Remove from the heat. Using a large slotted spoon, transfer the chicken pieces to a plate to cool slightly. Season the cooking liquid with salt, add the honey, and stir well, then add the remaining onions, the garlic, and two-thirds of the parsley. Return the pot to medium-low heat and simmer uncovered until the onions and garlic are soft and the cooking liquid has thickened into a savory reduction, about 15 minutes.
Meanwhile, when the chicken pieces are cool enough to handle, bone them, discard the bones, and cut the meat into 1½-inch pieces. When the cooking liquid is ready, return the chicken pieces to the pot and heat through.
To serve, using the slotted spoon, transfer the chicken pieces to a platter. Spoon the almond sauce over the chicken, sprinkle with the remaining parsley, and squeeze the lemon juice over the top.
Roden, Claudia. Arabesque: A Taste of Morocco, Turkey, and Lebanon. New York: Knopf, 2006, pp. 88–93.
———. The New Book of Middle Eastern Food. New York: Knopf, 2000, p. 219.
Salloum, Habeeb, and James Peters. From the Lands of Figs and Olives: Over 300 Delicious and Unusual Recipes from the Middle East and North Africa. Brooklyn: Interlink Books, 1995, p. 135.
CHAPTER 11
Vasco da Gama Mastering the Game of Globalization
It is a long way from Zayton, the Chinese port town that was once associated with olive branches, to Lisbon, the Portuguese metropolis where olives, known as azeitonas, still grow along the boulevards. And there was just as much psychological distance between their favorite sons, Zheng He and Vasco da Gama. It is difficult to imagine two “explorers” and fleet commanders more dissimilar in their personal and diplomatic styles.
Vasco da Gama missed encountering Zheng He off the coast of East Africa by only about seventy years. The Portuguese spice and slave traders had begun to work their way down the coast of West Africa in the 1440s, less than a decade after Zheng He’s death, but da Gama himself did not reach the harbors of East Africa frequented by Muslim spice traders until 1498.1 As historical geographer Louise Levathes has asked aloud, “One wonders what would have happened if they had met. Realizing the extraordinary power of the Ming navy, would da Gama in his eighty-five to hundred-foot vessels have dared continue across the Indian Ocean? Seeing the battered Portuguese boats, would the Chinese admiral have been tempted to crush these snails in his path, preventing the Europeans from opening an east-west trade route?”2
Perhaps the combined Chinese, Buddhist, and Muslim presence would have nipped Portuguese colonialism in the bud, or at least tempered the zealotry of young Vasco da Gama, who believed himself to be on a holy crusade against Islam’s economic and spiritual dominance along the spice routes.3 We will never know exactly why Manuel I, also known as Manuel the Fortunate, chose young da Gama to lead a major expedition around the Horn of Africa in 1497, since he had little experience on the open seas and no diplomatic training, and was already known for his hot temper and quarrelsome behavior. He was an anomaly, not really representative of seasoned Portuguese sailors, or even of Western navigators of his era. As Fernández-Armesto once quipped, “Once he got to sea, he made almost every possible error.”4 As a teen, he may have fought alongside other youths from the town of Évora in a brief skirmish in Morocco. This may have impressed the young Manuel, a politically incompetent but fanatically religious Catholic who, on marrying the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, decreed that any Sephardic Jews who did not convert to Christianity and all Andalusian Muslims would be expelled from Portugal.5
The prices for spices reaching western Europe had soared during the fifteenth century, and the Portuguese were desperate to circumvent the middlemen that stood between them and India—wherever exactly that was—because they had been receiving adulterated saffron and black pepper for more than a half century. The king may have also wanted to expedite dominance over the Spice Islands to halt a growing anti-spice lobby among Portuguese moralists and economic conservatives. These groups disapproved of the hedonistic desire among Europe’s elite for expensive aromatics, claiming that such demands were draining the treasuries of Christian nations while allowing the Muslims to prosper.6
Outfitted with four well-equipped ships and instructed to head southward around Africa, da Gama promptly appointed his more levelheaded brother Paulo as his right-hand man and then set out from Lisbon. They were charged by the king not with conquering new lands but with contacting Christian nations in the East who might become Portugal’s allies in wresting control of the spice routes away from the Muslims. Perhaps because the king was envious of his in-law’s apparent success in helping Christopher Columbus discover “some place” beyond the world charted by European mapmakers, the stakes had been raised. It was critical for the Catholic world to ensure it had control of what were actually the Spice Islands, as it was believed that trade from there had fueled Islam’s growing wealth and power.
And yet, even with some of Portugal’s best navigators aboard, including a number who had sailed south with Bartholomeu Dias to the Cape of Good Hope at the tip of Africa in 1488, da Gama almost did not make it to the reaches of the cape. His tiny ships had been badly battered during the four months in which they bore the brunt of the powerful waves moving across the southern Atlantic. Even before the crews had actually passed the cape, they made a stop on the coast of southern Africa and terrified a band of residents. Within three days, the coastal community became so incensed with the behavior of the Portuguese that some of its members wounded da Gama and several of his men with arrows.
After several other trials and miscommunications with coastal Africans, da Gama and his seasick crew finally passed the Cape of Good Hope and entered the waters of the Swahili Coast, which was lined with ports unknown to earlier Portuguese navigators. By Christmas Day 1497, da Gama’s scurvy-infested crew was finally approaching the trade routes long controlled by Arab seafarers and merchants. And yet it took them two more months of slowly sailing the waters between the southern tip of Africa and Madagascar before they were finally presented with foodstuffs laced with spices that they recognized: “a jar of bruised dates made into a preserve with cloves and cumin.”7 Perhaps, they hoped, the Spice Islands were close at hand.
Along the way, da Gama donned the garb of an Arab to win an audience with a local sultan and his family, but then failed to offer his hosts tribute gifts fit for royalty. His inability to fathom the importance of presenting such dignitaries with valuable items as tribute—a custom of the greatest importance throughout Africa and Asia—soon became the unifying theme of the expedition.
Before departing the southern reaches of the Swahili Coast in March 1498, the three Portuguese ships did add Arabic-speaking black guides to their crews at Mozambique. But da Gama soon became so convinced that they were serving as spies for the “White Moors,” or Arabs, that he began torturing two of them by dripping hot oil onto their bare skin to get them to confess.8 His tactics were disastrous, for both men squirmed loose and jumped overboard to their deaths.
Left without local speakers to serve as their pilots and intermediaries, the Portuguese fell short on supplies before they could reach Mombasa, and they took to looting Arab cargo ships. Muslim merchants in their seaworthy dhows had already come to view da Gama and his crew as little more than pitiful pirates, so once they did enter the port of Mombasa, they were immediately forced out. They drifted northward toward Malindi, where the local merchants were in competition with those of Mombasa. That rivalry ensured that da Gama received a better reception, and he ceremoniously signed a treaty of cooperation with the sultan of Malindi. The sultan then offered da Gama a supper of six lambs, which were likely richly cooked in the same spices that were given to the Portuguese as special gifts: allspice or nutmeg, cloves, cumin, ginger, and pepper.9 Again, the ease of access to some of the world’s most expensive spices must have made some of the crew assume that their destination was near.
But it was already April 1498 and da Gama knew that he had gained no real knowledge of how to
get to the Spice Islands or how far away they were. So, he took one of the sultan’s diplomats as a hostage and told the sultan that he would exchange him for an expert navigator. Presumably, the sultan agreed to the deal or conceded that he had no choice but to be blackmailed. According to a consensus at a 2012 forum of Gujarati historians and journalists, the talented pilot was most likely a Gujarati originally from the Indian district of Kutch, but whether he was a Muslim or a possible convert from Islam to Christianity is still debated.10 His name, according to the same scholarly group, was Kanji Malam, and he was a seafaring trader of indigo and cotton11 who may have been trained by the Arab nautical genius, Ahmad ibn Majid of Julfar (today’s Ras al-Khaimah), on the Omani coast.12 Kanji Malam had probably crossed the Indian Ocean before, carried maps, and knew how to time a ship’s departure to take advantage of monsoonal winds.
Thanks to the guidance of this experienced navigator, Vasco da Gama arrived a few miles from the port of Calicut, India, in May 1498, and quickly claimed to have discovered India for the West. As we now know, an itinerant Portuguese named Pêro da Covilhã had come by land to the very same harbor almost a decade earlier.13 To da Gama’s dismay, his second day in port was spoiled by the arrival on his ship of two Spanish-speaking Tunisians! They were Muslims from the Barbary Coast who had arrived in Calicut via Cairo and the Red Sea, and they regularly traded with the local merchants.14 The Tunisians passed word of da Gama’s arrival to the overseer of India’s great spice emporium, and soon da Gama was welcomed by the hereditary ruler of the Malabar Coast, the samudra-raja or samuthiri, whom the Portuguese called the zamorin. At that time, the samuthiri was a rather timid Hindu puppet lord for Muslim merchants who truly ruled the harbor of Calicut, but later rulers became the worst rivals the Portuguese warlords encountered along the Indian Ocean.
The Portuguese could immediately see that Calicut, which had been the cornerstone of both maritime spice trade around southern Asia and overland trade from the hinterlands for well over two hundred years, was endowed with enormous wealth. As the Portuguese Renaissance historian Fernão Lopes de Castanheda later chronicled, the bazaar was loaded with “all the spices, drugs, nutmegs, and other things that can be desired, all kinds of precious stones, pearls and seed-pearls, musk, sanders [sandalwood], aguila [eagles], fine dishes of earthen ware, lacquer, gilded coffers, and all the fine things of China, gold, amber, wax, ivory, fine and coarse cotton goods, both white and dyed of many colors, much raw and twisted silk, stuffs of silk and gold, cloth of gold, cloth of tissue, grain, scarlets [dyes], silk carpets, copper, quicksilver, vermilion, alum, coral, rose-water, and all kinds of [fruit] conserves.”15 This was in fact the mother lode of pepper, the Malabar Coast that the Christians of western Europe had been waiting to mine for a very long time.
When da Gama offered the samuthiri a few petty gifts in exchange for building a trading post there with exclusive rights to send spices westward, the Muslim merchants who had previously enjoyed a similar agreement with the Hindu ruler took offense. Da Gama’s tribute to the ruler of the greatest spice emporium on the subcontinent—the one whom he had waited so long to see—amounted to only one case of cane sugar, two barrels of olive oil, two casks of honey, twelve pieces of striped cloth, four scarlet hoods, six hats, four strings of coral, and six brass basins. The samuthiri himself soon saw da Gama’s impropriety, when the Portuguese commander claimed he had brought so few goods along because he had been instructed by his king only to make discoveries.16
FIGURE 19. Vasco da Gama shown delivering the letter of King Manuel of Portugal to the samuthiri of Calicut. (Courtesy Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, www.loc.gov/pictures/item/92513908.)
The samuthiri and his advisers denied him exclusive rights and demanded that the Portuguese pay custom fees for trading in his kingdom. He then kidnapped da Gama and three other men and sent a notice to his brother Paulo that they would not be released until a ransom was paid. Paulo loaded up a dory with all of the most valuable goods from Europe still on the ships—other than statues of the Virgin and crosses—and paid the ransom. Frustrated and annoyed, Vasco da Gama instructed some of his men to remain in Calicut as the main conduits to their hosts on the Malabar Coast in case the samuthiri became more open to trade negotiations over the following weeks. Da Gama then took off with what he hoped were just enough exotic goods to be able to justify his long and expensive trip to King Manuel. Just before departing from Calicut, he kidnapped a few locals just to show his belligerence. When he reached Portugal, he displayed enough black pepper and hyperbole to be declared a hero.
Portugal’s Fourth Armada to India in 1502 was prompted by a report that in the intervening years, a few of the trusted colleagues that da Gama had left in Calicut had been massacred by Muslim traders. The command post of the new armada was originally offered to Pedro Álvarez Cabral, the Portuguese discoverer of Brazil and leader of the second and third armadas to India. But just a few days before the armada departed, Cabral was replaced by da Gama, whom Manuel I titled Admiral of the Seas of Arabia, Persia, India, and all the Orient. He first put in at Cochin to gain support for his cause and then arrived in Calicut with sixteen heavily armed ships. He demanded that the samuthiri expel all Arab Muslim traders from the city and hoped that the same might be done in other ports along the Malabar Coast. When his request was denied, he bombarded the city until the ruler surrendered. Later, Portugal was given exclusive trading rights to all spices coming into ports of the Malabar Coast. For da Gama, this was the crowning moment of his personal crusade: to break the back of Islam by usurping its role in the spice trade. It also set the stage for the more disturbing elements of the next five centuries of globalization, in which economic, spiritual, and military imperialism went hand in hand.
After his arrival in Calicut, da Gama exacted revenge for the earlier deaths of his colleagues by capturing an unarmed Arab ship, the Mīrī, which was traveling between Calicut and Cochin. It was filled with nearly three hundred Muslims, including at least ten of the wealthiest spice traders from Calicut, all of whom were returning from the hajj. The group’s leader, Jauhar al-Faqih, was not only a prominent spice merchant but also the diplomatic counsel to Calicut for the sultan of Mecca. He tried to negotiate with da Gama, offering him a wealth of spices and other treasures, if the Portuguese would spare his family and friends. But da Gama ordered his men to rob them of all of their gold, kidnap all of the children, and then set the ship on fire. After a five-day struggle, da Gama watched as nearly 250 passengers—the ones who had not already jumped overboard—were killed.
On witnessing this incident, a Portuguese companion of da Gama’s, Gaspar Correia, called it an act of unequaled cruelty in the history of his people.17 Centuries later, an Indian historian of the incident, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, suggested that it was a turning point in the history of maritime trade, for it introduced the systematic use of violence at sea. Subrahmanyam controversially claims that such methodical genocide was first executed at the hands of Portuguese Christians on an unsanctioned crusade to devastate the Islamic world.18
Given the title of viceroy by John III, Manuel I’s son and successor, da Gama set out on his third voyage to India in 1424. Within a few months of his arrival, he died in Cochin, after having squirmed for days with inexplicable pain. It is said that he suffered to the end from hard boils festering at the base of his neck, ones that propelled him into “great fits of irritation, [and] with the heavy burdens that he felt on account of the many things which he had done and had yet to do, [the pain] of his illness was doubled.”19
Da Gama continued to travel without much rest for centuries. He was first buried in silk garments in a humble Franciscan church in Cochin, where Gaspar Correia reported that a couple of Portuguese mercenaries grieved for having lost “so honored a father, and [for having to lay him to rest] in such a desert of a place, of all the places in the entire kingdom of Portugal.”20 In 1538, his bones were repatriated to a convent in Vidigueira, Portugal, where the ti
tle of count had been bestowed on him in 1419. In 1880, they were supposedly disinterred and reburied at the Jerónimos Monastery in the Belém harbor, on the edge of Lisbon. But it was discovered some years later that the wrong set of bones had been transported. Not long after that accident was revealed, officials had what they hoped were da Gama’s true bones moved to the monastery and then held a discreet celebration to commemorate the transition.21
Today, the tomb of Vasco da Gama sits alongside those of kings in the monastery on the Lisbon waterfront. The explorer rests within spitting distance of the tomb of his benefactor, Manuel I.
During my only week-long visit to Lisbon, the first thing I did after putting my bags down in my hotel room was begin the slow walk down from the coastal hills to the shores of the Tagus River where it widens into a bay. There, in the parish of Belém, the Jerónimos Monastery sits a few hundred yards from the waterfront.
As I walked into the monastery’s cathedral and read on a multilingual sign that Manuel I had built the complex to celebrate Portugal’s role in what we now call the Age of Discovery, my head began to reel. Da Gama’s tomb, which stands just inside the entrance, was surrounded by a spiral of tourists waiting to get close to it. When I finally stood before the gilded tomb, I tried once more to read about the man who is known as the first count of Vidigueira, an admiral and viceroy of India, and an esteemed member of the Order of Christ. As the crowd pressed in behind me, I began to feel claustrophobic, and I quickly turned and left the cathedral without seeing the tombs of the other famous men interred there.
Each day I was in Lisbon, I would walk the streets seeking neighborhood spice markets, but had little luck finding anything of significance. But the fourth day, while walking along the waterfront, I met a resident of Lisbon whom I asked to direct me to a typical outdoor marketplace where I might see some fresh produce and spices. He looked at me quizzically and rather than recommending that I visit the Mercado da Ribeira, a 125-year-old indoor fish, cheese, produce, herb, flower and meat market of considerable proportions but of little historic significance, he directed me to the oldest extant marketplace in Lisbon, back up in the hills overlooking the Tagus.
Cumin, Camels, and Caravans Page 30