Splendid Exchange, A

by Bernstein, William L

  Earlier, in 1488, on his way to the Cape, Diaz had followed the time-honored coastwise route pioneered by the first Portuguese expeditions sent by Henrique. South of the equator, as southerly trade winds increasingly blew against his ships, progress became ever more difficult. Sometime during the eight-year hiatus between his return in 1489 and da Gama’s departure in 1497, a mariner unknown to history found the solution to this problem. As da Gama’s ships passed the coast of what is now Sierra Leone, they turned right, departed the coast for the open Atlantic, and headed almost due west for several hundred miles. Then, the ships gradually executed a counterclockwise semicircle thousands of miles wide, enabling them to tack across the wind blowing directly on their port sides. This slowly brought them back to the Cape. So generous was the arc that da Gama’s fleet came within several hundred miles of Brazil. Even so, he did not swing wide enough to achieve his objective of bypassing the treacherous Cape of Good Hope to the south, instead striking Africa’s southwest coast at Saint Helena Bay.

  Da Gama’s small fleet had been out of sight of land an astounding ninety-five days; by contrast, Columbus’s transit during his first voyage from the Canaries to the Bahamas took thirty-six. So great was da Gama’s navigational skill that his measured latitudes were never off by more than two degrees. Columbus, by contrast, was notorious for his navigational inaccuracy, placing, for example, Cuba at forty-two degrees north latitude —that is, even with Boston.31

  Not long after reaching the southern African coast, da Gama’s crews suffered a strange illness, “their feet and hands swelling, and their gums growing over their teeth, so that they could not eat.”32 The caravel, by making possible journeys of up to several months out of sight of land, allowed sailors’ bodies to deplete their stores of vitamin C, causing scurvy, the great killer of European mariners. On the outbound leg of the journey, the timely arrival of da Gama’s crew in prosperous East African ports apparently spared them the brunt of the disease. They would not be so lucky on the way home.

  Da Gama’s First Voyage, 1497–1499

  Although da Gama’s nautical preparation was excellent, the same cannot be said for his commercial planning. In order to apprise native traders of the goods they sought, the Portuguese did carry with them samples of gold, spices, and ivory, but they failed to also bring along adequate goods to barter for these desired items. Whether this was the result of ignorance, arrogance, or both, we shall never know.

  At first, da Gama’s trading operations in southern Africa went reasonably well; the natives seemed happy to exchange local goods for small quantities of European linen, which they prized greatly. However, as the Europeans proceeded north and began to encounter the Muslim-dominated Indian Ocean trade emporium, market conditions changed drastically. The traders became lighter-skinned, and they spoke Arabic. On the island of Mozambique, the Portuguese encountered a Muslim sheikh, to whom they offered

  hats, (silk garments), corals, and many other articles. He was, however, so proud that he treated all we gave him with contempt, and asked for scarlet cloth, of which we had none. We gave him, however, all of the things we had. One day the captain-major [da Gama] invited him to a repast, when there was an abundance of figs and confits, and begged him for two pilots to go with us.33

  For the first time, and not the last, scraggly Europeans bearing inferior goods in puny ships with limited navigational expertise had failed to impress rulers grown rich and jaded on the well-oiled machinery of the Muslim Indian Ocean trade. Not only did Asian goods awe the European visitors; so did their maritime technology. As an anonymous crew member remarked:

  The vessels of this country are of good size and decked. There are no nails, and the planks are held together by cords. . . . The sails are made of palm matting. Their mariners have Genoese needles [magnetic compasses] by which they steer, quadrants, and navigating charts.34

  The levers of this commercial machine were manipulated by the Muslim trade diaspora—merchants from Persia. For example, in Mombasa (in modern-day Kenya), the Portuguese observed: “There were colonies of both Moors and Christians in this city . . . these latter lived apart under their own lords.”35 At first, both the local sultans and the trade communities showed generous hospitality to the initially cautious and courteous Portuguese, from whom profitable commerce was expected. Native traders soon tumbled to the Portuguese obsession with Prester John and learned to indulge it—the great Christian ruler seemed always to be just over the horizon, beyond the next kingdom, or in the next port. Da Gama’s men, for their part, assumed that anyone who was not visibly Muslim must be a Christian:

  These Indians are tawny men; they wear but little clothing and have long beards and long hair, which they braid. They told us that they ate no beef. . . . On the day on which the captain-major went up to the town in the boats, these Christian Indians fired off many bombards from their vessels, and when they saw [da Gama] pass they raised their hands and shouted lustily, Christ! Christ!36

  Obviously, da Gama’s men had mistaken as Christians Hindu Indian traders, who were more likely than not shouting the name “Krishna” than that of the Son of God. This dark religious comedy would continue in India, which the Portuguese at first assumed to be a largely Christian nation with exotic churches (Hindu temples) adorned with multiple-limbed and scantily clad versions of the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit, the Virgin, and the saints.

  Besides the wide south Atlantic arc, da Gama’s other “innovation” was his reliance on Indian Ocean pilots. None other than Ibn Majid, the legendary Arab pilot and author of the most authoritative medieval text on Indian Ocean navigation, is said to have guided da Gama to India, and he is to this day cursed in the Islamic world for this act of unintended treachery. Although the story of how the generous and open Majid was ill-used by the perfidious Portuguese makes for a delicious morsel of anti-imperialist propaganda, Majid cannot possibly have been the guilty pilot. Da Gama’s pilot, hired or abducted at Malindi (about sixty miles north of Mombasa), was a Gujarati who was taken back to Portugal; Majid, an Omani, made no mention of visiting Portugal in his extensive memoirs.37

  Whatever da Gama’s many virtues, he was not known for having a sweet or gentle nature; he ordered his crew to rob, kidnap, and murder at the slightest provocation. The two pilots taken on in Mozambique, who had been flogged for alleged disloyalty, escaped at the first opportunity in Mombasa. By the time the expedition reached its last port of call in Africa, Malindi, news of the Portuguese reputation for blood thirst preceded them, and no local vessels ventured out to do business. This posed a problem, since by that point they were short on supplies and in desperate need of a guide to India. At Malindi, necessity forced da Gama to behave tolerably well, going so far as releasing Muslim hostages taken in Mombasa and Mozambique as a sign of goodwill.

  On April 24, 1498, resupplied and in the company of a Gujarati pilot provided by the sultan of Malindi, da Gama’s three tiny ships left that port city and headed northeast into blue water on the first breaths of the summer monsoon. Five days later, they recrossed the equator and sighted the old friend of the European mariner, the north star, and on May 18, they beheld the mountains of the Malabar Coast. In only twenty-three days, they had flown across 2,800 miles of open ocean, missing their target, Calicut, by just seven miles. The world’s most brutal trading nation had “discovered” the secrets of the monsoon; the wolf had entered the sheepfold, and world commerce would never be the same.

  The Portuguese sought not a trading empire, but rather a protection racket that coerced local merchants into selling spices and other goods at below market rates and excluded others, particularly Muslims, from honest commerce. The dividing line between protection and piracy is a fine one indeed, and the Portuguese crossed it routinely. During this first voyage to India, da Gama developed a well-rehearsed routine. The flotilla waited until boats came to greet it; its crew then grabbed hostages. The captains of the three ships—da Gama, his brother Paulo, and Nicolau Coelho—remained on board wh
enever possible, and force was liberally used as part of subsequent “trade negotiations.”38

  Both in Africa and in India, da Gama employed condemned men called degradados from Portugal’s jails, selected for their language abilities, to be the first ashore in strange lands. The degradado chosen for this honor at Calicut was João Nunez, a recently converted Jew who spoke some Arabic. He was met by Tunisians speaking both Spanish and Italian and was asked, “May the devil take thee! What brought you hither?” to which Nunez responded, “We come in search of Christians and of spices.”39

  As in East Africa, the Indians were less than awed by the quality of European trade goods. In preparation for a meeting with Calicut’s Hindu ruler, the zamorin, da Gama sent to him “twelve pieces of [striped cloth], four scarlet hoods, six hats, four strings of coral, a case containing six hand-wash basins, a case of sugar, two casks of oil, and two of honey.” Such gifts would likely not have impressed even the lowliest geniza merchant, let alone the ruler of the richest entrepôt in India. The zamorin’s retainers, on seeing these gifts, howled with derision and informed da Gama’s messengers that, “It was not a thing to offer the king, that the poorest merchant from Mecca, or any other part of India, gave more, and that if he wanted to make a present, it should be in gold.”40

  The zamorin was not the only inhabitant of Calicut unhappy with da Gama. The city’s powerful Muslim merchants worried, justifiably, that the appearance of European Christians did not bode well for their own future welfare, and they must certainly have advised the zamorin to be circumspect: he kept the captain-major waiting an entire day.

  Things went from bad to worse. The captain-major, his offerings disparaged, brought nothing, and when the zamorin upbraided him for coming empty-handed, da Gama answered that his purpose was discovery, not trade. The zamorin then acidly asked “What it was he had come to discover: stones or men? If he had come to discover men, as he said, why had he brought nothing?”41

  If da Gama’s commercial preparation was inadequate, his understanding of Indian culture and customs was atrocious. The pitiful trade goods, the overweening arrogance, and the paranoia of the Portuguese combined to produce a downward spiral of hostage-taking and deteriorating relations with the Muslim merchants, who had probably already learned of the captain-major’s demands for their expulsion from the city. The merchants spat on the ground exclaiming “Portugal! Portugal” each time one of da Gama’s men passed by.

  Remarkably, almost a decade before, Pero da Covilhã, in the course of his epic journey, had already gathered the commercial and diplomatic wisdom that da Gama so sadly lacked. Such, however, was the state of communication in the medieval era that da Gama, like Diaz, apparently never received Covilhã’s priceless intelligence.

  Despite these strained circumstances, commercial transactions between Indian merchants and da Gama’s crews eventually took place. Even if the Muslim traders correctly perceived the religiously inspired hatred and mortal danger borne by the new arrivals, and even if the zamorin was unimpressed with the Westerners’ gifts, his Hindu subjects were more than happy to exchange da Gama’s European textiles for spices. Although the Portuguese were dismayed by the low prices fetched by their finest linen shirts—one-tenth, in terms of gold and silver, what they would command in Lisbon—they were delighted that they could purchase spices even more cheaply.

  Although the Hindu zamorin was initially agreeable about trading with the Europeans, he rapidly tired of the captain-major’s duplicity. He finally allowed the three ships, which had slowly loaded their holds with pepper and other treasures in the three months they had been in port (and had failed to pay the usual customs duties), to weigh anchor and depart Calicut on August 29, 1498.42

  The rigors of da Gama’s first voyage to the Indies were typical. Of the approximately 170 men who set out from Lisbon, less than half returned. The majority of the deaths were due to scurvy on the return leg across the Indian Ocean,43 when the disease attacked with far greater fury than on the outbound journey, killing and sickening so many that one of the three ships had to be abandoned merely to muster enough able-bodied seamen to control the other two. Paulo da Gama succumbed to the disease the day after arriving in the Azores, the last stop before reaching Lisbon in September 1499. No matter. Da Gama’s crews had loaded enough pepper, cinnamon, and cloves in Calicut to pay the expedition’s cost sixty times over, and when the sorry remains of the expedition limped into Lisbon, no one questioned the awful human toll.44

  The Portuguese crown quickly followed up on this momentous navigational and commercial accomplishment. Less than six months later, in March 1500, Pedro Alvares Cabral departed with thirteen ships and approximately 1,500 men. He made an even more effective “wide sweep” of the Atlantic, passing safely well to the south of the feared Cape and in the process becoming the first European to visit Brazil, which happily for Portugal lay on its side of the Tordesillas line.

  This set the pattern for most subsequent European expeditions to the Indies. They left in late winter so as to take maximum advantage of the south Atlantic trade winds, then caught the summer monsoon across the Indian Ocean to arrive in India in September, just six months after departing Lisbon. (In the words of one captain, “The last day of February is time enough, but the first day of March is late.”45) After spending the fall in India swapping cargoes and repairing sails and timbers, the Europeans could return on the winter monsoon. The late-winter departure from Europe proved not only more rapid but often more dangerous, as this schedule threw the expeditions into the teeth of southern hemisphere storms on the outbound leg. Four of Cabral’s vessels were lost in a south Atlantic tempest, and of the nine that survived it, only six reached India. Again, no matter. Huge were profits and cheap were lives; hundreds of souls were a small price to pay for the pepper, cinnamon, and cloves demanded by a covetous Europe.

  On arriving in India, Cabral stirred up the poisonous diplomatic brew concocted two years before by da Gama’s paranoia and brutality. In the interim between the two voyages, the old and proud zamorin, who had had a tempestuous but ultimately satisfactory commercial relationship with da Gama, had died and been replaced by his son. Like da Gama, Cabral demanded that the Portuguese receive priority over Muslim merchants. Initially, things went well; the Europeans captured a ship from a neighboring Indian kingdom carrying an elephant, which was given to the flattered zamorin, and the largest vessels were loaded with pepper and fine spices. Hearing that a Muslim ship had just been loaded with spices and was bound for Jeddah, Mecca’s port on the Red Sea, Cabral seized it, since in the eyes of the Portuguese, any commerce with the hated “Moors from Mecca” violated the “agreement” with the zamorin. This angered the city’s Muslims, who attacked the Portuguese trading post and killed fifty-four men.

  The Portuguese waited a day for word from the zamorin. When none came, they assumed the worst—that the zamorin was behind the massacre of the trading post—and captured about a dozen Indian ships, slaughtered their crews, and devastated the town with cannon fire for a full day. The Portuguese then decamped for Cochin, Calicut’s rival to the south. In Cochin, and in Cannanore, about forty miles to the north of Calicut, they loaded their smaller ships with more spices. Fearing a counterattack by the zamorin and betrayal by Cochin’s ruler, they departed in such haste that they abandoned their traders onshore, in spite of having significant reserves of silver and cargo space. On the way back to Lisbon, Cabral lost one more ship.46

  The crown was less than pleased with the commander, who had lost two-thirds of his vessels and blundered into a war with the new zamorin. The king could pardon these sins. Far more serious was his purchase of a large cargo of inferior-grade cinnamon. Better to give the next large India fleet to da Gama, who departed in 1502 with twenty-five ships.

  The three-year interlude between his first and second voyages had not made da Gama a kinder, gentler captain-major. He had, it seemed, an agenda that now ran far beyond mere commerce: in punishment for the trading post mas
sacre at Calicut of two years before, he planned to shut off all Muslim traffic between the Malabar Coast and the Red Sea. In early September 1502, seven months after departing Lisbon, his fleet took up station off Cannanore and waited.

  About three weeks later, on September 29, the fleet intercepted the hajj vessel Mîrî, carrying several hundred men, women, and children returning from Mecca. Over the next five days, da Gama’s crew slowly and deliberately stripped the ship of its cargo and its passengers of their possessions and listened with deaf ears as the pilgrims bargained for their lives with offers of far greater booty ashore.

  A crew member and chronicler on that voyage, Tomé Lopes, wrote that on October 3, 1502, after the looting had stopped, events occurred which “I will remember all the days of my life.”47 Da Gama ordered the ship set ablaze. The passengers, men and women alike, with little to lose, responded by attacking da Gama’s men with stones and their bare hands. The doomed Muslims next rammed one of the Portuguese vessels, preventing da Gama’s men from bombarding the Mîrî lest they hit their own ship, and a ferocious close-quarters combat ensued. All the while, Muslim women waved their jewelry and held their infants aloft in the hope that da Gama, observing the action through a porthole, might take pity. He did not. The only passengers spared were the children, who were removed and baptized, and, of course, the pilot.

  The young zamorin sued for peace, diplomatically suggesting that the carnage and plunder on the Mîrî more than made up for the attack on the Portuguese trading post; let bygones be bygones. This only further inflamed da Gama, who fulminated, “Since the beginning of the world, the Moors have been the enemies of the Christians, and the Christians the Moors, and they have always been at war with each other.”48