Splendid Exchange, A

by Bernstein, William L

  He also formed a partnership with a brilliant geographer and astronomer, Ruy Falerio, who instantly recognized Magalhães’s extraordinary skill set and repaired the one gap in it—his lack of navigational expertise. Which of the two men concocted the plan for the first successful circumnavigation of the globe remains a mystery, but somehow they deduced the presence of a “southern strait” at the extreme end of South America, at about forty degrees south latitude, which like the Cape of Good Hope led to the Indies, but from the opposite direction.

  Like Columbus’s underestimation of the earth’s circumference, Magalhães’s placement of this passage was overly optimistic; the straits that would be named for him and the cape below them lay a brutal thousand miles beyond a relatively balmy, calm forty degrees. Similar to Columbus’s miscalculation, this inaccuracy gave Magalhães the courage to proceed with his plan.58 Finally, like Columbus, Fernão Magalhães found support and encouragement in the court of Spain, where he had changed his name to a Castilian spelling and pronunciation: Fernando de Magallanes, or, as he is known in the English-speaking world, Ferdinand Magellan.

  This time around, the Spanish crown was easier to convince. Two decades before, the Treaty of Tordesillas had moved the demarcation line eight hundred miles to the west of the original papal line in order to protect Portuguese claims in Africa. Magellan told the Spanish that Portugal would now have to pay the piper; since the treaty bisected the globe, the dividing line in the eastern hemisphere had also moved eight hundred miles to the west, to what is now about 135 degrees east longitude. In Magellan’s considered opinion, this shifted the Spice Islands into the Spanish zone. Within a few months of his arrival in Spain in the fall of 1517, he had secured backing for his plan, and two years later his multinational crew launched into the Atlantic on the most astonishing, and nearly the most deadly, of all the voyages of discovery.

  Only thirty-one of the approximately 265 men—those who were not killed by the Filipinos, the Portuguese, or scurvy, or who did not desert—completed the circumnavigation. In one of history’s saddest coincidences, the two cousins were killed within several weeks and several hundred miles of each other: Magellan by Filipino spears on the beach at Mactan, and Serrão by poison at the hands of a local sultan after becoming embroiled in an ancient rivalry between the two main clove islands, Ternate and Tidore.

  The most remarkable tale of the circumnavigation concerns a slave, “Enrique of Malacca,” brought back to Lisbon by Magellan in 1512. Having served his master in the Atlantic and Pacific during the circumnavigation, he had been promised freedom on his master’s death. Angered when he was not manumitted after Magellan was killed, he escaped. Although his birthplace and subsequent history are unknown, he probably became the first man to circle the globe.

  Of the five vessels that began the circumnavigation, only two, manned, almost literally, by skeleton crews and guided by captured local pilots, finally reached Tidore. Their crews loaded the holds so full of cloves that the sultan (the same one who had poisoned Serrão), observing how low to the water the vessels were set, recommended against firing farewell salutes for fear the shock would rupture their hulls.

  Only one of these two vessels, the Victoria, completed the circumnavigation. Yet the twenty-six tons of cloves it had loaded in Tidore paid for the entire expedition.59 The king of Spain awarded the commander who guided the crippled ship back to Spain, Juan Sebastián de Elcano, a pension and a coat of arms of two cinnamon sticks, three nutmegs, and a dozen cloves.

  In the early sixteenth century, who controlled these tiny volcanic scraps was a matter of life and death to Spain and Portugal, and when the news reached Lisbon that Magellan had sailed on his mission, Dom Manuel feared that Portugal’s fabulously profitable lock on the spice trade was at risk. He panicked. Since Magellan’s route was a well-kept secret, and it was not even known whether the Spanish vessels were heading east or west, Manuel knew not where to send his ships. So he scattered them from Argentina to the Cape of Good Hope to Malacca in hopes of locating the Spanish fleet. The Portuguese eventually found just one of Magellan’s ships, the Trinidad, which, in need of more extensive repairs at Tidore than the Victoria, had missed the winter monsoon and was then forced to attempt a suicidal easterly return across the Pacific. On reaching the latitude of northern Japan, its shattered crew gave up and returned to the Moluccas, where they were captured and imprisoned by the Portuguese, who had arrived too late to catch the Victoria. Only four of the Trinidad’s original sailors eventually made it back to Spain.

  Manuel needn’t have worried. Although the Spanish did leave a small trading post on Tidore, the pilots on the Trinidad and Victoria had by that point probably realized that Magellan and Falerio’s original computation had been incorrect; the Spice Islands lay, regrettably, in the Portuguese zone. (So did the Philippines, an inconvenience that Philip II of Spain rectified in 1565 by invading the islands.) It would be another 250 years before longitude could be measured accurately enough to know for sure, and by that time, nutmeg, mace, and cloves had become so commonplace and cheap that it no longer mattered.

  The Spanish crown, on learning of the harrowing journey, realized that even the long, deadly, and expensive Cape route was a cake walk compared to circumnavigation. The Portuguese, who controlled the Cape route, thus held an insuperable advantage over the Spanish. In the end, diplomatic requirements and the high cost of sending ships to the Spice Islands put paid to the Spanish attempt at the spice trade. Charles V of Spain had just married the sister of the new Portuguese king, João III, and so needed to maintain friendly relations with Portugal. In addition, Spain’s military adventures kept it chronically in debt. Needing both cash and peace on its western border, in 1529 Spain sold its claims in the Spice Islands to Portugal for 350,000 ducats.60

  The Portuguese, though freed from Spanish competition, still had to face the Asian trading powers. Portugal, with its tiny population and limited resources, could not cope with the enormous task of policing the entire Indian Ocean. Even within the relatively small confines of the Spice Islands, there were too many spice-bearing trees, too many beaches, too many native catamarans, and too many corrupt Estado officials willing to turn a blind eye for a few gold coins or a few sacks of nutmeg. As a result, Portugal, hopelessly strapped for manpower, could manage just one dilapidated trading post in the Moluccas. Consequently, only about one-eighth of the cloves unloaded in Europe traveled in Portuguese bottoms.61 Cinnamon was even harder to monopolize, and pepper proved impossible, since the latter grew not only over the entire length of the Western Ghats, but in Sumatra as well.

  Portugal’s only realistic chance of stopping Muslim ships, their hulls packed tight with spices, from reaching Egypt, and ultimately Europe, was to blockade the Red Sea. This, as we’ve already seen, it could not do. During the first decades after Almeida and Albuquerque established their bases in the western Indian Ocean, the Portuguese did appear to impede traffic through Bab el Mandeb. Even so, Estado officials and naval officers were easily corrupted. As one Venetian diplomat observed, spices were

  allowed to pass by the Portuguese soldiers who govern . . . the Red Sea for their profit against the command of their King, for [the Portuguese soldiers] can make a living only in that region by selling cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, mace, ginger, pepper, and other drugs.62

  It was to be expected that Venice would charge its diplomats with keeping tabs on the Portuguese, who were, in the words of Tomé Pires, in the process of applying their cold and greedy hands to its long, slender throat, at Malacca and elsewhere. Venetian merchants had reacted with horror at the news of da Gama’s return to Portugal, and at first saw their worst fears confirmed: Venice’s spice trade did plummet, by perhaps as much as three-fourths, in the decades following 1498. The falloff was not, however, the result of a Portuguese blockade. Rather, large amounts of spices were now flowing around the Cape to Lisbon, then onward to Antwerp, the main Habsburg trading hub in an increasingly prosperous northern Europe. Whe
n da Gama left Lisbon on his first voyage in 1497, Europeans consumed less than two million pounds of pepper per year. By 1560, this amount had grown to between six and seven million pounds.63

  Perhaps even more detrimental to the Venetian spice trade than competition from the Cape route was the deterioration in relations between Venice and the ever-expanding Ottomans. During the first few decades of the sixteenth century, the Turks drove the swift Venetian galleys, which carried luxury goods throughout the western Mediterranean, off the high seas.64 Even so, only briefly during the first flush of Portuguese expansion immediately after 1500 did the flow of spices to Egypt completely dry up.65 Otherwise, Venetian merchants found that they could always find spices piled high and offered at fair prices in Cairo and Alexandria—if they could but get there.

  By the 1560s, Venice had reestablished trade with the Turks. With Bab el Mandeb, the Red Sea, and Egypt itself under the thumb of the Ottoman Empire, and with demand for luxury goods burgeoning in Europe, more pepper may have flowed through Venice than before da Gama opened the Cape route. Venice was not alone in mending fences in Constantinople; France and the German kingdoms were also on good terms with the Ottomans, and their ships soon began to muscle Venetian galleys aside.66

  Just as the Venetians worried about the Portuguese, the Portuguese fretted about the power of the Islamic trading network. Today, it is difficult to imagine that in the sixteenth century, Portugal’s greatest single rival in the Indian Ocean was the western Sumatran city-state of Aceh, now best known as the remote, underdeveloped victim of the tsunami of 2004. In the mid-1500s, however, it was a commercial powerhouse, the beneficiary of the seafaring tradition that had spread its Austronesian ancestors across most of the Indian and Pacific oceans. Aceh also had a head start from its thirteenth-century adoption of Islam, which appealed to Asian merchants eager to avoid dealing with the heathen Portuguese at Malacca. The rise of Aceh largely explains Portugal’s difficulties in controlling the Indian Ocean. Asian vessels avoided Malacca and Goa, as they would avoid any port ruled by a corrupt, grasping sultanate, and instead favored entrepôts offering the merchant an honest deal. In the mid-sixteenth century, Aceh filled the bill perfectly.67

  Aceh was influential throughout the Indian Ocean and beyond. At the eastern end of its trading range, it competed successfully with Portugal in the Spice Islands and terrorized Malacca with repeated deadly raids mounted from swift oared craft. At the western end, Aceh’s close relations with the Ottoman Empire froze the Portuguese with fear.

  During the medieval period, spies loitered around wharves and warehouses in the same way that agents cased missile and nuclear facilities during the Cold War. In 1546, two Portuguese agents stationed in Venice sent back word that 650,000 pounds of spices—enough to supply Europe for approximately a month and destined for Venice—had landed in Cairo. Much of this cargo came from Aceh, which each year exported west as much as seven million pounds of pepper—approximately equal to the entirety of European consumption. Even if some was bound for the Ottoman Empire, this suggests that Aceh, and thus Venice, may have controlled more of the Indian Ocean spice trade than Portugal.68

  Portuguese agents reported that “These Acehnese are those who most frequent this commerce and navigation,” and that because of them, spice markets everywhere were glutted and prices were falling. The Portuguese spies also noted that the Acehnese had sent ambassadors to the Ottoman sultan in Constantinople and requested expert gunsmiths in exchange for pearls, diamonds, and rubies. According to one Portuguese observer, the Acehnese sultan Ri’ayat Shah al-Kahhar “never turned over in his bed without thinking how he could encompass the destruction of Malacca.”69

  The Portuguese recognized that unless they disrupted the Aceh-Ottoman-Venice trading axis, their spice empire would wither. They laid grand plans to clear the Red Sea and to invade Aceh; for the latter task, they would need the cooperation of the Manila fleet of the hated Spaniards. All came to naught; the Portuguese simply did not have the manpower, the ships, or the money to retain control of the spice trade. One Portuguese observer noted that Javanese ships freely carried cloves, nutmeg, and mace through the Strait of Malacca to Aceh, where “we cannot stop them doing, as we have no fleet in those parts to prevent them.”70 Worse, an alternative route south of Sumatra, then north through the Sunda Strait (between Sumatra and Java) lay entirely beyond the reach of the Portuguese.

  As Portugal’s dominance of the spice trade gradually deteriorated during the sixteenth century, things were looking up for it, at least temporarily, farther east. Occasionally, the human urge to trade takes a backseat to war and racism. For centuries, trade between China and Japan had been stunted by the latter’s piracy and coastal raiding. Ming emperors forbade any commercial relations with the “dwarf empire”—Japan—drying up the export market for the silver from Japanese mines. With the loss of their export markets, Japanese silver miners saw prices, and their incomes, fall. Further, although the Japanese produced silk, they greatly preferred the Chinese product, which, again, because of the embargo, commanded spectacularly high prices in Japan.71 But if China and Japan could not do business with each other, each could at least do business with the Portuguese.

  And what a business it was! Almost immediately after Albuquerque conquered Malacca in 1511, the Portuguese began trading actively with China. After just a decade, they attempted to conquer Canton, but were fended off by small Ming coastal vessels. In 1557, they gained a toehold at Macao, which they would rule for almost half a millennium.

  Around the same time that the Estado da Índia established itself in Macao, Portuguese merchants also began trading in the southern Japanese island of Kyushu. The huge amount of silver carried from Japan into Macao harbor by one ship, captained by Vasco da Gama’s son Duarte, electrified the Portuguese trading community in China. One member recounted:

  Ten or twelve days ago a Great Ship from Japan arrived here, and she came so richly laden that now all the other Portuguese and ships which are in China intend to go to Japan, and they wish to winter here on the China coast so that they may be able to leave for Japan next May, which is the season for the monsoon for voyaging thither.72

  The Portuguese had hit a jackpot on a par with the spice trade, and in 1571 the Estado established permanent port facilities—run by Jesuits—at Nagasaki to exploit it. Initially, the crown awarded licenses to conduct voyages from India to both Japan and Macao as gifts to Portuguese officials or officers for meritorious service. Portugal quickly appreciated the potential of the Japan-China trade in silver and silk and strove to extract maximum advantage: it would license a limited number of ships (one per year at first, slowly increasing to several per year during the early seventeenth century) to ply this route. The licensee paid tens of thousands of cruzados (a cruzado being roughly the same as a ducat, or about $80 in modern value) for this privilege, and in return he would stuff his vessel to the gunwales with raw and finished silk in Macao and silver at Nagasaki. Local merchants at either end awaited this “great ship,” and both ports became wealthy from the expeditions. Returns from a single round-trip were estimated at two hundred thousand ducats—more than half of what Portugal had paid Spain to permanently relinquish its claims to all of the Spice Islands.

  Initially, the ships were about the same size as the typical merchantman of the period, usually a carrack of about five hundred tons. As the sixteenth century gave way to the seventeenth, they grew into behemoths of up to two thousand tons, the largest seagoing vessels of the era. Portuguese merchants, who accompanied the goods and actually accomplished the trade, presumably paid off the license-holding captain-major. An early Dutch visitor to Japan recorded this account of events following the arrival of a “great ship” at Nagasaki:

  The ship coming from Macau usually has about 200 or more merchants on board who go ashore at once, each one of them taking a house wherein to lodge with his servants and slaves. They take no heed of what they spend and nothing is too costly for them, and sometimes th
ey disburse in the seven or eight months that they stay in Nagasaki more than 250,000 or 300,000 [ounces of silver], through which the populace profit greatly. This is one of the reasons why they are still very friendly to them.73

  As occurred elsewhere in Asia, the Portuguese were eventually undone by an excess of religious zeal. The early Tokugawa shoguns, having come to power just after the establishment of the “great ship” trade, were none too pleased with the increasing conversions by the Jesuits who infiltrated Kyushu from Nagasaki. After the Christian-led Shimabara rebellion of 1637–1638, the Tokugawa threw the missionaries out. When a Portuguese delegation arrived from Macao to appeal the decision, its members were beheaded.74

  The “great ship” trade aside, the Portuguese could not effectively control the maritime commerce of the Indies. They were thus forced to protect, and at times even raid. Their protection racket was named after the cartaz, or pass, which Asian vessels were coerced into buying, and without which they were subject to seizure and worse.

  The Portuguese did not have the muscle to enforce even the cartaz system. The pass, which itself sold for a nominal price, merely served as a device to force Asian ships to call at Portuguese-controlled ports where customs duties were collected. For example, in 1540 a Gujarati ship was seized because the final destination in the Persian Gulf, as specified in its cartaz, was inconsistent with its position far out in the Indian Ocean. That the customs duties were low—about 6 percent of cargo value—was itself evidence of Portugal’s inability to control Indian Ocean shipping.75 Although Asian merchants grudgingly purchased cartazes along the Hormuz-Gujarat-Malabar-Malacca route, they quickly learned that even this was not necessary when they sailed directly between Aden and Aceh. This route, which could be spanned in a single monsoon, was too far south to be reached by Portuguese patrols.76