Conquerors

by Roger Crowley

  “For that,” sneered the marshal, “I’m going. Return to the ships. You can embark and be quite happy with your great deed.”

  He prepared to advance, with a knight leading with a flag and Gaspar de Almeida indicating the way. A berço, a light swivel gun, was pulled along on its carriage with supplies of powder and shot. “And the men, avid for what they could plunder from the houses of the king, followed after the marshal.” Albuquerque returned to the beach with his own men, saying, “We must be ready. Today we will see what God wills. Many of those you see going won’t come back.” He left a guard on the longboats on the beach, making sure they were ready to embark the wounded. He took what troops remained—many had followed the marshal—and burned the beached dhows and light sailing boats. He was preparing for the worst.

  The marshal and his four hundred men were now heading directly toward the palace—a distance of some three miles. They had to go in single file through narrow lanes sunk down beneath stone walls with houses above set among palm trees. They met with no resistance. “The little black men” fled before them, seeming unwilling to fight. As they went, the marshal’s men fired the empty houses. The wind off the Ghats billowed thick smoke back down the path, so that those coming behind were choked by the fumes and the heat of the raging fires. Soon the whole city seemed to be alight. Many turned back. Albuquerque, trying to follow up with his contingent in good order, found it difficult to proceed.

  The marshal and his men pressed forward. When they reached a square with grander houses belonging to the nobility, they encountered a large band of Nayars, fully armed and ready to resist. The fighting became fierce. The square was cleared, but at some cost to the fidalgos: “Lisuarte Pacheco fell with an arrow in the throat, and António da Costa fell to the ground decapitated”; many suffered arrow wounds to the legs, unprotected by plate armor. Some turned back to the ships, finding the way now increasingly choked with the dead of both sides. Among the Hindu corpses lay that of the regent who had led the resistance.

  The marshal battered on, reaching the outer doors of the royal palace, where his force was again confronted by a sizable body of men firing a blizzard of arrows. After a fierce fight, they were put to flight and the Portuguese poured into the royal enclosure. Within “there was a large courtyard, surrounded by many pavilions with highly decorated doors faced with plates of worked copper and gold, and above great balconies of exquisite workmanship.”

  The samudri’s wooden palace

  The looting began. Locks were smashed off with axes. Inside was an Aladdin’s cave: chests stuffed with rich cloths worked with silk and gold thread, velours and brocades from Arabia, and wooden reliquaries ornamented with gold and silver. The fidalgos got their servants to pile up their private stashes, guarding them jealously in a furious competitive grab. The chance to become fabulously wealthy swept away all caution. They left their lances outside, the better to scoop up armfuls of prizes. A hundred men had been detailed to guard the front gate under one Ruy Freire, “crooked in one eye.” These men, jealous of their exclusion from the plunder, carried out their own secondary collections. When piles gathered by the looters were left unattended in the palace square, Freire and twenty of his compatriots grabbed what they could and made off back to the ships. For two hours the plundering continued. The morning wore on. The day was becoming hot.

  The looters failed to see what was coming. Word of the regent’s death, along with three Portuguese heads, had been run to the samudri in retreat up above the city. Furious, he called for revenge. The Nayars regrouped and started to force their way into the courtyard, past the remnants of the guard detail. Treasure fever had by this time rendered the plunderers oblivious to danger. Smashing open one door, they found chests stuffed with gold coins, “which they hauled outside and each one guarded what he could.” Inside this room a second inviting door, locked from within, gleamed with panels of beaten gold. This, according to Gaspar the interpreter, was the king’s treasure room. Dizzy with the prospect of what might lie within, the soldiers hurled themselves at the door, smashing at it with the butts of their lances. It failed to budge.

  Outside four hundred more Nayars had gathered, sent by the king, all determined to avenge the regent’s death or die in the attempt. The arrows were starting to fly thick and fast when Albuquerque also arrived with a detachment of his own. He cleared a space around the outer gate and ordered his secretary, Gaspar Pereira, to go inside to rouse Coutinho to the perilousness of his situation. Pereira attempted to get the marshal to comprehend: there were many enemies out there, and the number was increasing by the minute. It was time to go: “he should be content with the deed, which was considerable…he lacked men, all had departed with their plunder; they had a long and difficult route; it was already hot and midday.”

  Coutinho was oblivious, obsessed by the unyielding door. His only message back to Albuquerque was that “he came without him and would return without him.” Albuquerque set guards on the outer gate to prevent further men being lured into a death trap. He went in person to try to shift the marshal: “In the name of the king we ask you to leave, we mustn’t stay here a moment longer. If we don’t, we’re all dead. The route by which you came is all on fire and we’re going to have great trouble getting away.” The marshal was haughty to the last: reluctantly he would go, but like Lourenço at Chaul he would mark his personal courage by being the last to leave, and he would fire the palace as he went. They departed, Albuquerque and his men in front clearing a path, then Coutinho’s men, and lastly the marshal himself, trailed by his gun crew firing the berço, which, for a time, forced the Nayars back from pursuing them down the street.

  They were in the narrow lanes again, half a spear’s length wide. The Nayars changed their angle of attack. Climbing up onto the walls and the higher ground above, they pelted the harassed Portuguese with arrows, stones, and javelins, and rolled rocks and branches into the street to bar their way. It soon became impossible to haul the berço over these obstacles. It was abandoned. No longer intimidated, the Hindus surged back into the lane and swept down on the stragglers, falling on them with their own spears, which had been left outside the palace doors during the plunder.

  Coutinho, overweight and tired, defending himself with a shield, was flanked by a group of fidalgos. The lanes were in the shade, but the day was hot, and in the confined space their plate armor put them at a disadvantage. Their adversaries would leap back to avoid a laborious sword thrust, then turn and harass the file of retreating men, now forced to shed their cumbersome armor as they went. When the lane broadened into a wide street, the situation deteriorated further. Another detachment of warriors was lying in wait, this time with room to surround the marshal’s entourage. Coutinho himself turned to face this onslaught bravely but was struck from behind. His heel was sliced clean off. He collapsed to the ground. A triumphant shout went up from the Hindus. Those around him tried to get the heavy man back on his feet but, hemmed in, they found it impossible. Pushed back, they fought a gallant rearguard action: Vasco da Silva with his two-handed sword and a host of others went down in a roll call of honor as men “who all performed valiant deeds, and who fought until they could no longer lift their arms and they all died, and their heads were hoisted aloft with the royal flag.”

  Albuquerque, a musket shot ahead of this rear guard and closer to the beach, was also in growing trouble but had clustered around him a reasonable number of men under intense fire from enemy archers. He wanted to wait for the marshal, but news came that Coutinho had fallen in the fighting. He turned to give help, only there were few volunteers: “no one wanted to go back.” Almost immediately he was met by scores of fleeing men; after them came the Hindu warriors shouting triumphantly. Men just dropped their weapons and streamed toward the beach, leaving Albuquerque and forty or fifty others to face the enemy and try to prevent a total rout. Falling back under sustained pressure, Albuquerque was hit in the left arm by an arrow that lodged in the bone; a few minutes later he wa
s hit again, in the neck by a dart that penetrated his throat guard. Then a bullet caught him in the chest. He called out for the protection of Our Lady of Guadalupe as he collapsed to the ground. The shout went up that he was dead; men nearby started to panic. The Nayars closed in for the kill.

  But by what Albuquerque came to regard as a miracle, the shot to the chest had not finished him off. While the rank and file fled, four men lifted him onto a shield and ran toward the beach, while a second group closed ranks behind him, preventing total disaster. The commanders on the beach began to ferry the wounded out to the waiting ships; from the longboats they fired their berços to deter the pursuers and to give hope to those rushing through the streets that the beach was near. Later the big guns from the ships opened up, too. Keen to the last to prove their fighting qualities, two of the fidalgos, António de Noronha and Diogo Fernandes de Beja, led a band of three hundred back into the city. They met a large number of men and women running toward them, thinking that the Portuguese were all dead—and slaughtered them mercilessly. Some of the natives ran down onto the beach to escape, which threw the Portuguese waiting to embark into fresh panic. Assuming these fleeing people to be pursuing them, many hurled themselves into the sea, despite the shouts of their comrades, and drowned trying to reach the ships.

  —

  Evening fell. No one was left on the beach but the two captains, to the very end contesting which should be the last to depart. Finally Diogo Fernandes and Dom António embarked simultaneously, to preserve their precious honor. The fleet lingered at Calicut for two days, during which the wounded were attended to, the dead thrown overboard, and Albuquerque himself recovered and made up his dispatches.

  The casualties on both sides were heavy. The marshal’s glorious escapade had been costly to the Portuguese. Out of eighteen hundred men, three hundred were dead, “of which seventy were noblemen”—the chroniclers were always scrupulous to record their names—and four hundred wounded, “of which many died or were permanently disabled.” A snapshot of the losses from those who plundered the palace can be found in the fate of the twenty or so men with Ruy Freire, the crooked-eyed gatekeeper who absconded with some of the plunder: “who all died, except for a single slave, badly wounded, who reached the boats to give news of what had happened to the marshal.” Among the uncertainties is the fate of Gaspar de Almeida. The converted Jewish interpreter who first met Vasco da Gama and who provided Manuel with so much information about the Indian Ocean may have died on that day; thereafter he disappears from the records.

  The losses to Calicut had been more grievous. The samudri had the head and the banner of the marshal, but these were scant consolation for the death count and the destruction of the city and the royal palace by fire, and the loss of the merchant fleet on which his tax revenues depended. He feared the repercussions. He ensured an honorable burial for the marshal, with an engraved tombstone and his banner hanging above. It was an insurance policy against inevitable Portuguese revenge. As for Albuquerque, he would never fully regain the use of his left arm, but he honored the miracle of his survival. The bullet that had felled him was retrieved by a servant and sent with a sum of money to the shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe in the Algarve; the bullet was laid before her image and the money paid for a lamp that “might burn forever” there.

  There was one bright spot for the governor in all this. He inherited all but three of the marshal’s ships, which returned to Portugal. It provided him now with a substantial fleet to deploy as he wished—and he had plans to do so. He spent the next day writing to the king about everything that had happened recently, without a word about the Calicut fiasco. The men returning to Portugal could explain that. His silence was eloquent. Calicut itself remained a problem to be solved. Three years later, he would find a solution to the samudri; it would be far simpler, and almost bloodless, but without honor or glory. Meanwhile, he pondered the lessons of the disastrous collapse of discipline, in which the emphasis on individual bravery outweighed tactical organization, and how the hunger for booty, which was the compensation for continual late pay, could reduce an army to a rabble that might break and run.

  17

  “What the Portuguese Win They Never Give Up”

  January–June 1510

  NO ONE KNOWS EXACTLY when or why Albuquerque decided to attack Goa, but within a few weeks of the massacre at Calicut he hatched a plan that would launch the Portuguese on a huge campaign, almost three years of continuous contest that would radically alter the axis of power in the Indian Ocean.

  He had returned to Cochin badly wounded. One chronicler claimed that in January 1510 the doctors feared for his life. If so, his recovery was extraordinary. Albuquerque was a driven man, impelled by the shared Manueline dream of destroying Islam, as if he knew, too, that time was short. He saw how quickly India used men up—the sapping climate, the change of diet, the blows of dysentery and malaria all took their toll on energy and life expectancy. “The caulkers and carpenters,” he wrote to the king, “what with their dealings with the local women, and the work in this hot climate, within the space of a year are no longer men.” He set about his duties as governor in Cochin with ferocious zeal, overhauling the fleet for a new campaign, organizing supplies, shaking up perceived slackness in the fulfillment of duties—and writing. Where Almeida had been sparse in his accounts to the king, Albuquerque was lavish. He had concluded that the chronically insecure Manuel wanted to know everything—and the egocentric Albuquerque wanted to justify everything.

  “There is nothing,” he wrote to his monarch, “in India or within myself that I do not report to you, save only my own sins.” Over the next five years he would supply Manuel with a torrent of detail, explanation, justification, and recommendation on all the doings of India, hundreds of thousands of words dictated to a team of long-suffering secretaries by day and night. They took down his words on horseback, at table, on the deck of a ship, in the small hours of the night. Letters, orders, petitions were signed on his knee and dispatched in multiple copies, composed in tearing haste in an impulsive style, restless and urgent, with sudden changes of subject and shot through with a passionate sense of self.

  One of these hapless scribes, Gaspar Correia, not only wore out his fingers writing and copying these letters but somehow found the time to compose his own compendious and brilliantly vivid chronicle of this whirlwind in action. Albuquerque seemed to attend to everything. His ability to frame huge geostrategic initiatives was matched by an inexhaustible attention to detail. While sending envoys to the raja of Vijayanagar, he would be inquiring into the foot of a wounded elephant, considering the use of coconut shells as a packing material, arranging for gifts to loyal potentates, overseeing the loading of ships and the hospital facilities for wounded men. He was aware that while the Portuguese were lords of the ocean, they had only fragile leaseholds on the Indian coast at Cannanore and Cochin. He had personal scores to settle—in Calicut and Ormuz—and imperial edicts to fulfill. The list of objectives that had eluded Almeida was long: the destruction of Calicut, capture of Ormuz, blockade of the Red Sea, and control of Malacca, the southernmost hub of the spice trade, as well as exploring the seas beyond. Behind this, hidden from all but the inner circle of the royal court, Manuel’s final contest: the destruction of the Mamluks in Egypt and the retaking of Jerusalem.

  Manuel, chronically fearful of entrusting power to any one man, had decided to create three autonomous governments in the Indian Ocean. Nominally Albuquerque had authority to act in only the central segment—the west coast of India from Gujarat to Ceylon. The coasts of Africa, the Red Sea, and the Persian Gulf were the domain of Duarte de Lemos. Beyond Ceylon, Diogo Lopes de Sequeira had responsibility for Malacca and the farthest Orient. This dispersal of forces was strategically flawed, as neither of the other two commanders had sufficient ships for effective action. Albuquerque not only saw the pointlessness of this division, he also believed that no one was as capable as himself. Over a period of time, he found ways o
f obtaining the ships of the other commanders and integrating them into one unified command, without royal say-so. It made for an effective deployment of military resources; it also made him enemies, both in India and back at court, who would snipe at his methods and malign his intentions to the king.

  Equally unpopular was the issue of military organization. The massacre at Calicut had highlighted the shortcomings of the way the Portuguese fought. The military code of the fidalgos valued heroic personal deeds over tactics, the taking of booty and prizes over the achievement of strategic objectives. Men-at-arms were tied by personal and economic loyalties to their aristocratic leaders rather than to an overall commander. Victories were gained by acts of individual valor rather than rational planning. The Portuguese fought with a ferocity that stunned the peoples of the Indian Ocean, but their methods were medieval and chaotic and, not infrequently, suicidal. It was in this spirit that Lourenço de Almeida had refused to blast the Egyptian fleet out of the water at Chaul and Coutinho had attempted to march into Calicut with a cane and a cap. The laudatory roll calls of fidalgos who went down to the last man pepper the pages of the chronicles. Yet it was clear, too, though cowardice was the ultimate smirch on a fidalgo’s name and the merest whisper of a refusal to fight had ultimately cost Lourenço his life, that the ill-disciplined rank and file could crack under pressure.

  Albuquerque was certainly in thrall to Manuel’s messianic ideas of medieval crusade but, like the king himself, he was also keenly aware of the military revolution sweeping Europe. In the Italian wars of the late fifteenth century, bands of professional Swiss mercenaries, drilled to march and fight as organized groups, had revolutionized battlefield tactics. Highly maneuverable columns of trained men, armed with pikes and halberds, had steamrollered their opponents in tight mass formations. Albuquerque, with the energy of a zealot, set about reorganizing and instructing men in the tactics and disciplines of the new warfare. At Cochin, he formed the first trained bands. Immediately after his return from Calicut he wrote to Manuel, asking for a corps of soldiers practiced in the Swiss techniques and for the officers to instruct the India men. As it was, he proceeded anyway. Men were formally enrolled in corps, taught to march in formation and in the use of the pike. Each “Swiss” corps had its own corporals, standard-bearers, pipers, and clerk—as well as monthly payment. To encourage the status of this new regimental structure, Albuquerque himself would sometimes shoulder a pike and march with the men.