Conquerors

by Roger Crowley

  In the colorful account of the chronicler Gaspar Correia, the admiral harangued the hapless ruler through the medium of his interpreter:

  I am the slave of the king my sovereign, and all the men whom you see here and who are in that fleet will do that which I command; and know for certain, that if I choose, in one single hour your city would be reduced to embers, and if I chose to kill your people, they would all be burned in the fire.

  He continued that he “would fetch [the sultan] by the ears and drag him to the beach, and that he would take him away with an iron ring round his neck, and show him throughout India, so that all might see what would be gained by not choosing to be the captive of the king of Portugal.”

  Gama demanded the right to trade in gold and a handsome annual tribute to the king of Portugal, in recognition of whose overlordship the sultan was also to fly the royal flag. It was an act of comprehensive humiliation. The tribute was paid in two installments. The first was handed over with due pomp, “with great noise and manifestations of joy,” Tomé Lopes related, perhaps drily, while a large group of women on the beach took up the repeated refrain “Portugal! Portugal!” It was probably a call inspired more by fear than joy. The startling directness of gunboat diplomacy was beginning to be felt up and down the Swahili coast. On July 27, Gama sailed on toward Malindi, where he was received warmly, if nervously, by his old friend the sultan.

  The crossing of the Indian Ocean was comparatively uneventful. By August 20, the whole fleet was at the Anjediva islands, having raided some nearby ports, Honavar and Bharkal (Bhatkal), without any apparent justification. Gama bluntly declared to their cowering raja, in the words of Correia, that “this is the fleet of the king of Portugal my sovereign, who is lord of the sea, the world, and also of all this coast.” From here it moved farther south. By early September it was at Mount Deli, a prominent headland backed by sheltering lagoons, north of Cannanore. This was the first and last port of call for merchant ships trading along the Malabar Coast, and was widely used by spice ships from the Red Sea as a stopover for water, wood, and food. Gama’s twenty ships and thousand men anchored in the sheltering lagoon. Scurvy was again taking its toll, according to Tomé Lopes. They set up tents for the sick, but despite a plentiful supply of oranges, it was too late for many. Sixty or seventy died. Others were manifesting distressing symptoms of a new kind. They developed tumors between their legs, probably as a result of tropical parasites, though these were evidently not fatal.

  The crest of Mount Deli, nine hundred feet above the sea, provided a wide lookout point from which to plan maritime ambush. Gama and his Sodré relatives had probably carried out similar operations as young men along the coasts of Morocco. If the orders were to strangle trade with the Red Sea, there was also the matter of revenge for the massacre at Calicut, and many were doubtless interested in the chance for personal plunder. On September 29, 1502, that chance came. A large dhow was sighted coming from the north. Gama put out to sea with a detachment of ships and his bombards primed.

  The shift to conquest: Gama’s second fleet was six times the size of his first.

  There are several eyewitness accounts of what happened next. The Italian commercial agent Matteo da Bergamo was too shocked to commit the details to writing in the letter he sent back to his employer. “We took no part. We were told it was none of our business,” he wrote. “There are also certain details of this event which it’s neither the time nor the place to disclose.” The Portuguese clerk Tomé Lopes was less reticent. He was perhaps the first to cast a critical and searching glance at the methods and mentality of conquest in the Indian Ocean.

  The ship was called the Miri. It was returning from the Red Sea with about 240 men, as well as women and children, many of whom had been on pilgrimage to Mecca. The ship evidently was armed and carried some cannons. It included a number of rich Calicut merchants, one of whom was the Mamluk sultan’s factor there, Jauhar al-Faqih, an important businessman who owned several ships.

  Perhaps to Gama’s surprise, the Miri surrendered without a fight. There were well-observed rules along the Malabar Coast. It had become practice to pay a toll if intercepted by local pirates on certain stretches, and the merchants were well provided, confident that they could pay their way. Al-Faqih made his opening bid. He offered compensation for a mast cracked on one of the Portuguese ships during the approach and to provide spices for all of them at Calicut. Gama refused. The merchant tried again: he would give up himself, one of his wives, and a nephew as hostages against a full loading of spices of Gama’s four largest ships—evidently a substantially improved offer. They would remain on board as prisoners. One of his nephews would be put ashore to arrange the deal. Additionally, he undertook that all Portuguese goods taken at Calicut would be returned and peaceful relations established with the city, which amounted to an open entry into the spice trade. If after fifteen or twenty days these promises had not been fulfilled, the admiral could do with him what he would. Gama was unmoved. He ordered al-Faqih to tell the merchants to hand over everything they had. The increasingly astonished man made a dignified reply: “When I commanded this ship, they did what I ordered. As you now command, tell them yourself!”

  The merchants gave whatever they wanted, “without torture,” according to Lopes, apparently leaving considerable wealth on the ship. There was, in some accounts, considerable gibing among the captains at Gama’s stiff-necked obstinacy in neither accepting the terms nor carrying out a wholesale plunder of the ship. Lopes was plainly astonished. The refusal to profit on some strange point of principle seemed incomprehensible: “Just think of the jewels and other rich objects left on board—the jars of oil, butter, and honey and other commodities!”

  Gama had other plans. To the disbelief of the Miri’s passengers—and probably of many in the Portuguese fleet, for different reasons—the ship was stripped of her rudder and tackle, then towed some distance away by longboats. Bombardiers boarded the ship, laid gunpowder, and ignited it. The Muslims were to be burned alive.

  Now understanding the seriousness of their plight, those aboard the Miri responded with spirit. They somehow extinguished the fires and sought out whatever arms, missiles, and stones they could find. They decided to go down fighting. When the longboats returned to reignite the fire, they were met with a hail of missiles hurled by both women and men. They were forced to back off. They attempted to pummel the disabled ship with their gunfire, but the longboats carried cannons too light to inflict serious damage. Even from a distance they could see the women pleading for their lives, holding out jewelry and precious objects, begging the admiral for mercy. Some took their little children and held them out, “and we understood that they asked for pity,” wrote Tomé Lopes, whose account becomes increasingly distraught and uncomprehending. “The men indicated by their gestures that they were willing to pay a big ransom…there’s no doubt that with this there was enough to ransom all the Christians held prisoner in Fez and there would still have been great riches for our lord the king.” Gama watched all this impassively, hidden, from a spy hole. He made no response. On the ship, the passengers started to construct barricades out of mattresses, hurdles, anything they could find. They would sell their lives at the highest price.

  For five days, the disabled Miri floated on the hot sea. The ship on which Lopes sailed followed it closely, trailing a captured Muslim craft from its stern. On the fifth day they were detailed to finish it off. “We could see everything,” wrote Lopes. “It was Monday 3 October, a date I will remember as long as I live.”

  His ship closed on the Miri and came alongside. From point-blank range a cannon shot blasted a hole in the Miri’s deck, but the Portuguese had seriously underestimated the fighting spirit of their opponents. The Miri grappled their ship, “so suddenly and with such fury that we didn’t have the time to throw a single stone from our fighting top.” At once the tables were turned. The Portuguese found themselves surprised and at a disadvantage. “Many of us didn’t carry weapons becaus
e we thought we were fighting unarmed people.” They had to hurriedly lock the Muslim prisoners they were holding belowdecks and face a concerted assault. The Miri was higher and rained a torrent of missiles onto their deck, so many that the bombardiers were unable to get to the cannons. They felled a few attackers with crossbows, but forty of their crew were out in the longboats. They were short-manned and forced to cower: “As soon as one of us showed himself on the open deck, we were assaulted by twenty or thirty stones and occasional arrows.”

  The two ships were locked together. A furious contest raged all day. The Muslims were maddened beyond all pain; “they hurled themselves against us with such spirit, it was an extraordinary spectacle. We killed and wounded many but they didn’t hesitate and didn’t seem to feel their wounds.” Lopes saw the situation deteriorate around him. “We were all wounded.” Fourteen or fifteen men were holed up on the raised forecastle, which their swarming assailants were attempting to storm. Most of the men abandoned their position and fled down the deck. Just Lopes and the captain, Giovanni Buonagrazia, were left there, fighting for their lives. Buonagrazia had salvaged a breastplate from somewhere to protect himself, now battered and dented by the volleys of stones, its straps torn away. With an attacker just in front of him, the armor slipped right off. Buonagrazia turned amid the din of battle and shouted, “Tomé Lopes, clerk of this ship, what are we doing here, now that everyone else has gone?”

  It was time to get out. The two men abandoned their position, leaving control of the forecastle to the passengers of the Miri. “They uttered loud shouts, as if they had already vanquished us.” The Muslims were now occupying the aftercastle as well, and those who had rallied to support the captain and clerk saw that the situation was hopeless and jumped into the sea, where they were picked up by the boats. “There were few of us left on the ship, all, or nearly all, wounded.” Fresh waves of men leaped across from the Miri to take the place of the injured, though quite a few fell into the sea and drowned. The few remaining Portuguese were hemmed in on the deck below the forecastle, sheltering from the barrage as best they could. “They killed one of us and wounded two or three more. We had difficulty in protecting ourselves from the stones, even if the sail sheltered us somewhat.”

  The situation was becoming terminal when quick thinking came to their aid. Another carrack, the Joia, sailed toward the Miri and feinted as if to board her. It turned the tide. Suddenly the attackers feared for their own vessel. They scrambled back onto the Miri and cast off, leaving the exhausted survivors to count their luck.

  The spirited defense of the Miri had failed. It was now just a matter of time.

  Gama, with six or seven of the largest ships, stalked the crippled vessel drifting rudderless on the open sea. The swell was too high to risk boarding, and the Miri’s death agony became horribly protracted. For another four days and nights they tracked their prey, firing shots without effect. On the fifth morning a swimmer from the Miri came alongside with an offer. In return for his life, he would attach a cable to the ship’s rudder so that they could reel it in and burn it. He also revealed that there was no further plunder to be had; all the valuables, the goods, the food had been cast into the sea—the Portuguese should have nothing. Lopes paid a final tribute to the spirit and bravery of the Muslims: “During the battle we sometimes saw a man wounded by an arrow tear it out, hurl it back at us and continue fighting as if he hadn’t noticed his wounds.” “And so it was,” he concluded witheringly, “after so many fights, that with great cruelty and without any pity the admiral burned the ship and all who were in it.”

  It is said that before it went down, Gama extracted from the vessel its hunchbacked pilot and some twenty children, whom he ordered to be converted to Christianity.

  —

  The terrible, slow-motion fate of the Miri shocked and puzzled many later Portuguese commentators; by Indian historians, particularly, it has been taken as signaling the start of shipborne Western imperialism. It was the first violent collision between two self-contained worlds whose terms of reference were mutually inexplicable. “It is unheard of,” one Muslim ruler had said, “that anyone should be forbidden to sail the seas.” Although the Portuguese were labeled pirates, Gama’s motivations—an application of maritime violence that actually spurned plunder—were simply beyond explanation. He may have been extreme in his belief in exemplary terror, but he was not unique. The Portuguese came from an arena of fierce competition, rooted hatreds, and the military application of advanced technologies in navigation and artillery. They brought to the Indian Ocean a narrow view of the Islamic world glimpsed through lowered visors on the shores of Morocco. The Iberian powers who had carved up the world at Tordesillas in 1494 were conditioned to believe in monopoly trading and the obligation to crusade.

  Along the Malabar Coast, the Miri incident was neither forgotten nor forgiven. It would be remembered for centuries: great sins cast long shadows, in the Spanish proverb. But Gama had only just started. His blood was up.

  8

  Fury and Vengeance

  October–December 1502

  GAMA SAILED ON TO Cannanore, nominally a friendly port, which contained a small Portuguese trading post. By now the prickly admiral was suspicious of all intentions and in no mood to be appeased. He refused to step ashore to meet the raja. The meeting, dressed up in displays of pomp by both parties, was awkwardly conducted, on one side from a small platform projecting out onto the sea, on the other from the poop of a ship. After the diplomatic niceties and the exchange of gifts, problems quickly arose over trading terms. The raja was unable to discuss these; spice negotiations had to be conducted with the merchants of the city—and they were Muslims.

  Gama could not or would not grasp the split everywhere along the Malabar Coast between the political power of a ruling Hindu elite and the economic activities of their Muslim subjects. The merchants sent to see him demanded high prices because the Portuguese goods were too mediocre to purchase. This response cast Gama into paroxysms. Why, he demanded, had the raja sent these Muslims to him, “as he knew very well, that they had an ancient hatred of Christians and were our worst enemies?” It appeared that the king did not value his friendship. Since the raja refused to deal with him, he intended to return the few sacks of spices already loaded early the next day.

  In the midst of this, the Portuguese factor in Cannanore, Pai Rodrigues, came to attempt to smooth things over. Gama ordered him to quit the town forthwith. Rodrigues faced him down: he was not answerable to the admiral and had merchandise and duties to attend to. This check only exacerbated Gama’s foul mood. He left grudgingly, with a warning to the raja: if there was any harm to the Christian Portuguese, “his kaffirs would pay for it.” He was in danger of alienating the whole coast. He sailed on with a fanfare of trumpets and salvos from his cannons for good measure.

  He swept on down the coast toward Calicut, looking for trouble. On the way he bombarded a small port that was a tributary of Cannanore and captured a boatload of Muslims. The raja sent a mollifying letter after the furious admiral to the effect that even if they killed his “kaffirs,” this would not break the peace with the king of Portugal and he would disclose everything to him. This did nothing to improve Gama’s temper, as it was quite clear that the letter had been written by Pai Rodrigues.

  In Calicut, however, the fate of the Miri was already known and causing the samudri a great deal of thought. It was apparent that the Portuguese were not chance visitors to the Malabar Coast. They were coming every year. They seized any vessels they could obtain. The danger from the unwelcome incomers would increase exponentially if they established a land base. Even the four ships sent the year before had demonstrated Portuguese invulnerability to armed resistance, and this year’s fleet was immense. It was critical to find a solution to the problem of the Franks, but given their technological superiority, this would not prove easy.

  The samudri did two things. He wrote a letter to Gama while he was still at Cannanore, in an attemp
t to establish peace. He wished the Christians nothing but friendship. He wanted to give compensation for Portuguese goods that had been left in his city. With regards to the deaths, this was something that could not be expressed in monetary terms or reimbursed, and as the Portuguese had killed even more people on the Mecca ship, as well as on others, surely they could consider themselves adequately avenged. He was proposing that they wipe the slate clean on the matter; his tone was extremely moderate.

  However, he had written a rather different letter to his rebellious vassal, the raja of Cochin, stressing the urgent need for cooperation and giving a clear-eyed analysis of their joint situation: “There remained only one sure solution. If they didn’t adopt it they were all lost and conquered: through the whole of [the Malabar Coast of] India not to give them any spices at any price.” Unfortunately, the king of Cochin remained defiant, and it was these cracks in the local politics that would ultimately doom them all. He replied that “he was at peace with the Portuguese…and had no intention of acting otherwise.” Furthermore, he showed the letter to the Portuguese in his city, who forwarded it to Gama. The admiral was therefore in receipt of both letters. His views of Indian duplicity remained unaltered.