In the poem, the giant ogre Adamastor, who stands watch over the Cape of Good Hope (the “Cape of Storms”), awakens in these sailors the fear and doubt over whether they have ventured too far. Yet they do not turn back. To be sure, The Lusíads encapsulates the essence of the Portuguese achievement of the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries: to drag the West from a “limited Mediterranean outlook,” in the words of the late Oxford scholar Maurice Bowra, “to a vision which embraced half the globe.”41
Camões was the first great European artist to cross the equator and visit the tropics and the Orient. On “routes never charted” he was protected only by “frail timbers on treacherous seas.”42 His intense and intricate descriptions of the Indian Ocean and its fearful effects on men indicate just how well he knew it:
Sudden, catastrophic thunderstorms,
Bolts setting the atmosphere ablaze,
Black squalls, nights of pitch darkness,
Earth-splitting claps of thunder …43
There are, too, Camões’s vivid descriptions of the East—that is, of the Indian Ocean littoral, or what he, too, simply calls the “lands of India.” There are the sails made of palm leaves in Mozambique, and the bare chests and daggers of the inhabitants; the purple caftans of the people of Malinde and the golden collars and velvet sandals of their king. Then comes Dhofar, “source of the loveliest, most aromatic of all altar-incense.” There is the Persian Gulf island of Bahrain, where “the ocean bed/Is bedecked with pearls, matching the dawn.” There are the “spreading pavilions and pleasant groves” of the palace in India, the aromatic betel nut, the perfumes and peppercorns, the cardamoms and hot chilies and precious stones, and the “monstrous Hindu deities with their violent colors and many limbs.” He describes the submarine plants of the Maldive Islands, the sandalwood trees of Timor, and the men of Burma who wear “tinkling bells” on their genitals.44 Because the poet himself made the same voyage as da Gama, he crowds his epic with realism. Camões’s description of feasting in the palace in Calicut evokes the fantastic descriptions of Aztec Mexico as seen by Bernal Díaz del Castillo, the chronicler of the Cortés expedition.
Camões was born in 1524 of Galician origin. He grew up in Coimbra in central Portugal and attended its great medieval university, where, because the classical spirit of the Renaissance had comprehensively penetrated, he was able to immerse himself in the literature of the Greeks and Romans. “The thoroughness of his teaching is apparent when we remember that he wrote his epic [replete with classical and other literary references] in the fortresses of Africa and Asia, far from books,” notes the British scholar Edgar Prestage.45
On Good Friday 1544, in a Lisbon church, Camões fell in love at first sight with a thirteen-year-old girl, Caterina de Ataide, who ultimately rejected him. He then went through periods of depression, with thoughts of suicide. He might have fought a duel during this period. In any case, his indiscretions led to his banishment from court life. In 1547 he enlisted in the army and served for two years in Ceuta, where he lost his right eye in a skirmish with the native Moroccans. Back in Lisbon, where ladies mocked his disfigurement, he joined a gang of roughneck, bohemian youth, all the while hoping for a government appointment of some sort, but the palace turned him down. Then in a street fight he wounded a palace servant and was thrown in jail. In exchange for a pardon, he reen-listed for five years in the military and was dispatched to India. This was meant as a death sentence, given that his was the only one of four India-bound ships that arrived safely that year.
In 1553, six months after leaving Lisbon, his boat tied up in Goa, a Portuguese bastion of 100,000 founded by D’Albuquerque. From there, Camões went on combat missions along the coast to discipline petty Hindu and Muslim rulers. He took part in an armada that sailed back across the Arabian Sea and up the Red Sea and Persian Gulf, to rein in piracy, which throughout history had been a scourge in these waters. The next pirate hunt saw him in the Horn of Africa, the Gulf of Aden, and the East African port of Mombasa. Upon returning to India, he set sail again, this time eastward, to the Moluccas and Macao. His life reads like a chronicle of Portugal’s policing efforts in its newfound Indian Ocean empire. All of these experiences he weaves into the final canto of The Lusíads, which manages to communicate both a spirit of exotic adventure and of a profound homesickness—that is, a unique sadness common to Portuguese mariners that they call saudade.
Camões had to rewrite much of his epic, which was lost in the mouth of the Mekong River in 1559 in modern-day Cambodia, after the boat he was traveling in as a prisoner from China back to India was wrecked. He had to swim ashore, clutching parts of his manuscript rather than his possessions.
Why he was imprisoned is unclear, most likely because of some intrigue or indiscretion in the violent, tumultuous frontier society he inhabited. By way of Malacca he was able to return to Goa. Finally released from jail there, he borrowed some money and made his way to Mozambique, where he was detained for two more years, unable to pay his debts. He had to beg his friends for food and clothes and for his passage home. The only wealth he had when he returned to Portugal in 1570, after an absence of seventeen years, was the finished manuscript of The Lusíads. Immediately upon disembarking in Lisbon, he visited his beloved Caterina’s tomb. To the last he was a man obsessed.
Publication of the epic in 1572 won Camões a royal pension, but his troubles and heartbreak were not over. The poem calls for the rejuvenation of the imperial spirit just as King Sebastião’s invasion of Morocco ended in disaster, with the destruction of the Portuguese army. A few years later, in 1580, Camões died of the plague in Lisbon, alone and unmarried, without even a sheet to cover him. He was buried in a borrowed shroud in a common grave. Three centuries later, what was believed to be some of his remains were transferred to the Portuguese national pantheon: the elaborate and spired Jerónimos Monastery in Belém, in western Lisbon. Here they lie in a sculptured stone tomb bathed in yellow light from the imposing stained-glass windows, right beside the tomb of Vasco da Gama, whom he had immortalized.
The stores of energy that drive The Lusíads are reminiscent of that other great Iberian epic, Don Quixote, published over three decades later, in 1605 and 1615. Both works were forged out of a crucible of extreme personal adventure and tragedy. In the way of Camões, Miguel de Cervantes enlisted in the army and fought in the naval battle of Lepanto in 1571 off the western coast of Greece, where his left arm was crippled by a wound. En route home to Spain four years later, he was captured by Barbary pirates and sold as a slave, eventually becoming the property of the viceroy of Algiers. After five years of captivity and several failed escape attempts, he was obliged to pay a ransom that financially ruined his family. Though the sensibilities of the two epics could not be more different—one a passionate salute to imperial conquest; the other a humorous parody of a knight-errant—both constitute a grand and audacious cinematic journey across the world map.
At the start of the poem, Camões makes the claim of how superior to the ancient Greeks and Romans are the Portuguese, to whom “both Mars and Neptune bowed.”46 Yet the poet pays tribute throughout his epic to the ancients by his very use of their classics. It is the ancient gods—full of beauty, enchantment, and brilliant contrasts—who help determine the voyage’s outcome: Bacchus who seeks to thwart the Portuguese sailors; Venus and Mars who favor them. This deep involvement with Mediterranean mythology, according to the Oxford scholar Bowra, is what helps make Camões part of the secular Renaissance, even though his poem also can be read as an assertion of Christendom after a long period of Muslim ascendancy in the Mediterranean and the Levant.
Camões, like the Portuguese empire itself, is full of contradictions. He is the first of the moderns, and the last of the medievalists. He can be championed by Bowra as a humanist in his condemnation of the excesses of some of Portugal’s own conquerors, although his portrayal of Muslims is often dark and unforgiving. He refers to “vile Mohammed.”47 To Camões, Islam is simply corrupt and barba
rous, mixing “guile and falsehood.”48 The only virtuous Muslims are those who help the Portuguese, for the contest he depicts is nothing less than the struggle between light and darkness.49 Camões attacks the Reformation for dividing Christians at a time when they should have been focused on the Islamic threat: instead of fighting the pope, he implies, they should have been fighting the Turks.
The poem celebrates Portuguese imperial conquest, but at the same time Camões can be ambivalent toward that very enterprise, for he rails against vanity and glory, and admits how the spreading of the Christian religion can lead to new horrors. As he writes:
Delusions are possessing you,
Already, ferocity and brute force
Are labeled strength and valour …50
There was little pretty or romantic about the way Portugal yanked the Indian Ocean into contact with Europe and the West. It was a gruesome and grueling affair, full of pain and wonder and savagery. Camões’s Lusíads illuminates it all. The poem is a reminder of how conquest almost always leads to heartbreak. The more they conquered, the less ground the Portuguese were able to hold. The Indian Ocean is small in a cultural sense, but too vast even in the jet age for one power to gain real sway over it. The Portuguese conquest, like the conquests of the Dutch and the British that followed, reflects both the dynamism and imprudence to which all empires are susceptible. It is a lesson the United States would do well to learn.
* Hippalus may have been an Egyptian-Greek, though there is some confusion over whether he existed. The exact date of his discovery is uncertain. The workings of the monsoon may have been known about since Nearchus, an officer in Alexander’s Macedonian army, sailed back from India in 326 B.C. Hourani, Arab Seafaring, p. 25; Donald B. Freeman, The Straits of Malacca: Gateway or Gauntlet? (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003), p. 12; Charles Verlinden, “The Indian Ocean: The Ancient Period and the Middle Ages,” in Satish Chandra, The Indian Ocean: Explorations in History, Commerce and Politics (New Delhi: Sage, 1987), p. 32.
* “Junk” is the anglicized form of the Southeast Asian term jong, a range of advanced Chinese vessels that were developed by the Song dynasty in the tenth century.
* The voyage from Lisbon to Goa in India usually took six to eight months nonstop. A.J.R. Russell-Wood, The Portuguese Empire, 1415–1808: A World on the Move (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), pp. 37, 58, 59, 73, 119, 219.
* But as Fernand Braudel points out, the Turkish occupation of Egypt and Syria did not occur until after Vasco da Gama’s voyage, and thus outflanking the Turks was only a part of Portugal’s crusading spirit against the world of Islam. Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, vol. 2, pp. 667–68.
* Not just the Arabs, but the Indians, too, had long before explored the Greater Indian Ocean from East Africa to Borneo, beyond the Strait of Malacca.
† They arrived on May 20. The voyage back took four months because the winds were in the wrong direction. Almost half the crew was lost and the survivors were crippled with scurvy. Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Pathfinders: A Global History of Exploration (New York: Norton, 2006), p. 180.
* The astrolabe was a thick bronze plate with an arm that moved on an axis, used for measuring the elevation of known stars in order to calculate the latitude and time of day. It appeared in the second half of the eighth century in Baghdad, built by Muhammad ibn Ibrahim al-Fazari, and was used by Ahmad ibn Majid.
* Boxer’s critical view of the Portuguese expressed in his masterwork, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire, has been challenged in some respects by the scholar Holden Furber, who saw close cooperation between Asians and Europeans during the age of sail. Ashin Das Gupta and M. N. Pearson, eds., India and the Indian Ocean, 1500–1800 (Kolkata: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 131.
* Some scholars allege that the Portuguese were not much worse than the Dutch and the English in their behavior, and that Anglo-American arrogance is responsible for the negative image of Portuguese colonialism. Kenneth McPherson, The Indian Ocean: A History of People and the Sea (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 267.
CHAPTER FIVE
BALUCHISTAN AND SINDH
Maps are inherently spellbinding, and one of the many delights of Camões is the way his poem draws you to them. Often when I have been in need of inspiration—or of an idea—I have consulted a map. Take the map of Pakistan’s Makran coast, from the Iranian frontier eastward along the Arabian Sea to Karachi, near the border with India. The word “Pakistan” connotes the Indian Subcontinent, but geographically and culturally one may argue that the Subcontinent does not actually begin until the Hub River a few miles west of Karachi, near the Indus River delta. Thus, the four-hundred-mile Makran coast inside Pakistan constitutes a vast geographical and cultural transition zone, bearing a heavy imprint of the Middle East, particularly Arabia, for we are directly across the Gulf of Oman from Muscat. Makran was first invaded by Arabs in A.D. 644, only twenty-two years after the Hegira.1 This transition zone, the frontier of al-Hind, which includes both the Makran coast and the adjacent interior, is together known as Baluchistan. It was through this wave-lashed alkaline wasteland that the 18,000-man army of Alexander the Great marched westward, from the Indus toward Persia, in the course of a disastrous retreat from India in 325 B.C.
Baluchistan, particularly the southern, coastal part, is a wild and woolly, Turko-Iranian, tribal stepchild of the Middle East that has chafed for decades under the domination of darker-skinned, urbanized, and, so it is alleged, sharper-in-the-ways-of-the-world Punjabis, who live close to the Indian border in Pakistan’s crowded northeast, and who essentially run the Pakistani state. Yet, the teeming hills of humanity that mark the densely populated Indian Subcontinent feel far away here in Arabian Pakistan. To drive along the Makran coast is to experience the windy, liberating flatness of Yemen and Oman, with their towering, saw-tooth ramparts the color of sandpaper, rising sheer off a desert floor pockmarked with thornbushes. Here, along a coast so empty that you can almost hear the echo of the camel hooves of Alexander’s army, you lose yourself in geology. An exploding sea bangs against a knife-carved apricot moonscape of high sand dunes, which, in turn, gives way to crumbly badlands of black slag heaps. This is a more baroque seaboard than Dhofar, and the record of the winds and seismic disruptions takes the form of tortuous folds and uplifts, as well as of deep gashes and conical incrustations.
For hours on end, the only sign of civilization is the odd teahouse, a partly charred stone hut with jute charpoys (beds) and musty, Iranian-packaged biscuits for sale along with strongly brewed tea. Historically, this is a wilder, less visited coastline than Oman, and thus less marked with the cosmopolitan influences of the rest of the Indian Ocean. Into these road stops, on old autos and motorcycles, screech Baluch tribesmen wearing Arab headscarves, speaking in harsh gutturals, and playing music that, with its rumbling rhythms, is much closer to the spirit of Arabia than to the introspective twanging ragas of the Subcontinent.
But be not deceived, Pakistan exists here. The highway from Karachi west to the Iranian border area is a modern one, with only a few broken patches left to be paved. Government checkpoints are frequent, and major air and sea bases are being developed, respectively, at Pasni and Ormara, from where Pakistan can counter India’s projection of power into the Indian Ocean. Pakistan’s government may not control the vast desert and mountain fastnesses of Baluchistan, with their rebellious and smuggling tribes and dacoits (bandits). But the government can be where it wants, when it wants: to extract minerals, to grab land, to build highways and bases.
Indeed, as the government builds roads and military installations, Baluch and minority Hindus are being displaced forcibly from the area, for both groups are suspected of harboring sympathy for India, which, truth be told, in Baluch and Hindu eyes, acts as a necessary counterweight to a Pakistani state that oppresses them.
Studying the map of “rugged and moldy” Baluchistan, as the first adventurers of t
he British East India Company called it, nothing stirred my imagination so much as Gwadar, a port town of seventy thousand close to the border with Iran at the far end of the Makran coast.2 If there are great place-names of the past—Carthage, Thebes, Troy, Samarkand, Angkor Wat—and of the present—Dubai, Singapore, Teheran, Beijing, Washington—then Gwadar might qualify as a great place-name of the future.
Getting to Gwadar was not easy. A special permit, or “non-objection certificate,” was required from the Pakistani Ministry of Interior. I waited nearly two weeks for one, and then was told I had been rejected. Thoroughly despondent, I was finally able to locate through an old friend a helpful bureaucrat who performed the seeming miracle of getting me the permit in two days. And so, because of the very difficulty in reaching the place, Gwadar was invested with great importance in my own mind before I even arrived.
Oman held Gwadar until 1958, when it ceded this western corner of the Makran coast to the new state of Pakistan. Gwadar immediately seized the imagination of Pakistani planners during the military rule of Ayub Khan in the 1960s. They saw Gwadar as an air and naval hub that would be an alternative to Karachi and that, when set alongside Pasni and Ormara, would constitute a string of Arabian Sea bases making Pakistan a great Indian Ocean power athwart both the Subcontinent and the whole Near East. Gwadar’s ultra-strategic location would help liberate Pakistan from its own artificial geography, giving it in effect a new destiny. But the Pakistani state was young, poor, insecure, and with weak infrastructure and institutions. Thus, the development of Gwadar would have to wait.
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