Bethlehem,” for the purpose of bestowing the sacraments on departing mariners. The whole crew, something between 148 and 166 men, spent the hot summer night before departure there in prayer and vigil.
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July 8, 1497. A Saturday. The mission to rediscover India, “for so many centuries hidden.” The day, consecrated to the Virgin Mary, had been chosen by court astrologers as auspicious for departure. A month earlier, the pope had granted Manuel perpetual ownership of lands conquered from the infidel on which other Christian kings did not already have claims. People came flocking out of Lisbon to send off their friends and relatives. Gama led his men in a devotional procession from the chapel down to the beach, organized by the priests and the monks of the Order of Christ. The navigators wore sleeveless tunics and carried lighted candles. The priests walked behind, chanting the litany, and the people called in response. When they reached the water’s edge, silence fell on the crowd. Everyone knelt to make a general confession and to receive absolution, according to the papal bull Henrique had obtained for those who died “in this discovery and conquest.” “In this ceremony everyone wept,” according to João de Barros.
Then the men were ferried out to the ships in small boats. The sails were hoisted to the rhythmic clashing of cymbals, the vessels cast off, and the royal standard run up on Gama’s flagship, the Gabriel; with the sailors raising their fists to the sky and chanting the traditional cries—“Safe voyage!”—and the blowing of whistles, the flotilla caught the wind, led by the two carracks, with the beautifully painted wooden figureheads of the archangels Gabriel and Raphael at their prows. People waded into the water to catch a last glimpse of their loved ones across the widening gap. “And with one party looking back at the land, the others to the sea, but all equally absorbed by their tears and the thought of the long voyage, they remained like this until the ships were far from port.” The ships slid away down the Tejo until they passed the mouth and felt the first sting of the ocean.
And on the Rafael one man, whose identity has never been conclusively established, was preparing to take notes. The anonymous writer starts his terse journal, the only eyewitness account of everything that followed, with an abrupt lurch:
Artist’s reconstruction of the São Gabriel
In the name of God. Amen!
In the year 1497, King Dom Manuel, the first of that name in Portugal, dispatched four ships to discover and go in search of spices.
We left Restelo on Saturday July 8, 1497. May God our Lord permit us to accomplish this voyage in his service. Amen!
If one goal—the search for spices—was clear, the curiously intransitive verb descobrir, “to discover,” undefined by objective, hints at the extent to which this was a leap into the unknown.
Catching the favorable winds down the African coast, they sighted the Canary Islands within a week. Aware of likely weather conditions, Gama had given orders that if the ships became separated they should rendezvous at the Cape Verde Islands a thousand miles farther south. By the following night, the Rafael had become lost in fog; when it cleared next day, the others had vanished. It sailed on. By July 22, when the Rafael sighted the scattered outer islands of Cape Verde and the other ships came into view, it was the Gabriel, with their commander, that was now missing. Frustrated, they sat there becalmed for four days, on a flat sea. When the Gabriel was sighted, on July 26, something like relief broke out among the fleet. “And having got speech with him in the evening we gave expression to our joy by many times firing our bombards and sounding our trumpets.” An edginess marks the early days of the expedition. A week was spent on the Cape Verde island of Santiago, making repairs to masts and taking on board meat, wood, and as much water as they could store in their barrels for the ocean sailing ahead.
“On Thursday 3 August we left in an easterly direction,” recorded the anonymous writer in a routine voice. In fact, the expedition was about to embark on a maneuver for which there is no known precedent and only the sketchiest record. Some seven hundred miles south of the Cape Verdes, about seven degrees from the equator, instead of following the familiar contours of the African coast into the doldrums of Guinea, the Gabriel and its following vessels turned their rudders toward the southwest and plunged into the center of the Atlantic in a huge looping curve. The land had vanished. The ships driving briskly on into the unknown were swallowed up in the vastness of the ocean. The sails crackled in the salt wind.
Gama’s course followed the counterintuitive truth established by Bartolomeu Dias nine years earlier—that to round Africa it was necessary to swing away out into the ocean to pick up westerly winds that would carry ships past the Cape—but the Gabriel’s tack was a huge magnification of the earlier experiment. It is evident that by the end of the century, Portuguese navigators must have had a clear idea of how the winds of the southern Atlantic worked, but how they acquired this knowledge in the southwest quadrant of the sea remains unknown. The possibility of secret exploratory voyages in the interval since Dias’s return remains speculative; the confidence to commit the ships to the deep ocean, relying on solar navigation to judge position, must have come from somewhere.
If it was deeply frightening, the unemotional journal contains no hint. On August 22, they saw heronlike birds flying south-southeast “as if making for the land,” but by this time they were eight hundred leagues, over two thousand miles, out to sea. They clung to a sense of passing time by the calendar of saints’ days; otherwise, their world was a blank of sea and sky, sun and wind. It would be another two months before the diarist saw anything else worth recording that might suggest they were not lost in an enormous void: “On Friday 27 October, the eve of St. Simon and St. Jude, we saw many whales.”
Even before the pilots put their hands to the tiller to turn southwest, the ships felt the weight of the sea. Six hundred miles south of Santiago, the Gabriel cracked its main yardarm, “and we lay to under foresail and lower mainsail for two days and a night.” The toughness of the crews must have been tested to the maximum. Each man watched four hours on, four hours off, day and night, the time being counted by the glass and called out by the ship’s boys: “the watch is changed, the glass is ru
nning.” The more unskilled work—pumping out the bilges, raising sails, hauling on ropes, swabbing decks—fell to the convicts and the dispossessed. The men would be fed on an unbalanced diet of biscuits, meat, oil and vinegar, beans, and salted fish—and fresh fish, when they could be caught. All foodstuffs deteriorated as the long days passed, the biscuits more wormy, the rats hungrier—though it was usual for ships to carry cats, and sometimes weasels, to control the rodent population. The one likely hot meal a day, if conditions were reasonable, would be cooked in a sandbox. It was not food that would run short but drinking water, which became increasingly foul as the voyage progressed and had to be mixed with vinegar. As the barrels emptied, they would be refilled with seawater to maintain the balance of the ship.
The aristocrats of the ships, the captains and the navigators, wearing the badges of their offices—a whistle hanging from a golden chain, capes of black velvet—ate and slept in their private cabins, the others according to their status: experienced seamen in the forecastle, men-at-arms under the bridge. If nights were fetid in cabins, they were worse for the convicts and outcasts, out on deck shivering under goatskins or oilcloths as the ships ran south of the equator, into colder seas. Everyone slept on mattresses of straw in clothes stiff with salt, which in wet weather would never dry. Their oilcloth blankets would double as shrouds if they had to be cast to the depths. They defecated and urinated into buckets or directly overboard, as the sea dictated. No one washed. The round of the day was marked by the calling of the watch, the hours of meals, the emergencies to fix running repairs, the routine prayers morning and night. In stormy weather the sailors would be aloft, hanging from the rigging above a dipping and rearing sea, adjusting the sails, hauling in or resetting yards of heavy canvas, feeling the lash of rain and wind. When the ships were running well and the sea was stable, men would put themselves to their amusements. Gambling with cards, a ready source of trouble, was forbidden. The men might fish, catch up on sleep, read (if they could), sing and dance to pipe and drum, or hear the priest read the lives of the saints. Processions around the deck might be organized to mark the days of the saints, and Mass was said without consecration, for fear that the chalice might be overturned and the contents profaned. The role of the musicians was to entertain and preserve morale.
Conquerors Page 5
