The Boundless Sea

by David Abulafia

  Seen from a maritime perspective, this was the lull before the storm. A new king succeeded to the throne late in 1495; Manuel I was the cousin of João II, and he was driven as much by messianic ideas of Portugal’s role in the struggle against Islam as he was by his support for the now wealthy trading community of Lisbon; he had been educated by Franciscan friars who imbued him with his sense of a messianic mission, which was accentuated when, against the odds, he found himself heir to his cousin’s throne.5 Manuel’s decision to expel both Jews and Muslims from his kingdom in 1497 reflects his apocalyptic view of human history: Christ would return when the Jews became Christians and when the Infidel Moors were defeated at home, as far east as Jerusalem, and in Asia. (In the event, most Jews were forced to convert to Christianity when Manuel closed the ports to prevent them leaving, with the result that a large and prosperous community of New Christians, often secretly loyal to their old religion, came into existence.) Voyages to the heart of Asia would divert the gold and spices of the East away from the Islamic heartlands, and help to undermine the power of the Mamluks in the Middle East and of the Ottomans in Turkey and the Balkans.

  So, amid great celebration, in July 1497 Vasco da Gama set out with four ships, at first following the classic Portuguese route along the west coast of Africa and past the Cape Verde Islands.6 Two of these ships were not caravels; much energy had gone into designing a sturdier type of ship, with square sails, that would be better suited for the bold route Dias had identified. This route would take the ships through powerful winds across open ocean well out of sight of land, rather than the coastal route Cão had taken, which took advantage of the ability of caravels to sail a good way upriver. Dias advised on the design of the new ships, but the king mysteriously chose da Gama, a minor nobleman with no experience of command at sea, to lead the expedition; Manuel was more interested in placing someone who might be able to negotiate with foreign rulers at the head of the expedition, rather than an old sea dog like Dias.7 Bearing in mind Dias’s advice, da Gama swung far out into the ocean once past the Cape Verde Islands, describing a route that traversed three times the distance covered by Christopher Columbus in 1492. His ships were swept along, arriving somewhere along the coasts of modern Namibia and South Africa. There they met naked, tawny-coloured Bushmen who were disappointingly ignorant of spices, gold or pearls;8 further south, Vasco da Gama’s chronicler described people who looked and acted more like the black Africans known from much further to the north.9 The Portuguese bought an ox for three bracelets from these people and dined well off it, for it was full of fat and as tasty as anything back home – a great joy after weeks of salt pork and hard biscuit.10 The good news was that, as they rounded southern Africa, the Portuguese began to realize that the inhabitants were not isolated from the world; they were ‘handsome and well-made’ and they knew iron and copper, and the Portuguese met one man who told them about his travels far up the coast, where he had seen big ships.

  The further they coasted into the Indian Ocean the more the Portuguese were reminded not of the Christian but of the Muslim world, and this made sense because Arab merchants had been trading up and down the east African coast for centuries in their dhows.11 Many of the inhabitants spoke Arabic, whatever the colour of their skin (for there had been plenty of intermarriage between the Arabs and the Africans). These people dressed finely in linen and cotton and wore silk turbans; they were active in trade with the ‘white Moors’ to the north, and Arab vessels were in port, piled with the gold, pearls and spices about which the Portuguese had been asking everyone they encountered, including the pepper of the Indies. The merchants boasted that pearls and jewels were so abundant in the lands towards which the Portuguese were heading that one simply gathered them, without any need to offer goods in return.12 The Portuguese absorbed all the rumours they heard like sponges: there were Christian kingdoms to the north, at war with the Moors; there was the Ethiopian realm of Prester John, still busy in defence of Christendom after three centuries. It was all too good to be true. By the time he reached Mombasa in what is now southern Kenya, da Gama had entered a much more familiar world of princes and traders. He even convinced himself that he had met some Christians when two merchants of Mombasa proudly showed the Portuguese what the newcomers believed was an image of the Holy Spirit drawn on paper.13 With the help of a willing pilot, often though wrongly assumed to have been ibn Majid, the Muslim author of several tracts on navigation, da Gama was at last able to make his way to Calicut in India, where he arrived on 20 May.14

  Here he was entering a world which had close links to home. He found a couple of Moors from Tunis, who spoke Spanish and Italian, and who unenthusiastically greeted the Portuguese with the words: ‘May the devil take you! What brought you here?’ The Portuguese were, nonetheless, convinced that they had reached a Christian land. It was certainly not a land under Muslim rule. The Portuguese were mightily impressed by a building they identified as a church; it was made of stone, and was the size of a monastery, with a great bronze pillar at the entrance. Within the church there was an imposing chapel, and ‘within this sanctuary stood a small image which they said represented Our Lady’. The figure carried a child, so the identification was as certain as could be. Therefore Vasco da Gama entered the compound with some of his companions, and they said their prayers. The local priests threw holy water over the Portuguese visitors and presented them with ‘white earth’ made of cow dung, ashes and sandalwood, with which the local Christians were accustomed to anoint themselves. The local Christians were also devotees of any number of saints, whose images were painted on the walls of the church, some with several arms or with giant teeth.15

  It was all, of course, a great mistake. Their first encounter with the Hindu gods was transmogrified in the fertile imagination of the Portuguese into an encounter with the Virgin and Child. The panoply of gods painted on the walls was read as a cycle of Christian saints.16 The Virgin and Child was probably an image of Krishna being suckled by his mother Divaki. The Portuguese knew these people were not ‘Moors’, whose places of cult had no images and whose language and practices were easily recognizable – as has been seen, Islam was banned in Portugal only in the year when da Gama left home.17 But India was a land of kings, of scheming Moors, of undoubted wealth, in which the Portuguese were not really welcome. Da Gama’s attempts to negotiate with local rulers were frustrated at every turn, and his constant recourse to violence, which became the trademark of Portuguese conquerors, made it more difficult still to win the respect of local rulers and establish trading stations. Still, da Gama was able to leave loaded with samples of pepper and other goods, and to reach Lisbon again in September 1499.

  The king of Portugal optimistically began to call himself ‘king of Portugal, lord of Guinea, lord of the conquest and navigation and commerce of Ethiopia, Arabia, Persia and India’. This title was not quite as empty as it may sound: within five years an astonishing eighty-one ships were despatched from Lisbon to India. A second fleet was put together under the command of Pedro Álvares Cabral, setting out in 1500; this fleet consisted of thirteen ships and swung so far out into the Atlantic that it made landfall in South America, in what the Portuguese called the ‘Land of the Holy [or True] Cross’, soon to be rechristened Brazil. This land happened to fall on the Portuguese side of the line of demarcation that had been established by the Treaty of Tordesillas six years earlier. Although it has often been suggested that the Portuguese already possessed secret knowledge of Brazil, and that Cabral knew where he was heading, contemporary reports indicate that this was an accidental discovery. The Portuguese took a long time to capitalize upon it.18

  Cabral took care to carry along Arabic interpreters, including a certain Gaspar da Gama, named after his godfather Vasco, who was an enthusiastic and well-informed Jew of Polish descent da Gama had found wandering in India and had brought back to Portugal. Cabral’s method for convincing the Samudri, or king, of Calicut to do business was crude in the extreme: ships with hund
reds of passengers aboard were sunk; the town was bombarded by cannon; no quarter was given; elephants as well as people were massacred (and the elephants were eaten); but in the end permission was given for spices to be loaded, though not enough to fill all the holds. These goods were only acquired because Cabral was able to take advantage of the intense rivalry between the ruler of Calicut, whose town he had ravaged, and the rajah of Cochin, better disposed to the interlopers because he saw them as well-armed allies.19 Seven of the ships finally returned to Lisbon, but only five carried merchandise; one ship wandered off and reached Madagascar, the first European landing there. In June 1500, along the coast of Africa Cabral’s ships encountered a fleet carrying the Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci, a sign that this vast world was in some respects still a small one – in these enormous spaces Europeans somehow managed to find one another. Vespucci was bound for the north coast of South America; but he was fully alive to the implications of these Portuguese voyages. He sent a long letter back to Florence, recounting the achievements of Cabral’s fleet and describing the geography of maritime Asia to his patron, a member of the Medici family; he thought that the lands Cabral had visited in South America were an extension of those Columbus and others had been revealing under the Spanish flag, whereas the Portuguese view was that Brazil was a large island.20

  King Manuel was so carried away by enthusiasm that even before Cabral had returned he sent out yet another fleet, in March 1501, under the Galician commander João de Nova. Nonetheless, de Nova managed to learn what Cabral had been doing: Cabral left a message in a shoe suspended from a tree near the southern tip of Africa; astonishingly, the message was found, and de Nova was warned that he should stay wary of the hostile Samudri of Calicut. De Nova was able to use his cannon to fight off attacks by ships from Calicut, and he captured several cargo vessels, one of which belonged to the embattled Samudri. Cochin and Cannanore proved good sources of spices, although the downside was that the Indians had only limited interest in the goods the Portuguese had brought. Still, de Nova managed to establish a ‘factory’, that is, a warehouse and office, for the Portuguese at Cannanore; this is what da Gama had aimed to achieve at Calicut, but his bloodthirsty behaviour there made the creation of a permanent base impossible. So de Nova was able to return to Portugal in September 1502 with hundreds of thousands of pounds of pepper, cinnamon and ginger. Some of the cargo was without doubt loot from captured Cochin ships. The Portuguese would long appear to many of the inhabitants of the shores of the Indian Ocean as pirates and interlopers, and it is impossible to disagree.21

  In 1502 da Gama went out to India for a second time, departing just as de Nova left Indian waters. Twenty ships set out, divided into three squadrons: one squadron of ten ships to collect cargoes of spices, one to clean the sea of Arab traders hostile to the Portuguese, and one to stay in India, protecting the Portuguese who were taking up residence there. The self-confidence of the Portuguese is impressive: they assumed that the ships that went out would – with some losses – eventually return, despite the danger of war with the ruler of Calicut and the sheer difficulty of a journey through stormy seas and past many potentially hostile towns in east Africa. The tone of the expedition was set by a visit to Kilwa, long an important port on the east coast of Africa, where the threat of unleashing his firepower on the town convinced the local ruler to declare himself a vassal of the king of Portugal and to offer a substantial tribute in gold.22 The message that Portugal would achieve its aims by force was never allowed to fade from sight. Once off India, the level of violence increased to horrific levels: the burning of a merchant ship full of men, women and children returning from Mecca was only one ghastly episode, as da Gama bombarded towns and rejoiced in Portuguese firepower, ever intent on humiliating the Samudri of Calicut and of forcing his way into the spice markets of India. Potential friends were harassed too, like the rajah of Cannanore, who was found to be in cahoots with Muslim merchants and had to be warned that in no circumstances must he interfere with the Portuguese agents based in his port.23

  These actions even stirred da Gama’s enemy, the ruler of Calicut, to begin negotiations, though in the hope of trapping da Gama and destroying his fleet; early in February 1503 the Portuguese and the navy of Calicut clashed, and da Gama won a handsome victory. One reason for the defeat of Calicut was that the Samudri was unable to persuade the Arab merchants to lend him their ships, so his navy consisted of a few dozen ships provided by his Indian subjects. The Portuguese took home an extraordinarily rich cargo of over 3,000,000 pounds’ weight of spices, mainly pepper but also plenty of sweet-smelling cinnamon. Brightly coloured parrots were brought back, described as ‘marvellous things’. If this could be repeated year in, year out in more peaceful conditions, the trade routes of the world would be radically transformed.24

  Even when these pioneers were able to fill their ships with pepper, the high risks of these voyages, with the loss of up to half the ships, began to raise doubts back home about their viability; the wreck of what may well be one of da Gama’s ships, the Esmeralda, which foundered off the coast of Oman, was first identified in 1998, although its location was kept secret until 2016. It is the earliest known wreck of a European ship from the age of discovery. This is one of those cases where archaeological evidence and the documents converge neatly, for the story of this shipwreck is well known, thanks to reports in contemporary chronicles and in a letter sent to King Manuel.25 The sinking of the Esmeralda and its sister-ship, the São Pedro, was even illustrated in a manuscript of 1568, such was the fame of these events. These vessels had been sent to hunt down Arab ships off Arabia, but unfamiliarity with the winds and waves did the Portuguese vessels far more harm than clashes with Arab dhows – the Esmeralda was torn from its anchorage close to an offshore island by a storm and hurled against the rocks. The name of its captain, Vicente Sodré, was commemorated in the inscription ‘VS’ carved on to the stone shot kept on board for use in battle; Sodré was da Gama’s uncle and was to be his substitute if da Gama died on the expedition. A bell carrying the number ‘498’, that is, 1498, and some gold cruzado coins minted in Portugal help to confirm the ship’s identity; one coin, a silver indio of King Manuel I, is only known from one other surviving example, but it was a famous coin in its day, minted for trade with the Indies.26 Among the most recent finds is a mariner’s astrolabe, of which very few other examples survive, and none this early.

  Growing experience of these waters reduced these dangers, and growing profits increased their attractiveness to those trying to make their fortune. Venetian writers began to panic, fearing (wrongly) that all the pepper they had been buying through Alexandria would disappear; they were also disconcerted to learn that ‘it is impossible to procure the map of that voyage. The king has placed a death penalty on anyone who gives it out.’27 In his diary the Venetian Girolamo Priuli kept repeating his fears about the future:

  Some very wise people are inclined to believe that this thing may be the beginning of the ruin of the Venetian state, because there is no doubt that the traffic of the voyage and the merchandise and the navigation which the city of Venice made each year thence, are the nutriment and milk through which the said republic sustained itself … With this new voyage by the king of Portugal, all the spices which should come from Calicut, Cochin and other places in India to Alexandria or Beirut, and later come to Venice … will be controlled by Portugal.28

  Venice was quick to act, and sent its own galleys out of the Mediterranean to Flanders, dumping the spices it had obtained in the Levant and trying to head off Portuguese competition.29

  Portuguese pepper was plentiful, but by the time it reached Europe it was often waterlogged, and Portugal did not gain supremacy in the spice trade overnight. The Venetians were relieved when the Portuguese king failed to make much money from the pepper brought back in 1501. It took a few years for the effects of da Gama’s breakthrough to be visible. After 1503 the price of spices in European markets fell, reflecting the presence
of spices brought by the Cape route. Venice did suffer, but a sudden and catastrophic collapse did not occur, and there was even a Venetian recovery in the late sixteenth century.30 Portugal’s success depended on the strength of demand in north European markets; Antwerp was to be Portugal’s salvation, a market close to the cities and courts of northern Europe where Portugal could unload its goods and undercut the Venetian galley trade out of the Mediterranean. That said, it is important to remember that the major overseas market for Indian spices lay eastwards, not westwards, in China, which was a voracious consumer even in the face of Ming attempts to concentrate production at home; and India itself consumed far more spices than the whole of Europe – even before the Mughals brought their cuisine to the subcontinent, there was plenty of spicy food to be had in India. European demand for spices did not have much effect on the price of spices in the Indies. The opening of the route to India and beyond by Portugal was of massive importance, laying the foundation of the first of the great European maritime empires; yet it is important not to exaggerate the effect of the European spice trade on the economy of Asia.