Steven Solomon

by Power;Civilization Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth

  After Henry’s death, the commercial allure of Africa was sufficiently tangible for the Portuguese king to be able to lease monopoly rights on the Guinea trade in gold, ivory, slaves, and pepper to a wealthy Lisbon citizen, Fernao Gomes, in exchange for a promise of further exploration and a state share in his profits. Within five years, Gomes’s profit-seeking sailors had explored a length of the African coast equal to the distance covered by Henry the Navigator in thirty years. By 1481 the economic rewards of exploration were so great, and the risk of failing so reduced, that the king granted the trading and exploration franchise to his own son, who himself soon became King John II and vigorously carried on Prince Henry’s legacy. In retrospect Henry the Navigator’s research institute effectively proved to be as much a precocious landmark in Europe’s evolving political economic marriage between private markets and governments as it was a scientific prototype. The state, in the person of Prince Henry, effectively underwrote the front-end cost of the speculative, basic research until commercially profitable returns became foreseeable enough to attract private risk capital for further targeted development. Once actual profits materialized, entrepreneurs and governments equitably apportioned the new wealth between themselves through politically negotiated tax rates, lease fees, and other revenue-sharing arrangements. This model was very similar to the pattern of government-funded research in the West to the present day.

  Europe went to the cusp of its maritime breakthrough in February 1488 when two caravels of Portuguese captain Bartholomew Diaz rounded Africa’s southernmost Cape of Good Hope. If not for a rebellion among his crew after a terrible storm, Diaz would have continued on as the first European to sail into the Indian Ocean. His reluctant return to Lisbon harbor in December 1488 instead shaped a dramatic twist in the course of European history. By riveting King John II’s energies on the singular ambition of a follow-up trip that would yield for Portugal the grand prize of the all-water route to India, Diaz’s voyage promulgated the king’s final rejection of a proposal by Christopher Columbus, who had been entreating the sovereign and his experts since 1484, for funds to sail westward across the Atlantic, where he believed India lay at a distance no more than the length of the Mediterranean Sea. King John II’s experts were far more correct than Columbus in reckoning the actual, much-farther distance to India. Nevertheless, Columbus’s blind faith and perseverance withstood further rejections by England and France until 1492 when King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain agreed at the last moment to outfit his voyage into the western unknown in celebration of their decisive triumph at Granada over the last Islamic stronghold on the Iberian Peninsula. His three ships departed on August 3, 1492—on the very same tide that carried away many emigrating Jews on the deadline date of their expulsion by the Spanish Inquisition—and sighted the islands of the West Indies two and half months later on October 12. Columbus returned to the New World a year later with a 17-ship fleet and 1,500 people to establish the first of many permanent Spanish settlements.

  The far-reaching impacts of Spain’s sweep through the New World are well recorded by history. Armed with muskets, and unknowingly with far-deadlier European diseases like smallpox and measles, Spanish conquistadores decimated the native Amerindian populations they encountered, reducing their number from about 25 million to only a few million within a century. The disease-enfeebled Aztec empire in Central America fell to them between 1519 and 1522; the South American Inca gave way between 1531 and 1535. By 1513 the Pacific was reached across land, some six years before Magellan’s ships set sail from Spain on the first round-the-world sea voyage. Soon Spanish galleons were sailing the Pacific Ocean, and serving colonies that stretched from the Rio Grande on the modern Mexican-U.S. border to the River Plate dividing modern Uruguay and Argentina. While Spanish vessels discovered vital New World foodstuffs such as potatoes, corn, and squash that provided a huge boon to European population growth and health over the long run, the Spaniards’ overwhelming obsession was gold and silver, which began to be exported home to the Old World in vast quantities during the 1530s. At Columbus’s parting, King Ferdinand purportedly exhorted, “Get gold, humanely if possible, but at all hazards—get gold.” High up in the Andes, at over 13,000 feet, the Spanish discovered a veritable silver mountain at Potosí, which filled its treasury and tempted its ambitions for many decades. Water-powered mills to crush the silver ores were introduced in the 1570s, fed by an expanding network of storage dams and feeder canals to turn the waterwheels. In 1626 one of the dams collapsed, doing so much damage that the then-declining mining operation never recovered to full capacity and striking a powerful blow against the Spanish economy.

  New World bullion transformed Spain into a rich and powerful state and helped launch its Habsburg monarchs, Charles V and his son Philip II, on their overweening quest to unify Europe as a Catholic region under their political aegis; this in turn helped stir a long period of religious and political wars and conflicts critical to the forging of modern Western society. The influx of so much bullion into the European monetary economy also fueled a great continental inflation in which prices rose three to four times by the end of the sixteenth century. The ironic, unintended net result of this inflation was a stealthy redistribution of wealth that hastened the rise of northern Europe with its bourgeois tradesmen, sea merchants, and private capitalists who could respond fastest to rising prices and unsettled the static economic and class relationships underpinning traditional, land-based aristocratic societies, including Spain itself.

  To prevent Columbus’s discovery of the New World from triggering a land grab war between two loyal Catholic states, the pope drew a demarcation line from the North to the South Pole and granted all new lands to the west to Spain and those to the east to Portugal. However the pope, the notoriously wanton, Spanish-born Borgia pope Alexander VI, drew the line with such a heavy bias in Spain’s favor that it did not even leave Portugal sailing room to continue its African voyages. But Portugal’s clearly superior naval power facilitated a swift diplomatic settlement between the sovereigns and the dividing line was relocated some 865 miles farther west through a new 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas.

  The line dividing the world between Portugal and Spain cleared the way for Portugal to carry out its planned rounding of the African cape to exploit the first all-water sea trade route to India. For the task Portugal’s king chose Vasco da Gama, then thirty-seven. The son of a minor official, da Gama was well qualified for a nautical and political task that was far more challenging than Columbus’s. He was a skillful and disciplined sea captain, and audacious as he was ruthless and diplomatic. His voyage took him across many unfamiliar seascapes and presented complex leadership challenges onshore and offshore, including managing a crew that was out of sight of land for 4,500 miles and ninety-six days, nearly three times more than Columbus.

  Da Gama’s four ships departed Lisbon harbor on July 8, 1497, with stores for a three-year voyage. He was accompanied by Diaz as far as the Cape Verde Islands. Then, in order to avoid the treacherous Gulf of Guinea, he began his famous southwest detour almost as far as Brazil. This wide arc enabled him to traverse the southeast Atlantic trades and catch the strong far south westerlies that carried him back east toward the African cape. He ultimately rounded it on November 22. Vast distances of wild coastlines and unsailed seas followed. Finally, in March 1498, after an arduous voyage and a month of delay for ship repairs and rest, da Gama sailed through the treacherous channel between Mozambique and Madagascar and thereby shattered the insuperable barrier that had thwarted the advance of Muslim dhows down the African coast. Entering into the civilized sphere of the Indian Ocean, da Gama’s fleet docked at the thriving, Muslim port on the island of Mozambique. The gold, jewels, spices, and silver of the Muslim merchants heartened him, as did news, which eventually proved spurious, of lost Christian kingdoms inland and up the coast. Proceeding northward, he finally dropped anchor at Malindi, one of several important ports along the Zanzibar coast near modern Kenya and Ta
nzania, where earlier in the century Chinese Admiral Cheng Ho had secured a giraffe for his emperor’s amusement. With good fortune, da Gama secured at Malindi an expert Arab pilot—some historians believe it may have been Ahmad Ibn Madji, the most renowned Arab navigator of the era—to guide his fleet in twenty-three days across the tricky Arabian Sea. On May 20, he reached his intended destination of Calicut on India’s Malabar coast. The next three months were spent in difficult diplomacy with the local Hindu ruler, to whom he explained his mission as seeking “Christians and spices.” Da Gama failed to conclude a treaty with him, however, due to hostility from Calicut’s established Muslim merchants and the unimpressive gifts he could offer as a foretaste of future trade benefits with Portugal.

  Unfavorable winds cursed da Gama’s homeward journey across the Arabian Sea. So many on board died of scurvy on the three-month voyage that he was compelled to burn one of his ships for want of a crew to sail it. Nevertheless, in summer 1499 da Gama reached Portugal in triumph. Although less than one-third of his original 170-man crew returned alive, the peppers and other cargo paid for the cost of his voyage sixtyfold. Portugal’s lust for the riches of the Indies was excited by the discovery that although it had little to offer in desirable traded goods it possessed one irresistible advantage that its would-be trading partners simply could not refuse—vastly superior long-range sea cannonry and a new Atlantic style of naval warfare of small crews fighting from a distance.

  Voyages of Discovery: Da Gama & Cheng Ho

  Suez Canal

  Long-range sea artillery stands out among a handful of military innovations that has profoundly altered the course of world history. On land, the Gunpowder Revolution altered long-standing power balances, including by breaking down the defenses of walled fortresses with large cannons, as the Ottoman Turks dramatically demonstrated in taking Constantinople in 1453. Its effects were even more far-reaching when it was applied to sea combat, which since antiquity had been based on ramming and boarding for hand-to-hand combat. An evolutionary step toward missile-launched sea warfare had occurred in the thirteenth-century Mediterranean with the intensive use of crossbows to prevent enemies from approaching and boarding. But it was in the Atlantic that sea cannonry was most precocious. The English possessed some sea artillery by the late fourteenth century, while Venetian galleys in the Mediterranean didn’t carry them until the early to mid-fifteenth century.

  The big difficulty was handling the cannon’s tremendous recoil upon firing. Serendipitously, the sturdy caravel and its related family of Atlantic sailing vessels had bestowed one last gift upon European civilization. Its superior balance proved highly adaptable to absorbing the recoil across the deck of the heavy, long-range, mid-fifteenth-century French and Burgundian cannons. By the dawn of the history-making Voyages of Discovery, heavy long-barreled guns that could bombard with accuracy of up to 200 yards—sufficient to prevent enemies from approaching near enough to carry out traditional ramming and boarding attacks—were commonly carried aboard Portugal’s seagoing vessels. “There is no doubt that the development of the long-range armed sailing ship heralded a fundamental advance in Europe’s place in the world,” writes historian Paul Kennedy. “With these vessels, the naval powers of the West were in a position to control the oceanic trade routes and to overawe all societies vulnerable to the working of sea power. Even the first great clashes between the Portuguese and their Muslim foes in the Indian Ocean made this clear…[T]he Portuguese crews were virtually invincible at sea.”

  The Portuguese wasted no time in pressing their naval military advantage. Armadas were dispatched almost annually to the Indian Ocean to seize freely by brute force what they had been unable to win by trade. Da Gama himself led the second armada, totaling 20 ships, which departed two and half years after his initial voyage. He expressed his cold-blooded intentions unhesitatingly upon returning to India’s Malabar coast. Seizing a dhow carrying Muslim pilgrims on their way home from Mecca, he pirated the treasures on board, then burned the ship with its several hundred passengers, women and children included, locked up inside. Proceeding to Calicut, he rejected the local leader’s friendship offer and instead demanded his immediate surrender as well as the banishment of every Muslim from the town. To demonstrate his seriousness, he bombarded the harbor. When two score fishermen and traders sailed out to sell him their wares, he had them immediately hung, dismembered, and sent their body parts back to the ruler with a note inviting him to make a curry of them. Upon filling his cargo holds with treasures he sailed home, but not before deploying ships to stay behind as Europe’s first permanent naval force in Indian waters.

  The sphere of Portuguese power continued to expand rapidly with the sailing of each new armada. To confront its growing menace to Islamic trade, the rival Egyptian Mamluks and Ottoman Turks united to send a large fleet of dhows out of the Red Sea. The decisive battle between Islam and the West for control of the Arabian Sea was fought off the Indian port of Diu near the mouth of the wide Gulf of Cambay in 1509 between heavy cannon-fitted Portuguese warships, manned by small crews, and a much larger, oared Muslim fleet. It was little contest. Portuguese broadsides decimated the enemy dhows before they could penetrate close enough with their weak artillery to execute their antiquated naval tactics of ram and board. After Diu, Portuguese hegemony over the Indian Ocean was asserted expeditiously. Goa fell in 1510. Malacca, controlling the narrow straight between Malaysia and Sumatra and access to the Spice Islands or Moluccas of Indonesia, was taken in 1511. By 1515, Hormuz, at the head of the Persian Gulf, was permanently occupied by Portugal, and Ceylon (modern Sri Lanka) was captured. The Portuguese failed only to take Aden at the mouth of the Red Sea, which was the route for supplying Alexandria, where goods were reloaded on Venetian vessels for distribution to the markets of the Mediterranean. In 1516, a Portuguese ship sailed up China’s Pearl River and docked at Canton. By the mid-sixteenth century, Portugal had a chain of forts that extended from the Gulf of Guinea, around the cape and up the East African coast, across the rim of the Indian Ocean to Malacca and to the mouth of China’s Pearl River at Macao. It was a stunning achievement for a nation of only 1 million people—a primacy it owed to its pioneering role in unleashing the latent power of oceanic sailing and sea power upon the world.

  The effects of the sudden rise of Portuguese sea power reverberated everywhere. Power balances were upended. Trade was rerouted. The Venice–Alexandria trade monopoly with the East was shattered; within four years of da Gama’s historic voyage the price of pepper in Lisbon was only 20 percent of its price in Venice. Venice’s overtures to Egypt, starting as early as 1502, to reopen Pharaoh Neko’s old “Suez” canal to shorten transport time and costs likewise came to naught. In 1521 Portugal felt sure enough of its position to refuse Venice’s desperate offer to buy its entire stock of spice import. Venetian power never recovered. Islam’s decline, too, was hastened by the loss of its monopoly over the rich Indian Ocean trade and competition from the far cheaper, faster, and safer all-water route to the Indies. Islam’s overland West African trade was likewise outflanked by Portuguese ships, each of which could carry as many goods as an entire plodding, 5,000 to 6,000 camel train. Within Islam, the Mamluk Empire in Egypt and Syria, which depended mostly on the wealth of the Indian Ocean trade, soon was conquered by the Ottoman Turks. The Turks, in turn, exerted new military pressure on Europe from the east, by land and in the Mediterranean. The Turks’ threatening Mediterranean advances throughout the sixteenth century forced Venice and Spain to devote great naval effort and expense to repel them. As a result, the central locus of intra-European power tilted even more decisively throughout the sixteenth century away from the Mediterranean and in favor of the insulated, northwest Atlantic sea powers.

  One other noteworthy water innovation played a complementary role in maritime Europe’s speedy conquest of Earth’s open seas. Keeping drinking water fresh aboard ships was one of the banal, yet most frightening challenges of long-distance sea sailing. Despite countle
ss jealously guarded formulas, there was simply no way to keep water fresh aboard ship for a long time. Explorers’ first order of business upon landing at any unknown shore was finding a freshwater source. Even putting in at civilized ports didn’t always guarantee freshwater in an age when drinking discolored, briny, germy, and polluted water was so much the norm that many restricted their water imbibing to alcohol-disinfected beer or wine, or to boiled hot drinks. The situation for seamen improved somewhat in the fifteenth century when Europeans developed an improved cask to keep water fresh for longer periods. Such casks enabled da Gama to make his long sea voyages to India and barely sufficed on Magellan’s landmark first global circumnavigation from 1519 to 1522. As Magellan’s crew wandered lost for thirty-eight harrowing days through the 334 labyrinthine miles of false bays, snowy fjords and narrow passages of the thereafter-named Strait of Magellan linking the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, and then needed more than a hundred days to traverse the vast Pacific, which was much larger than expected, a despairing onboard diarist recorded on November 28, 1520, that the water they drank was yellow and putrid.

  The wealth earned by Portugal and Spain as first movers of the Age of Discovery whet the desire of the rest of maritime Europe for a share of the prize to be had from the high seas. They did not acquiesce to the pope’s assignment of the globe to Iberian, Catholic primacy. Over the ensuing three centuries of the oceanic age of sail, the intra-European struggle for supremacy was a primary force in defining the political, economic, and religious character of Western civilization, and the interlinked, colonial world-system it helped create.

  One early effect of the large inflow of New World bullion to Spain was to spur its regal Habsburg rulers, Charles V and his son Philip II, to try to extend their family’s mastery over many European states into a consolidated, autocratic Catholic empire by marriage or force or arms. They were harassed in this ambition by the lesser powers of England and France, whose rulers commissioned entrepreneurial privateers—state-sanctioned pirates—to plunder the gold and silver Spanish treasure ships sailing out of ports in the western Caribbean on the renowned Spanish Main. From 1566 they were joined by able seafaring privateers from the Netherlands, where a Protestant revolt for religious and political freedom against Spanish overlordship had been answered with brutal reprisals by Philip II’s troops. England’s Queen Elizabeth covertly and overtly supported the Dutch rebels against their common Habsburg Catholic adversary with financial aid, safe haven for Dutch privateers and on one occasion by interdicting the pay intended for Spanish troops in the Netherlands when the ships carrying it were forced by weather to dock at English ports. By 1576, the combined effect of piratical disruptions of bullion shipments, the cost of Spain’s contemporaneous struggle against the Muslim Turks in the Mediterranean, and Philip’s own monarchal overreach forced Spain to default on its international bank loans and to suspend payments to its troops fighting in the Netherlands. Spanish troops mutinied by sacking Antwerp, then the richest city in the Spanish-controlled Netherlands.