Conquerors

by Roger Crowley

  It is likely that he initially hesitated over such a provocation but acted on the promptings of the factor, Corrêa, who had in turn been disingenuously persuaded to this by leading Muslims. Their underlying aim was to provoke a reaction within the city. It had the desired effect. The confiscation was a flashpoint for simmering tensions. In circumstances in which the samudri’s inclinations are unknowable, a mob started to gather in the city streets and surge toward the Portuguese trading post. An anonymous eyewitness recounted what happened next. There were about seventy men from the ships in the town, armed with swords and shields, trying to resist the attack against the mob, who “were innumerable, with lances and swords and shields and bows and arrows.” The Portuguese were forced back inside the building, which was surrounded by a wall “as high as a man on horseback.” They managed to force shut the outer gate; from the wall they fired crossbows, of which they had seven or eight, killing a fair number of people. From the building’s roof they hoisted a banner as a distress signal to the ships.

  Cabral, apparently too sick at that moment to attend in person, dispatched longboats armed with swivel guns to try to disperse the crowd. This had no effect. The Muslim crowd began to destroy the outer wall, “so that in the space of an hour they razed it completely.” The defenders were now penned inside, firing from the windows. As the trading post was close to the sea, Corrêa decided that further resistance was useless. Their best hope was to make a break for the shore, hoping that the longboats would pull in to rescue them. Bursting out of the house, most of them managed to reach the beach. To their dismay, the boats were holding back, not daring to approach in a rough sea. The armed mob closed in; Corrêa was hacked down, “and with him fifty and more men,” including Pêro Vaz de Caminha, the first chronicler of Brazil, and several Franciscans, “the first Christian martyrs in India.” Twenty people made it into the water, including the anonymous narrator, “all severely wounded,” and were hauled “almost drowned” into the boats—among them Corrêa’s eleven-year-old son, António.

  Cabral, probably groggy and unwell, expected an immediate apology from the samudri for the failure to protect his colony. He waited one day for a response. None came. The samudri was evidently uncertain how to react. Cabral interpreted the silence as ominous; he believed that the samudri was preparing for war. Twenty-four hours later, Cabral moved to vengeance. He ordered the capture of ten Arab ships in the port and the slaughter of all those aboard. The inhabitants of the city watched with horror from the shore.

  And thus we slew to the number of five hundred or six hundred men, and captured twenty or thirty who were hiding in the holds of the ships and also merchandise; and thus we robbed the ships and took what they had within them. One had in it three elephants which we killed and ate, and we burned all nine of the unloaded ships.

  Cabral had not finished. As night fell, he brought his ships up close to the shore and readied his cannons. At dawn, he subjected Calicut to ferocious bombardment; there was a popping response from a few small cannons on the shore, but Portuguese firepower was overwhelming. All day shots tore into the town, smashing buildings, including some belonging to the king, and killing one of his notables. The samudri hurriedly left the city, and Cabral sailed off, capturing and burning two more ships along the way, to the city of Cochin (modern Kochi), a hundred miles down the coast, which he had instructions to visit if negotiations with the samudri failed. The terminal collapse of relations with Calicut left both parties bruised and outraged. The bombardment would never be forgiven. The massacre at the trading post demanded revenge. It was the first shot in a long war for the trade and faith of the Indian Ocean.

  —

  Information about the city of Cochin had probably been supplied by Gaspar da Gama. The Portuguese knew that the raja of the city, a vassal of the samudri, was keen to escape the yoke of Calicut and would welcome an alliance with the new players in the game. The greeting was cordial. Hostages were exchanged; two high-caste Hindus and the matching Portuguese were swapped daily, as the former were forbidden to eat or sleep on the sea. In a fortnight Cabral was able to load up his ships with spices and agree to the establishment of a small permanent trading post; the Portuguese were also able to enlarge their understanding of the Malabar Coast. Messengers arrived from other ports along the coast, Cannanore (now Kannur) and Quilon (Kollam), inviting him to trade and seeking alliance against the samudri. It was here, too, that they first met authentic Indian Christians; two priests from nearby Cranganore (Kodungallur), Joseph and Mathias, came to the ships and were overjoyed by the meeting. If this was a comfort to the Portuguese, it was probably also the moment when they were finally disabused of the long-held belief in a Christian India and started to grasp the existence and nature of “pagan” Hinduism. Far from being a majority population, the priests revealed that the Christian following of St. Thomas was a small and beleaguered sect surrounded by infidels and almost all the trade of the coast was in the hands of Muslims.

  In Calicut, the samudri was hankering for revenge. News reached Cabral of the imminent arrival of a fleet of eighty ships to intercept him on his return. His confidence in his artillery was sufficiently high to refuse the raja’s offer of naval support, but he put to sea almost at once, abandoning the men in the trading post and carrying off the two Hindus. These sorrowful hostages would neither eat nor drink. It was three days before they could be cajoled, “and then they ate with great grief and sorrow.” This act of cultural insensitivity cast a long shadow over the alliance with Cochin. Thirteen years later, the raja still recalled it in a letter of complaint to Manuel about the loyalty he had shown to the Portuguese and their lack of gratitude.

  Cabral had no need for a fight. His ships were heavily laden, and the samudri’s vessels, wary of Portuguese guns, only followed at a distance, then lost them in the dark. Farther up the coast, the king of Cannanore begged Cabral to put in and load up with spices. This was as much an insurance policy against Portuguese guns as a desire for alliance against Calicut. Stopping briefly, Cabral’s fleet struck out across the Indian Ocean.

  The ships made the long sea route back in small detachments. There was a commercial disaster at Malindi when a rash maneuver caused the loss of a ship richly laden with spices; “nothing was saved from it except the people in their shirts.” Though the wreck was burned to prevent its cargo from being taken by the Muslims, divers from Mozambique subsequently retrieved some of the cannons, which would later be turned on the Portuguese.

  —

  Back in Lisbon, Manuel, confident that the rich gifts to the samudri would have ensured a peaceful resolution, was already sending off the next expedition. In March, just as Cabral’s ships were battling back toward the Cape, a small trading fleet of just four ships under João de Nova left the Tejo. The time between arrival and return was so long that there was a full two-year cycle between the dispatch of one fleet and the feedback from its voyage informing the departure of another. Everything was determined by the rhythm of the monsoon. On their separate tracks across the Atlantic wastes, each year’s fleet blindly passed its predecessor and proceeded under instructions based on information that was two years out of date, though some makeshift arrangements for mitigating these effects were already in place. When Nova reached the bay of St. Brás, near the Cape, he found a shoe hanging in a tree with a message inside informing him of the true situation at Calicut. He bypassed the city, loaded with spices at Cannanore and Cochin, and again came off best against the samudri’s ships, thanks to Portuguese gunnery.

  Cabral’s ships returned to Lisbon in small groups in the summer of 1501. Along the way, exploratory side journeys had added new knowledge. The port of Sofala, an important center of the African gold trade, was inspected. Diogo Dias explored the mouth of the Red Sea. Manuel was already forming strategic thoughts in that direction. It had been tough going; the Portuguese found an arid and inhospitable landscape, the climate hot as a furnace. Most of the sailors died, “and thus the ship came [back] with o
nly six men, most of them ill, and they had nothing to drink but water which they collected in the ship when it rained.” All this information enriched the maps that the Portuguese compiled and stored confidentially for their own future use.

  The return to Lisbon was eagerly awaited. Of the thirteen ships that had sailed, seven returned. Five of these were laden with spices; two were empty; the other six had been lost at sea. Bells were rung and processions ordered across the land. Within the Portuguese court, verdicts on Cabral’s voyage were mixed. There was a strong lobby that believed the price had been too high, the distances too great. Manuel had invested heavily in the venture, and if the laden ships would provide a handsome return, the loss of life cast a pall. The discovery of land to the west was considered interesting but not significant. The failure to ensure a peaceful outcome at Calicut, the destruction of the trading post, and the now clear evidence that the majority of people and their rulers on the coast of India were not Christians added somewhat to the gloom.

  The cost of Cabral’s voyage: six ships lost at sea

  However, Manuel made certain that positive news was trumpeted across Europe. Nowhere was it received with greater attention than by the Venetians. For the maritime republic, the spice trade, in which they had almost a monopoly by the end of the fifteenth century, was their lifeblood. Hemmed into the eastern end of the Mediterranean, Venice worked exhaustively to maintain relations with the Mamluk dynasty in Egypt and ensure the annual loading of their vessels in Alexandria. The news of the Portuguese coup in outflanking these middlemen was stunning. It threatened the city’s whole existence and called for urgent investigation. An alert Italian observer of the Lisbon scene, Alberto Cantino, wrote back to the duke of Ferrara that the king “has already told the Venetian ambassador that if his affairs do not turn out well, as it is believed, he will abandon the enterprise entirely.” This may well have been hope as much as expectation in Venice. More realistic voices expressed foreboding bordering on terror. Their ambassador “Il Cretico” had been in Lisbon when the ships came in. The details were disturbing. “They took on a heavy cargo [of spices] at a price I fear to tell,” he reported. “If this voyage should continue…the King of Portugal could call himself the King of Money because all would convene to that country to obtain spices.” Manuel called on Il Cretico to celebrate the spice haul, “and so I rejoiced in due form with him.” The Venetian would doubtless rather have eaten sawdust.

  Back in Venice, the diarist Girolamo Priuli predicted doom for his city if the Portuguese could buy spices at source and cut out the Islamic middlemen. “These new facts are of such importance to our city that I have been carried away with anxiety,” he wrote. And Manuel rubbed it in. He suggested to Il Cretico “that I should write to Your Serenity that from now on you should send your ships to carry spices from here.” It was the start of covert commercial war between Venice and Portugal, in which information was the key. “It is impossible to procure the map of that voyage,” Venetian spies reported. “The king has placed a death penalty on anyone who gives it out.”

  Yet the high toll on the Cabral expedition had damaged Manuel’s credibility. He was now aware of the true situation along the Malabar Coast—it contained few Christians, and the whole trade was in the hands of Muslim merchants—but he had not abandoned his ambitions. He told Il Cretico that “he would forbid the [Mamluk] sultan going for spices.” He would push on.

  The losses at Calicut called for a response. With the return of Cabral, the strategy for India changed. The samudri, clearly revealed as a heathen, had spurned the rich gifts, destroyed his trading post, and killed his men. In Portuguese eyes he was patently under the sway of the Muslims of Mecca. It was obvious that trade with the Indies would henceforward have to be fought for. It was clear, too, that vengeance, the default position of militant Christendom, was in the air. An Islamic lament on the Portuguese incursion into the Indian Ocean written eighty years later pinpointed Cabral’s expedition as the moment when peace turned to war. It was now that “the worshippers of crucifixes” began to “trespass on the property of Mahomedans and to oppress their commerce.” When Cabral declined a second posting Manuel sent for Vasco da Gama.

  7

  The Fate of the Miri

  February–October 1502

  WITH THE BELIEF THAT the commerce of the Indian Ocean required aggressive action, Manuel prepared an even larger fleet for the now yearly departure from the Tejo in the spring of 1502. Twenty ships were to go, split into two squadrons under Gama’s overall command. With him went Vicente Sodré, his uncle, who had separate orders and a certain autonomy. Though Gama’s written instructions have not survived, they can be deduced from what occurred: to demand reparation from the samudri of Calicut for the murder of Gama’s men, to enforce his demand for the expulsion of Muslim traders, to expand trading agreements with the dissident kings on the Malabar Coast, and to enlarge the small toeholds established there through the trading posts at Cochin and Cannanore. With the confidence that the Indian Ocean contained nothing to match Portuguese artillery, it was a recipe for gunboat diplomacy, if not all-out war.

  The ratcheting effect of fleet sizes and Manuel’s ambitions is apparent in the instructions given to Sodré. He was to “guard the mouth of the Strait of the Red Sea, to ensure that there neither entered nor left by it the ships of the Muslims of Mecca, for it was they who had the greatest hatred for us, and who most impeded our entry into India, as they had in their hands the control of the spices which came to these parts of Europe by way of Cairo and Alexandria.” It was a step forward in a geostrategic plan that was enlarging in scale. Vicente and his brother Brás, who accompanied him, although Gama’s uncles, were about his age. They had grown up together and had probably cooperated in corsairing expeditions off the Moroccan coast; they certainly shared the same propensity for violence. Gama had also recruited his cousin Estêvão: it was to be a family affair.

  The new expedition was prepared with the now customary rituals of departure. At the Mass in Lisbon’s stern crusader cathedral, Gama was formally granted his title of admiral of the Indies and decked out with the symbols of empire and war. Dressed in a crimson satin cape and adorned with a silver chain, with a drawn sword in his right hand and the royal standard in his left, he knelt before the king, who placed a ring on his finger.

  The majority of the fleet departed from Restelo on February 10, 1502, with the prayers and tears of the sailors’ families fading on the wind. A second detachment of five ships under Estêvão da Gama followed on April 1. The amplified expedition included a number of observers who would write eyewitness accounts. Some were anonymous; others identified themselves. They included a Portuguese clerk, Tomé Lopes, and an Italian commercial agent, Matteo da Bergamo, both in Estêvão’s squadron, who recorded the progress of an expedition that definitively tilted the Portuguese aspirations in the Indian Ocean from peaceful commerce to armed violence.

  After the near annihilation of Cabral’s fleet in the southern ocean, the sailors approached the voyage with considerable trepidation. Tomé Lopes, probably a landlubber without much sea experience, described the climatic changes through which they passed. From the island of Madeira, “a region with a very agreeable climate, neither hot nor cold,” the ships headed for the Cape Verde Islands, then made the southwest swing into the high seas. Close to the equator, the weather started to become insufferably hot. The crew persevered “without being able to get any respite, either by day or night”; then they lost the polestar and the heat gradually drained away. Approaching the Cape, “it became extremely cold; the closer we got, the colder it became, and the less we were able to protect ourselves. To keep warm we wrapped ourselves in our clothes and ate and drank a lot.” The days grew shorter; daylight shrank to eight and a half hours, night was fifteen and a half long. On June 7, Lopes’s ship was suddenly struck by a violent tempest in the dark. The squadron was scattered. “Only two found themselves still together, the Julia and us….At the third gust the wind be
came so strong that it shattered our lateen yard down the middle, and snapped the Julia’s main mast…great packets of sea rolled over us—it was stupefying to see.” The blows of the waves sweeping over the deck started to force water into the Julia. While pumping furiously to keep the ships afloat, the crews made vows and drew lots as to who would undertake a pilgrimage if they survived. Freezing cold, soaked to the skin, they waited for the storm to pass. On June 9, the weather improved: “We put our clothes out to dry in the sun, but it didn’t release much heat and hardly enabled us to get warm again for we had been completely drenched by the numerous hits of the sea, and we weren’t helped further by the rain.” Gama’s men had taken to throwing relics into the sea in a bid to win safety on this stretch. This time all the ships survived, but the voyage to and from the East would always be a test of endurance, running the risk of shipwreck or foundering.

  The Portuguese wanted both to trade on the eastern shores of Africa and to establish secure footholds there as way stations for replenishment and regrouping of fleets scattered by the turbulent Atlantic passage. After the tense negotiations and mutual suspicion that had dogged Gama’s first visit to Mozambique and Mombasa, it is clear that he had resolved on a more muscular approach. He was impatient of the nuances and longueurs of Oriental diplomacy and confident that European cannons could command respect. He also realized that the monsoon was an inflexible taskmaster: it would not wait. If compliance was not prompt, he would simply compel.

  He first visited Sofala and Mozambique, where the usual round of suspicious hostage exchanges and landings with concealed weapons allowed some gold to be purchased with reasonably good grace. But his main objective, Kilwa, the key trading port on the coast, had given Cabral a frosty welcome. Gama arrived with his whole fleet of twenty ships, flags flying and a volley of shot from his bombards to declare the magnificence and power of the Portuguese crown. He sent the sultan a brisk note requesting an audience. The reply came back that the sultan was ill and could not receive him. Gama promptly drew his ships up close to the shore in a threatening line, armed his longboats with 350 men with muskets and swivel guns, and set to shore. “He did not wish to see me,” ran the admiral’s own account, “but instead behaved very discourteously on account of which I armed myself with all the men I had, determined to destroy him, and went in my boats before his house, and placed the prow on dry land, and had him sent for much more discourteously than he behaved with me, and he had agreed to do so and came.”