Conquerors

by Roger Crowley

  However, the weather thwarted their departure. The wind turned. They were forced back to the island. The sultan tried to make peace overtures but was refused. Ten nervy days ensued. The water on the island was brackish, and the ships were running short. They were forced to return to the port of Mozambique on March 22. At midnight they attempted a secret landing to collect water, taking with them the remaining pilot. He either could not or would not locate the spring. In the lingering daylight the following evening, they tried again and found it guarded by twenty men. The bombards roared and put the men to flight. The battle for water continued. The next day they still found the source guarded, and this time the men were protected by a palisade. They bombarded the site for three hours, until the people fled. By March 25, the continuous threat of cannon fire kept all the inhabitants inside. Watering again, the Portuguese left, having snatched a few hostages from a boat, with some parting shots at the town for good measure.

  A pattern of frustration and aggressive response was emerging. The captains were increasingly short-tempered and suspicious, desperate for reliable provisions and the friendly welcome of a Christian port. None was forthcoming.

  Progress north was slow. They were forced back by contrary winds, sounding the channels with extreme caution for shoals and sandbanks, as they distrusted their captive pilot. They overshot the port of Kilwa, which they believed to contain many Christians, whipped the man for deceiving them, accidentally grounded the Rafael, and finally reached the island port of Mombasa. It was Palm Sunday. “We anchored here with much pleasure,” recounted the diarist, “for we confidently hoped that on the following day we might go on land and hear mass jointly with the Christians reported to live there under their own judge in a quarter separate from that of the Moors.” The comfortable notion of being among fellow Christians died hard.

  Landfall at Mombasa followed the pattern they had begun to establish. There was an initial welcome from the sultan. Two men, probably convicts chosen for the role, went ashore and were well received. For the first time they met “Christians,” “who showed them a paper, an object of their adoration, on which was a sketch of the Holy Ghost.” It was to prove one of the deepest, almost comical, early misconceptions of the Portuguese that Hindus, of whom they apparently had no knowledge, with their own images of gods, were Christians of a deviant sect. The Portuguese had come into the Indian Ocean expecting to find estranged Christians; these men with their unfamiliar anthropomorphic images neatly fitted a fixed preconception.

  The sultan sent them some samples of spices as a trading gambit, but it may well be that their reputation had preceded them. Lulled by this welcome, the small squadron prepared to enter port under local guidance, but then the Gabriel started to drift and struck the next ship. In the confusion, the pilots on board panicked. Probably fearing further punishment, they leaped into the sea and were picked up by local boats. The Portuguese were now jumpy. That night they tortured two of their hostages by dropping boiling oil onto their skin to make them “confess” that the order had been given to capture the ships as revenge for the bombardment of Mozambique. “And when this torture was being applied a second time, one of the Muslims, although his hands were tied, threw himself into the sea, whilst the other did so during the morning watch.” The risk of death by drowning seemed preferable.

  Toward midnight, the lookouts on the ships detected what they took to be a rippling shoal of tuna moving through the moonlit sea. These turned out to be men swimming silently toward the ships. Reaching the Bérrio, they began to cut the cable; others managed to climb up onto the rigging, but “seeing themselves discovered, they silently slipped down and fled.” On the morning of April 13, the flotilla set sail again for Malindi, seventy miles up the coast, in pursuit of better luck and a reliable pilot. The anonymous account relates that the sick had shown good signs of recovery, “because the climate of this place is very good.” The cause was more likely the vitamin C from a good supply of oranges. Even so, the expedition was faltering. The crew were so exhausted by hauling up the anchors that their strength failed and they were compelled to cut the rope and leave one on the seabed. As they worked their way up the coast, they came upon two boats “and at once gave chase, with the intention of capturing them, for we wanted to secure a pilot who would guide us where we wanted to go.” One escaped, but they ran down the other. All seventeen passengers, including a distinguished old man and his wife, preferred to throw themselves overboard rather than be taken by pirates, but they were scooped up out of the water, along with “gold, silver, and an abundance of maize and other provisions” from the boat. By now hostage taking had become the default strategy in a world perceived to be hostile.

  By the evening of April 14, they had reached Malindi. With perhaps a note of homesickness, the diarist remarked that its high whitewashed houses with their many windows, set among fertile fields and greenery, reminded him of a town back home on the banks of the Tejo. The following day was Easter Sunday. No one came out to inspect the strange ship. Their reputation had preceded them. Gama landed the old man on a sandbank in front of the town as a cautious go-between and waited for him to be rescued. The initial response from the sultan was similar to that of the two previous landfalls. The old man came back with word that the sultan “would rejoice to make peace with him…and willingly grant to the captain-major all his country afforded, whether pilots or anything else.” Gama moved the ships closer to the town but remained standoffish, trying to read the signs. He refused all invitations to step ashore, saying that “he was not permitted by his master to go on land.” Negotiations were conducted from adjacent rowboats, but the words remained friendly. The sultan sent out sheep and spices. He asked for the name of their king to be written down and desired to send him an ambassador or a letter.

  Weighing these words, Gama eased his position and released the boat hostages as a show of goodwill. Unwittingly, the Portuguese were learning their first lesson in the political diplomacy of the Indian Ocean. The sultan was seeking allies in a contest with Muslim trading rivals up and down the coast; the Christian incomers would in time understand how to leverage such alliances across the fault lines of religion to splinter opposition. The two parties engaged in courteous honorific ceremonies, safely separated by an expanse of water. The sultan, “much pleased, made the circuit of our ships, the bombards of which fired a salute.” There was an exchange of visitors—the convicts again being sent ashore—and the sultan, seated on a bronze throne on the beach and serenaded by musicians, ordered his horsemen to stage mock fights along the sand. Gama refused repeated entreaties to come ashore and visit the sultan’s old father.

  Meanwhile the Portuguese were heartened to hear that four ships of Indian Christians had arrived recently in Malindi, and in due course these “Christians” came aboard. When they were shown a picture of Christ on the cross and his mother, “they prostrated themselves, and as long as we were there they came to say their prayers in front of it, bringing offerings of cloves, pepper, and other things.” Their ships evidently possessed cannons and gunpowder; they lit up the night sky with a spectacular display of rockets and bombards in honor of their coreligionists; their shouts of “Christ! Christ!” split the air, and they warned Gama, via an exchange in imperfect Arabic, neither to go ashore nor to trust Muslims. They were unlike any Christians the Portuguese had ever seen. “These Indians are tawny men,” he noted in his diary. “They wear but little clothing and have long beards and long hair, which they braid. They told us that they ate no beef.” In the midst of this cultural confusion, it is likely that these long-hoped-for coreligionists were actually shouting, “Krishna! Krishna!”

  There was something of a festive atmosphere to the Europeans’ reception in Malindi. “We remained in front of this town during nine days, and all this time we had fetes, sham-fights, and musical performances.” But Gama was anxious to obtain a pilot, and it took another hostage seizure to extract one. The sultan dispatched a “Christian” who was willing to st
eer the expedition across the ocean to their desired destination. He was more likely a Gujarati Muslim, possessed of a chart of the western Indian coast and familiar with quadrants for taking astronomical observations. Five hundred years later, Arab dhow captains would still be cursing this Muslim pilot who first let the Franks, the Europeans they called the ferengi, into the secrets of the ocean’s navigation.

  Gama’s small flotilla. The supply ship was burned after rounding the Cape.

  On April 24, with the monsoon winds turning in their favor, the crews headed out to sea “for a city called Calicut.” The turn of phrase suggests that the diarist at least was hearing this name for the first time—and perhaps the whole expedition, blindly breaking into the Indian Ocean, had only the vaguest sense of their destination. With a continuous following wind, the diagonal crossing of this new sea was astonishingly quick. They were heading northeast. On April 29 they were comforted by the return of the polestar to the night sky, lost to view since the South Atlantic. On Friday, May 18, after only twenty-three days away from land and twenty-three hundred miles of open water, they spied high mountains. The following day shattering rain thundered on the decks, blotting out visibility; fierce flashes of lightning split the sky. They had hit the early prelude to the monsoon. As the storm cleared, the pilot was able to recognize the coast: “he told us that they were above Calicut, and that this was the country we desired to go to.” Through the breaking rain, they surveyed India for the first time: high peaks looming through the murk. These were the Western Ghats, the long chain of mountains belting southwestern India, on the Malabar Coast; the men could see densely forested slopes, a narrow plain, surf breaking on white sand.

  It must have been an emotional sight. They had watched their loved ones wading into the sea at Restelo 309 days ago. They had sailed twelve thousand miles and already lost many men. Behind lay a much longer voyage, one that reached back decades, to the first explorations of Prince Henrique, the hard slog down the African coast, the river explorations, the ships lost, the generations of men who had sailed and died. This first blurred view of India stands as a significant moment in world history. Gama had ended the isolation of Europe. The Atlantic was no longer a barrier; it had become a highway to link up the hemispheres. This was a signal moment in the long process of global convergence, yet there is no sense of any larger achievement in the resolutely factual anonymous journal, and there are only muted hints in slightly later Portuguese accounts: Vasco da Gama paid off the pilot handsomely, called the crew to prayers, and gave “thanks to God, who had safely conducted them to the long-wished-for place of his destination.”

  They had arrived unseasonally with the first blast of the monsoon, at a time when no ships called on this coast. From the shore there was immediate interest, sparked by both the novelty of the ships themselves, unlike anything sailing the Indian Ocean, and their unlikely timing. Four boats came out to see the strange visitors and pointed out Calicut some way off; the following day, the boats were back. Gama sent one of his convicts ashore with the visitors, a man called João Nunes, a converted Jew, destined to make the most famous landfall in Portuguese history.

  The crowd on the beach took him for a Muslim and led him to two Tunisian merchants, who spoke some Castilian and Genoese. The encounter was one of mutual astonishment. Nunes found himself addressed in a language of his own continent: “The Devil take you! What brought you here?”

  It was almost anticlimactic, a moment in which the world must have shrunk. The Portuguese had girdled the earth only to be spoken to almost in their own tongue. The commonwealth of Islamic trade, from the gates of Gibraltar to the China Sea, was far more extensive than the Portuguese could yet grasp.

  “We came,” replied Nunes, with considerable presence of mind, “in search of Christians and spices.”

  It was probably a fair description of Manuel’s sailing instructions. The Tunisians were equally incredulous. They could not understand how the journey had been made or why by the Portuguese: “Why does not the king of Castile, the king of France, or the Signoria of Venice send men here?”

  Nunes, upholding the dignity of his adopted land, replied that the king of Portugal would not permit it. The two men took him to their house and fed him delicacies—wheat bread and honey—then enthusiastically accompanied him back to the ships. “Good fortune! Good fortune!” one of them broke out as soon as he had clambered aboard. “Many rubies, many emeralds! You should give many thanks to God for having brought you to a land where there are such riches!” “We were so amazed at this that we heard him speak and we could not believe it,” said the anonymous diarist, “that there could be anyone so far away from Portugal who could understand our speech.”

  The meeting with the friendly Muslims was probably as deeply disorienting as anything that was about to follow. It was as if the Portuguese were looking at their own world down the wrong end of a telescope. It was Europe that was ignorant and isolated, not this sea into which they had stumbled. And they were extraordinarily lucky. One of the Tunisians, a man they called Monçaide (perhaps Ibn Tayyib), would help them interpret this new world. He had a nostalgia for the Portuguese, whose ships he had seen trading on the North African coast in the reign of João II. He offered guidance to the labyrinthine manners and customs of Calicut that would prove invaluable. The city, he told them, was ruled by a king, the samudri raja, “the Lord of the Sea,” who would “gladly receive the general as ambassador from a foreign king; more especially if the objects of his voyage were to establish a trade with Calicut, and if the general had brought with him any merchandise proper for that purpose; since the advantages which the samudri derived from the customs upon trade formed the chief source of his revenue.”

  Calicut, despite the lack of a good natural harbor, had established itself as the premier center for the trading of spices along the Malabar Coast because of its rulers’ reputation for good governance and fair dealing with merchants. “In Calicut,” one fifteenth-century visitor had noted, “no matter where a ship is from and where it is headed, if it docks there, they treat it like any other ship and subject it to no more or no less duty.” It had a sizable and deeply settled Muslim trading community, whose people, known as the Mappilas, were the offspring of Muslim sailors and low-caste Hindus, as well as traveling merchants from the Arabia Peninsula, the “Mecca merchants”; all lived in harmony with their high-caste Hindu overlords to the mutual benefit of both religious groups. This reciprocal arrangement had been noted during one of the great Chinese maritime expeditions. “Formerly,” wrote the chronicler Ma Huan, “there was a king who made a sworn compact with the Muslim people: You do not eat the ox; I do not eat the pig; we will reciprocally respect the taboo. [This] has been honored right down to the present day.” It was this harmonious arrangement that the Portuguese were destined to disrupt.

  The samudri customarily lived with other high-caste Hindus in a palace some distance from the city; he had another residence within Calicut itself, situated on a vantage point from which he could look down on the harbor and survey the comings and goings of ships—and enforce his tax dues. It was here that he was accustomed to meet foreign merchants and ambassadors. As he was out of the city, Gama sent two convict emissaries with Monçaide to press his case.

  The samudri’s reply was prompt and welcoming: he presented the messengers with gifts, expressed his willingness to meet the curious arrivals, and set off with his retinue to the city. He also provided a pilot to lead their ships to a better anchorage some distance away, in a secure harbor at a settlement the Portuguese would call Pandarani. Gama agreed to move his ships, but following his experiences along the African coast, he was cautious and would not proceed right into the berth that the pilot indicated. Suspicion and the tendency to misread motives would dog Portuguese actions in this new world.

  On board there followed a heated debate among the captains about how to proceed. They already assumed the worst of the Islamic merchants. The majority verdict was that it was to
o risky for the captain-major to step ashore. Even if, as they believed, the majority of the population were Christians, the commercial and religious enmity of Muslim traders in the city would make any landfall by their leader highly dangerous. Gama, in a speech probably created for him by the chroniclers, insisted that there was now no other way. They had reached India as the king’s ambassador. He must negotiate in person even at the risk of his life. He would take a few men with him and stay for only a short while: “It is not my intention to stay long on shore, so as to give opportunity to the Muslims to plot against me, as I propose only to talk with the king and to return in three days.” The rest must remain at sea under his brother’s command; an armed boat should be sent close to the shore each day to try to maintain communication; if any harm should befall him, they should sail away.

  On the morning of Monday, May 28, a week after their arrival, Gama set out with thirteen men. The party included interpreters and the anonymous writer, well placed to provide an authentic eyewitness account. “We put on our best attire,” he recorded, “placed bombards in our boats, and took with us trumpets and many flags.” Splendor was to be matched by armed defense. In a scene that would be romanticized by nineteenth-century painters, the battered sailors, still rocking with the pitch of the ships, set foot on the Indian subcontinent, “so long obscured,” in the best style they could muster, to the blare of trumpets.

  They were greeted in contrasting style by the samudri’s bale—his governor. To the groggy sailors, the sight of the reception committee was alarming: a large number of men, some with big beards and long hair, their ears pierced with glinting gold, many naked to the waist and holding drawn swords. These men were Nayars, members of the Hindu warrior caste, sworn from youth to protect their king until death. The Portuguese took them for Christians, and the reception seemed friendly. A palanquin, the means of transport reserved for dignitaries, shielded by an umbrella, was waiting for Gama. It was hoisted onto the shoulders of six men, organized in relays, and set off at a run. The rest of the party had to follow as best they could. Calicut was some distance off, and they attracted a growing crowd as they went. After some time they were set down at a house and fed on rice with much butter and excellent boiled fish. Gama, watchful or already impatient, declined food; the bale and his entourage retired for food in an adjacent house, the separation perhaps required by the dictates of the caste system.