Splendid Exchange, A

by Bernstein, William L

  Da Gama arrived in Calicut in the foulest of moods, and bombarded the port even more ferociously than had Cabral. On November 1, he hanged dozens of Muslim hostages from the masts, cut them down, and

  had the heads, hands, and feet of the hanged men cut off, and put on a boat with a letter, in which he said that if those men, though they were not the same as those responsible for the death of the Portuguese [at the trading post two years before] . . . had received that punishment . . . the authors of that treachery would await a manner of death that was even more cruel.49

  This was no isolated incident. The Portuguese often boasted of hanging the bodies from pillaged dhows for target practice, then sending the bits to the local ruler, suggesting that he use them in a curry.50 Their brutality was exceptional even for the times, intensified by fundamentalist Catholic temperament of the era. Medieval Christians embraced the damnation of nonbelievers as an axiom of faith; if Jews, Muslims, and Hindus were condemned to roast eternally in the afterlife, they could not expect much sympathy in the here and now.

  As a result of these largely unprovoked Portuguese atrocities, da Gama and the zamorin were now engaged in all-out war. In January 1503, the Hindu ruler lured the captain-major from the safety of Cochin into an ambush in Calicut. This was followed by several direct attacks by swift Indian vessels; all were repulsed.

  As winter wore on and the monsoonal clock ticked ever louder, the Portuguese finally departed. This time, they left behind permanent posts at Cannanore and Cochin along with several ships to serve as a sort of permanent Indian Ocean fleet. The departing vessels straggled home with an enormous quantity of spices—by one estimate, about seventeen hundred tons of pepper, and an additional four hundred tons of cinnamon, cloves, mace, and nutmeg loaded in Cochin following the Mîrî massacre. The captain-major himself was reputed to have carried about forty thousand ducats’ worth of the fragrant cargo back up the Tagus.51

  In the five years following da Gama’s appearance in East Africa and India in 1498, the Portuguese not only had established a fabulously profitable trade but also had made enemies in virtually every port along the way. Even if they had exerted a lighter touch, they still would have earned the enmity of displaced Muslim merchants. The new spice route, so long, tenuous, and vulnerable, had to be protected and supported by a chain of fortified Portuguese outposts, whose cultural and architectural ghosts are still visible today, strung all the way from the Azores to Macao.

  The building of this empire began quickly. In 1505, Francisco de Almeida assumed his duties as the first viceroy of India. His first stop was Kilwa (on what is now the coast of Tanzania), which he assaulted and subdued, leaving behind a puppet Arab sultan and a large garrison. Next, he sacked Mombasa, and while he sailed off to India, the garrison troops captured the island of Mozambique. Within a few months, Portugal was in command of East Africa’s most important ports. These bases and trading posts also served as a source of African gold to trade for Indian spices. The gold, in turn, was bought with Gujarati textiles. There was nothing new about this triangular commerce in textiles, gold, and spices; Arab and Asian merchants had been plying the same trade for centuries. But for Europeans, it also held the advantage of adding a few profitable extra Indian Ocean legs to their missions and avoided the treacherous journey around the Cape.

  Once in India, Almeida began to systematically subdue the Malabar ports. At first, the two great Muslim powers—the Mamluk Egyptians and the Muslim rulers of Gujarat—resisted. In 1508, they deployed a combined taskforce at the port of Chaul, south of modern day Bombay, where they unleashed a devastating ambush against Portuguese vessels in which Almeida’s son was killed. The viceroy avenged his death a year later by destroying the combined Muslim fleet at Diu (just north of modern Bombay), thus eliminating the one threat to European naval supremacy in the Indian Ocean. Demonstrating once again that ducats trumped devotion, Venice backed the Muslim expedition against their brothers in Christ by providing the Gujarati-Mamluk navy with military advisers.

  In addition to the East African and Indian campaigns, a third Portuguese offensive was commanded by a naval officer whose name, more than any other, symbolized European conquest in the Indian Ocean: Afonso de Albuquerque. In rapid succession, this legendary commander took control of several Somali ports and two islands pivotal to trade—Socotra, the multicultural gateway to the Red Sea, and Hormuz, guard dog of the Persian Gulf. Not for the last time would the latter, a parched scrap best known for its sand, stone, salt, and sulfur, vex a Western power. When the capable Albuquerque was called away to India to become viceroy, the inhabitants of Hormuz threw the Portuguese out and forced him to recapture it several years later.

  The Portuguese enterprise in the Indian Ocean did not run smoothly. When Albuquerque arrived in India in 1508, Almeida refused to recognize his commission and clapped him in irons for several months before another fleet arrived from Portugal with documents confirming his appointment. Wealthy, powerful, and hostile Calicut resisted conquest, and Cochin, already in Portuguese hands, proved inadequate as a harbor. Albuquerque’s eye finally settled on the island of Goa, which he subdued in 1510; there, he established the headquarters of the Estado da Índia, the name given to the entirety of the Portuguese colonial empire in Asia and Africa.

  Next, Aden had to be secured. It proved to be a thorn in Albuquerque’s side, and ultimately, a stake through the Estado’s heart. Built on top of an extinct volcano in a coastal cordillera, the walled city commanded the “Gate of Sorrows,” Bab el Mandeb, through which passed most of the Asian trade goods bound to Europe. From Abyssinia, across the strait, came slaves, ivory, coffee, and the city’s food; through a gap in the mountains to the east came incense and the finest Arabian horses. Northbound cargoes sailed in large, deep draft vessels that called at Jeddah, halfway up the Red Sea. There, the huge cargoes of pepper, cloves, nutmeg, fine Gujarati cottons, Chinese silks and porcelains, and other exotic goods were transferred to smaller ships capable of negotiating the shallows and reefs of the sea’s northern half and the Gulf of Suez.52

  Even though the Portuguese controlled many of the Indian spice centers and Hormuz, they did not command Aden. Thus, supple Muslim and Hindu mariners could easily bypass the Iberian strongholds and sail up the unguarded Red Sea to Egypt: no Aden, no Portuguese spice monopoly.

  Albuquerque never conquered it. Initially, he calculated that possession of the island of Socotra was adequate to blockade Bab el Mandeb, but it proved too distant from the strait for the purpose. He abandoned Socotra just a few years after its capture, and in 1513 finally mounted a direct assault on Aden itself. It failed miserably. He then sailed up the Red Sea before being forced by adverse winds to return to his viceregal duties in India. This unsuccessful foray into the Red Sea had been the first significant Western military presence in that vital waterway since the crusaders’ brief mission from the north three centuries before in 1183 by Reginald of Châtillon. It would also be the last for more than three centuries thereafter.

  Still, the viceroy dreamed of commanding Bab el Mandeb, if not at Aden, then from the island of Massawa on the Abyssinian side of the strait. Like Aden, and like every other strategic port in this part of the world, Massawa had long been in Muslim hands; it was captured from the Christian Abyssinians in the eighth century. If only he could seize Massawa, Albuquerque wrote to the king of Portugal in 1515, the island could be kept supplied, armed, and out of Muslim hands with the help of Prester John, who reigned nearby:

  We have no unsettled question left in India now but that of Aden and the Red Sea. May it please Our Lord that we should fix ourselves at Massawa—the port of Prester John.53

  Albuquerque died three months after he wrote this letter. Having failed to capture Aden, the Portuguese settled for second best. They deployed from India a naval blockade of Bab el Mandeb with each winter monsoon, timed to the commercial and hajj traffic. But because of the great distance, the limited number of warships at their disposal, and the enormous expe
nse of sending them, this seaborne embargo never succeeded.

  The window of opportunity for a Portuguese spice monopoly finally closed in 1538, when the Ottomans annexed Aden. Historians have suggested that it was more profitable for Portuguese captains and colonial officials to turn a blind eye to Asian traders transiting the strait than exert total control. Command of a Portuguese fort at Aden, in contrast, would have been a scorching, dangerous, and thankless billet.54

  Piri Reis, the great Ottoman admiral, was Albuquerque’s Muslim counterpart. Unfortunately for the Portuguese, his career lasted far longer; during the decades of his service to the sultan, he ranged over the Red Sea, Indian Ocean, and Persian Gulf, harassing, outwitting, and outflanking his European rivals. He was publicly beheaded at age ninety by the Ottoman governor of Basra after refusing to support hostilities against the Portuguese in the northern Persian Gulf.

  The Ottoman admirals who followed Reis continued his tradition, raiding and occasionally conquering Portuguese bases from East Africa through South Arabia and Oman, and even on the Malabar Coast. On one occasion, a lone Turkish warship virtually ejected the Portuguese upstarts from their fortresses and trading posts in the Swahili-speaking ports of East Africa.55 Neither the Iberians nor even the far more powerful Ottomans could control the maritime traffic between Asia and Europe. Soon enough, the Portuguese would find themselves challenged by new competitors.

  In 1505, two young Portuguese cousins and minor aristocrats, Fernão de Magalhães and Francisco Serrão, decided to seek their fortunes in India and shipped out among the thousands of troops and sailors in Almeida’s fleet. Their subsequent adventures, while fantastic to the modern ear, were typical of the era. Throughout their lives, they drew on each other’s ideas and experiences. Eventually, they would alter the course of history.

  Over the next several years, Magalhães fought in countless battles and was wounded in several, including the naval Battle of Cannanore in 1506, where Almeida succeeded in repelling an offensive by a combined fleet of the zamorin and the Mamluk sultan. On that occasion, Magalhães was invalided back home, but having tasted adventure and opportunity in the Orient, he found Portugal’s atmosphere impoverished and stifling. Both he and Serrão returned to sea with the next India fleet.

  Their expedition this time was much smaller than the fleet of 1505. That, however, did not lessen its importance, for the Portuguese king had charged its leader, Lopez de Sequeria, with no less than the establishment of trade with Malacca. What Aden was to the western end of the Indian Ocean, controlling the stream of goods to Europe, Egypt, and Turkey, Malacca was to the ocean’s eastern end—the narrow funnel through which the bounty of the Spice Islands and the luxury products of China and Japan flowed. In April 1509, the flotilla arrived in Cochin, resupplied and repaired its ships, and on August 19 ventured east on the summer monsoon into waters unknown to European mariners. It arrived in Malacca just twenty-three days later, on September 11.

  On that day, Portuguese and Asians alike must have experienced an uneasy mixture of amazement, anticipation, curiosity, and dread. Even the wonders of India could not have prepared the Europeans for the sparkling tropical beauty, the wealth, the massive fleets of trading ships, the thousands of merchants and shops, and the cultural diversity expressed in dozens of tongues in one of the greatest entrepôts of the era. To say nothing of the knowledge that all of it might soon be theirs, and of the terrible cost that might be paid for it. Malacca’s aristocracy and merchant community, by the same token, had so far seen only a few Europeans—enough, however, to have heard about Portuguese brutality.

  On the surface, all was serene and cordial. The delight of the Portuguese sailors who, after months of grim existence aboard ship and in the repair yard, now reveled in the succulent food, sweet drink, and exotic women of the world’s most exciting port city, can only be imagined. Yet Garcia de Sousa, the captain of one of the five Portuguese ships bobbing lazily in the harbor, worried about the hundreds of smiling Malaccans clambering aboard the vessels from their small catamarans and bearing local goods for sale. Smelling an ambush, he sent his most experienced and reliable sailor, Magalhães, to the command vessel to warn Sequeria. When he got to Sequeria’s ship, he found the captain playing chess and observed that behind each of the players was a native with a curved Malay knife—the deadly kris. He whispered a quiet warning to Sequeria, who in turn sent an observer aloft.

  At that very moment, the attack signal, a puff of smoke, wafted up from the royal palace. The fleet was saved, but just barely; Sequeria, Magalhães, and the other Portuguese dispatched the Malays in the stateroom before they could effectively deploy their krises, threw the natives on deck overboard, and gunned down the approaching catamarans.

  The crewmen lured onshore by Malacca’s tropical delights were not so fortunate. Many ran, but to no avail, since the Malays had already stolen their boats. Only one of the Portuguese ashore that day survived: Francisco Serrão. Surrounded by natives intent on his imminent demise, he was plucked off the beach by his cousin Magalhães, who had come to his rescue in a rowboat. Soon after, the expedition’s survivors sailed off in haste.

  Heretofore, Magalhães had seen plenty of action and acquitted himself well, but his exploits did not qualify as exceptional for a simple soldier of the Estado da Índia. The events at Malacca brought him commendation and promotion. In 1510, Albuquerque himself commissioned Magalhães as an officer, and he accompanied the viceroy’s fleet, which took Malacca the next year and thus captured a prize as rich as Constantinople or Venice. With their Western obsession with maritime choke points, the Portuguese had instinctively grasped by the throat the rich trade of China, Japan, and, of course, the Spice Islands, spread throughout the larger Moluccan chain, about 1,800 miles due east of Malacca.

  At this moment of supreme triumph, the two cousins went their separate ways. Magalhães had had enough. Wealthy from his share of the spices and other booty taken at Malacca; his reputation ensured, or so he thought; and still alive, he cashed in his chips and returned home in the company of a Malay slave purchased in Malacca, of whom we shall hear more later. Serrão, on the other hand, decided to spin fortune’s wheel one more time and took command of a ship in a three-vessel detachment from Albuquerque’s fleet, led by António de Abreu and bound for the Spice Islands.

  Abreu, Serrão, and their crews could hardly believe their great good luck. At Banda and Amboina they filled their holds to bursting with cloves, mace, and nutmeg bought for bracelets, bells, and other trinkets, and quickly set sail for the return journey. But Abreu had been greedy. He so overloaded the ships that one of them, the vessel commanded by Serrão, broke apart and was stranded on a reef.56 Valiantly, Serrão led the survivors off and made it back to Amboina. Military procedure dictated that he return to Malacca with all deliberate speed and place himself at the disposal of the crown. But by this point, he, like his cousin, had reached his limit. He had risked his skin for the greater glory of the king once too often; the contrast between the rigors of service to the crown and Amboina’s tropical landscape and friendly inhabitants was just too much for his tired flesh to bear. Never again to see Portugal, he went native, and found employment as military adviser to the king of Ternate and happiness with a young wife and a household full of children and slaves.

  Serrão did not entirely cut his ties with home. First and foremost, he continued to write to his cousin, to whom he owed his life. Centuries before the Treaty of Berne and the establishment of the Universal Postal Union, Serrão’s letters somehow found their way back to Europe from a land below the wind and beyond Western consciousness. Besides entreating his beloved cousin to return east to join him in his earthly paradise, he also supplied detailed, accurate navigational and commercial data. Before long, Magalhães knew more about the Spice Islands than almost any other European, and he formulated a plan to exploit his knowledge. In his last letter to his cousin Serrão, he promised to rejoin him, “if not by Portugal, by another way.”57


  When Magalhães returned to Lisbon in 1512, he found himself a stranger in his own home, an anonymous, unsung veteran of the colonial wars, in a city bursting at the seams with the trappings of the spice trade’s fabulous wealth. Bored and uneasy as a low-level hanger-on at court, he shipped out with the army to Morocco, where he saw more action and received one more serious wound, this time a knee laceration that disabled him for combat and left him with a permanent limp. Accused of theft as a quartermaster and facing a court-martial, he slipped away to Lisbon to argue his case before the king, Dom Manuel, who refused him an audience and ordered him to return to Morocco for trial. He complied, stood trial, and was cleared.

  Like any self-respecting conquistador of the age, he trembled before no man, not even his monarch. Rather than keep his mouth shut and collect his pension, this loyal subject, who had repeatedly confronted the cruel demons of the era for king and country, yet again demanded an audience from Dom Manuel. This time, it was granted. The confrontation probably took place in the same chamber where Dom Manuel’s cousin, João II, turned down Christopher Columbus. It would have the same costly outcome for Portugal.

  Unlike Columbus, Magalhães had in mind no grand scheme of discovery or conquest. He merely wanted a bump in his pitiful pension and an elevation in his standing at court above the callow youths who now lorded it over him. Magalhães also asked for the only post commensurate with his bravery, his dedication to the crown, his ability, and his long experience: command of a vessel bound for India.

  Coldly refused on all three accounts, a stunned Magalhães asked Manuel: since Portugal no longer needed his services, was he free to find employment elsewhere? Manuel, who wished only to be rid of this brash, demanding upstart, informed him that where he wound up was of little consequence to Portugal.

  Magalhães coolly remained at court for more than a year, biding his time and diligently scouring the royal library for useful information from the charts and logs of Portugal’s most recent expeditions to Asia and Brazil. He was particularly interested in the South American coast.