Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power

by Robert D. Kaplan

  There could not be a clearer case than this “discovery” of one civilization building upon the knowledge and skills of another. After all, it was not only the specific help provided by Majid from which the Portuguese benefited. In a more general sense, it was the Arabs and Jews who had bequeathed maps and astrolabes (precursors to sextants) to the Portuguese, so medieval mapmaking reached its zenith with these Iberian mariners.*

  By opening the sea route from Europe to the East, Portuguese mariners went a significant way toward ending the isolation of the different branches of humankind. Of course, this process was helped along by the Silk Road and other land routes across Asia. But with the general collapse of Mongol power in the fourteenth century, which preceded the more specific decline of the Timurid Empire—not to mention the rise of Safavid Persia at the turn of the sixteenth-century that caused tensions with the Ottoman Empire—these trans-Asian land routes became less secure, and their further weakening was foretold by the ability of the Portuguese to reach the East more easily by sea.17 With the establishment of this maritime route the East was pulled into European rivalries to a degree heretofore unseen. For the first time there was a truly vibrant world history, rather than strictly a European, or Indian, or Chinese one.18 One region could no longer be written about without reference to another.

  The more specific effect of da Gama’s rounding the Cape of Good Hope was that it diminished the importance of the Mediterranean in favor of the much vaster Indian Ocean, with its even richer civilizational links.19 As great as da Gama’s accomplishment was, however, it was strictly one of application and endurance: obviously, a level of endurance that is almost inconceivable in our age, when the idea of months and years at a time in the scurvy-ridden hold of a ship is something that belongs to the level of the phantasmagoric. Truly, it was an achievement of character, though the Portuguese empire in the Indian Ocean emerged not as a direct consequence of da Gama’s voyage at all, but as a result of the vision, that is, of the intellect—and of the endurance—of another mariner: Afonso d’Albuquerque.

  D’Albuquerque had made the voyage around Africa to India shortly after da Gama, where he made the strategic decision to prop up friendly rulers on the Malabar coast. He saw immediately that an area as vast as the Indian Ocean could not be controlled permanently by a small and distant country like Portugal, unless Portugal established not only bases but also an overseas civilization there. It was not enough for Portugal to control the principal egress points: the Cape of Good Hope and the Straits of Bab el Mandeb, Hormuz, and Malacca. It needed a capital city of its own in India, which D’Albuquerque established at Goa, south of present-day Mumbai (formerly Bombay) on India’s western Konkan coast, which would grow into a great outpost of cathedrals and fortresses. In order to hold and develop Goa, cemented by his implacable hatred of the Muslims, he formed a strategic alliance with the Hindu empire of Vijayanagar. D’Albuquerque put every Moor in Goa to the sword; though he was a man of great accomplishments, he should not be romanticized.

  This viceregal “Caesar of the East” took Hormuz and captured Malacca, from where he sent out expeditions to scout and control the East Indies, to the extent possible. He built a fortress on the island of Socotra to partially block the Strait of Bab el Mandeb and deny Arab traders the capacity to reach India via the Red Sea.20 His desire to deny Muslims use of the entire ocean ended up straining Portuguese resources to their utmost. Operating thousands of miles from any home base, he never had control of more than four thousand sailors and a small fleet of ships, and he did all this while a relatively old man in his fifties and beyond.21 D’Albuquerque wrested a tenuous empire out of the horrid expanse of the seas. It is something that, in strategic terms, a global maritime system, loosely led by the Americans, with help from the Indians, and hopefully the Chinese, now has no choice than to try to achieve.

  Yet, despite D’Albuquerque’s accomplishments, much remained as it was. Change around the Indian Ocean seaboard even in the heyday of Portuguese imperialism was gradual. “Indigenous empires and trading states remained dominant and largely unaffected by Europeans scurrying … at their edges,” writes the scholar Felipe Fernández-Armesto.22 There were a few Portuguese forts on the coast of Oman, but none in the desert interior. At the same time, though, the Portuguese were able to block the Red Sea to Muslim shipping, in keeping with their strategy to outflank the forces of Islam. And they defeated the Mamluk (Egyptian) fleet in the Arabian Sea.23 But while the high seas might have been Christian, much of the coastlines and all of the interior were not.

  As the first of the modern empires, Portugal’s was not only the weakest, but also the most medieval. Its navigators pried open the doors to the wider world, but at a savage cost. The Portuguese did not so much discover the East as launch a “piratical onslaught” upon it, breaking up, however slowly, the web of mutually profitable and peaceful maritime commerce that for centuries had bound the Arab and Persian worlds with the distant Orient. Indeed, the process that led China and Japan into hostile isolation was born of their bitter experience with the Portuguese. Yet, it wasn’t really the modern West that the peoples of the East came to know through the Portuguese, but Europe of the late Middle Ages.

  Portuguese sensibilities were further brutalized by nearly a century of ferocious fighting for control of Morocco, which had turned their soldiery into a veritable frontier society.24 With the Portuguese, modern-style mission planning went lock and key with a worldview that at times represented the worst of the Inquisition. In the minds of these sailors, because the Orientals were heathens, they felt no shame in recounting their stories of pillage. Writes the late British scholar J. H. Plumb:

  They butchered crews of captured Moslem dhows, slinging some from the yardarms for target practice, cutting off the hands and feet of others and sending a boatload of bits to the local ruler, telling him to use them for curry. They spared neither women nor children. In the early days they stole almost as often as they traded.… the children of Christ followed the trade of blood, setting up their churches, missions and seminaries, for, after all, the rapine was a crusade: no matter how great the reward of Da Gama … and the rest might be in this world, the next would see them in greater glory.25

  Da Gama sought “Christians and spices.” Thus, he filled his ship with pepper for the voyage home, while sinking a merchant ship off the Indian coast filled with seven hundred Muslim pilgrims from Mecca.26 Muscat was sacked and burned by D’Albuquerque in 1507. Portuguese freebooters occupied parts of Ceylon and Burma, and sold tens of thousands of the inhabitants into slavery. Such deeds, coupled with conquest on the scale that the Portuguese managed to achieve, required a narrow certainty of belief. If “doubt,” as T. E. Lawrence writes in Seven Pillars of Wisdom, is “our modern crown of thorns,” then the Portuguese were just short of being modern.27 C. R. Boxer, the late British scholar, notes that despite their momentary misgivings, “The certainty that God was on their side, and that He would and did intervene directly on their behalf” was a pivotal factor not only, as he writes, in the capture of Ceuta in Morocco in 1415, but also throughout the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as the Portuguese groped their way down the western coast of Africa and beyond.*

  Believing themselves a chosen people destined to be the sword of the faith, the Portuguese show us a religious nationalism as doughty and often extreme as any in history.28 Portugal’s spectacular and sweeping conquest of the Indian Ocean littoral falls into a category similar to that of the Arab conquest of North Africa nine centuries earlier. In the post-national West, we would do well to remember that morale is still the key to military victory: in particular, a morale fortified by a narrow, unshakable conviction, which often has been the product of religion and nationalism. What the medieval Arabs and the late-medieval Portuguese once embodied challenges us to this day. To a significant extent, American power will depend on how it confronts fanatical enemies who believe more firmly than it does.

  Portugal’s was both
a slaving empire and a military one. Unlike the Spanish in the New World who, following the conquest of Mexico and Peru, ran their holdings through civilian administrators (at least in the beginning), the great majority of male Portuguese who sailed from Lisbon to India’s western coast went out as soldiers. “This is a frontier land of conquest,” wrote a Franciscan missionary friar from the vantage point of late-sixteenth-century Goa.29

  That frontier—everything beyond the Cape of Good Hope, from the Swahili coast of East Africa to Timor in archipelagic Indonesia—was called India by the Portuguese, or the Estado da India (State of India). Indeed, the entire sprawling East was also referred to as the Indies or the lands of India for, as we have seen, Arab, Persian, Hindu, and other traders had turned it into a recognizable cultural system, unified and in a very palpable sense made smaller by the predictable monsoon winds.

  To understand further how the Portuguese were able to establish themselves so quickly throughout this quarter of the earth, one needs to realize that while a climatic, cultural, and trading system did unite the shores of the Indian Ocean, in political terms this vast region was in a state of incoherence and semi-chaos even, with congeries of small and weak states, susceptible to conquest or influence by an enterprising outsider. As we have seen in the case of Oman, while the sea united, the hinterlands often brought chaos.

  No map during any point in history could surpass that of the early-sixteenth-century Indian Ocean in its cultural and political variety. It was a map of controlled anarchy. Going from west to east, there were the Swahili city-states of the East African coast; most importantly Kilwa, Mombasa, Malindi, and Pate. Arabic was, so to speak, their cultural lingua franca, mixed with a veneer of Persian. Moving north up the coast and swerving along Arabia, the Portuguese encountered Oman and a number of other states and tribes, some independent, but most under the sway of the Mamluks (converted Muslim slaves who ruled in Egypt, Syria, and the Hejaz from the thirteenth through fifteenth century). Heading east over to the Persian Gulf, the new Shia Safavid dynasty in Iran was expanding inland, and on the verge of a collision with the Sunni Ottoman Turks that would soon exhaust both powers. India proper was on the eve of the Mughal conquest from Turkic Central Asia, and was thus still divided between Hindus and Muslims. In northern India, there were the Muslim principalities of Gujarat, Delhi, and Bengal. Other Muslim sultanates in the southern Deccan plateau region warred with one another and with the Hindu empire of Vijayanagar (with which D’Albuquerque formed his alliance for the establishment of Goa). Arab and Persian traders were spread throughout India’s coastal regions and Ceylon, which, in turn, was divided between the Buddhist Sinhalese and Hindu Tamils.

  As for the region corresponding to present-day Southeast Asia, it was, in Boxer’s words, “occupied by a number of warring states whose kaleidoscopic shifts of fortune cannot be followed even in outline.” Going down the Malay Peninsula in the direction of Indonesia were the kingdoms of Patani, Singora, and Ligor under Siamese (Thai) political influence, “but also affected by Chinese cultural and commercial contacts.” Malacca was the peninsula’s wealthiest sultanate, its rulers having converted to Islam in the fourteenth century, though Hindu traders were welcome in the port. The main islands of the Indonesian archipelago were themselves divided among warring, petty states. As for China, under pressure from Japanese pirates and Mongol nomads, it had effectively retreated from the Indian Ocean in which it once had a great presence, owing to the eunuch admiral Zheng He.30

  If the reader is confused, that is the whole point. Just as the Islamic conquest had occurred against a vacuum of power in seventh-century Arabia and North Africa—back then a stretch of weak Byzantine and Berber holdings—the Portuguese onslaught throughout the Indian Ocean took place during a period of weak principalities and distracted empires such as Ming China, Safavid Persia, and Ottoman Turkey. Furthermore, during the age of sail, political hegemony over the Indian Ocean was rendered impractical because of the monsoon, which made one-way communications fast but round-trip ones exceedingly slow, as the winds did not shift for months at a time.31 Ergo, the Portuguese did not so much conquer the East as fill a vast gap of authority within it, especially that of the retreating Chinese, thus moving the ocean into a new phase of history.

  As bigoted and illiberal as they were in some important ways, the Portuguese could also be broad-minded, and it was this aspect of their collective personality that accounts for their most successful techniques of empire.* Eventually, diplomats, merchants, naturalists, and artisans joined the ranks of soldiers toing-and-froing between Lisbon, the Persian Gulf, and India. Many of the travelers were educated, inquisitive people who did not make the journey as a last resort. “The depth, breadth, and richness of intelligence-gathering by the Portuguese was a notable characteristic of their world,” writes the Johns Hopkins University historian A.J.R. Russell-Wood. As the case with Majid shows, they relied on Arab pilots to cross the wider stretches of the Indian Ocean, and Arab, Gujarati, Javanese, and Malay pilots for voyages from India’s Malabar coast eastward to Ceylon, Siam (Thailand), and the Southeast Asian archipelago. They employed indigenous troops, and gave great recognition to local skills and lore. They became connoisseurs of Indian objects, particularly furniture. “Seemingly there was no facet of the human experience which escaped the lynx eyes and keen ears of the Portuguese in their peregrinations,” writes Russell-Wood.32 And for as brutal as they could be, there were other times, particularly in Africa, when the Portuguese used force as a last resort, establishing their forts and trading stations only after much negotiation.33 Indeed, there is much the United States can learn from the positive sides of the Portuguese imperial character, which left a deep cultural imprint in Monsoon Asia, with many Catholic converts and the persistence of the Portuguese language in places like Sri Lanka and the Moluccas.

  Intoxicated with their newfound wealth, the Portuguese let the gold slip through their fingers. The imperial booty was not directed toward modernization back home. Portugal remained an antiquated and crumbling little jewel, lacking a real bourgeoisie until the twentieth century. Think of the poverty of old age that may follow a youth of dissipated luxury and far-flung adventures. Think of Lisbon in “ragged majesty” in winter, in the words of its early-twentieth-century philosopher and poet Fernando Pessoa.34 The Renaissance had only a brief flowering in Portugal, owing to the natural conservatism of the people, the Counter-Reformation in Europe, and the rise of the Jesuits and the Inquisition, all of which worked to snuff out the Enlightenment in this land far beyond the Pyrenees. In the Portuguese Indian Ocean empire, the only institutions of higher learning were the Society of Jesus and other religious orders, which were part of the Counter-Reformation. Meanwhile, the Muslims held on, secure in their far-flung diasporas that reached around the tropical seas from the Levant to the Far East. They simply outlasted the Portuguese, whose empire would later be “whittled away” by the Dutch and the English.35 The Eighth Crusade ultimately failed: the result of an indigenous reality in Estado da India and the religious wars back in Europe, which divided Christendom against itself.

  What the Greeks and Romans accomplished for the Mediterranean, the Portuguese did for the Indian Ocean: they gave it a literary and historical unity, at least in the mind of the West. Indeed, whereas Homer’s Odyssey and Virgil’s Aeneid constitute myths based on the memories of a vague long ago, The Lusíads, the epic poem of Portuguese naval conquest in the Indian Ocean by Luiz Vaz de Camões, relies on a specific historical event—Vasco da Gama’s voyage to India—which occurred only a few decades before Camões wrote.

  Camões’s Vasco da Gama, unlike Odysseus or Aeneas, is more of a real man than a representational composite. Hence he is not romantic, or tragic, or even that interesting. As stated, da Gama’s greatest trait is his sheer endurance: his ability to abide years of uncertainty, loneliness, and physical hardship—rotten food and “loathsome” scurvy on a churning ocean, cannonballs tearing at limbs in offshore battles—while his eq
uals back in Lisbon enjoyed the convivial luxuries of home.36 “Fearing all,” as the poem says, “he was prepared for all.”37 In the midst of a storm, with the “seas gaping to hell,” da Gama, “tormented by doubts and fears,” has no one but God to turn to. He declares:

  Why, O God, do you now forsake us?

  Where is the offense? How are we to blame

  For this service undertaken in Thy name …

  As he uttered this prayer the winds howled,

  Butting like a herd of wild bulls,

  Lashing the storm to greater fury,

  And screaming through the shrouds;

  The fork-lightning never paused …38

  They survive the storm to reach India. Because the adventures Camões relates are quite literally true, this story of the sons of Lusus (the mythical founder of Portugal) on the vast and uncharted oceanic wastes is in the final analysis more extraordinary than the “shore-hugging” epics of Greek and Roman antiquity.39 As Camões himself asks in his poem, did Odysseus or Aeneas “dare to embark on Actual Oceans … did they see a fraction” of what da Gama saw?40 It is hard to think of many other odysseys where the hardships seem to last as many months and years as was the case with the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean. Not until men journey to other planets are they likely to have such a painful, palpable sense of great and lonely distance over the revolving earth as did these Portuguese mariners.