Unknown Seas: The Portuguese Captains and the Passage to India

by Ronald Watkins

  Following Mass the next day the two men met for an extended briefing. King John examined the ‘Indians’at some length, joined by a large contingent of locals who marvelled at them. When Columbus bragged about the intelligence of the men, the king summoned a quantity of dry beans and asked one of the natives to use them to draw a map of their lands. The man squatted down and with great presence of mind used the beans to depict his island and those surrounding it in detail, explaining himself in his own incomprehensible language. The king mixed the beans up and directed one of the others to reconstruct the picture, which he promptly did, adding still more lands.

  Whatever doubts King John had had until now, he could no longer conceal his chagrin at the extent of this new discovery, whether it was truly the gateway to India or not. Had he but listened to Columbus, they were lands that should have been his. In private, it is reported, the king struck his breast repeatedly in anger and cried out, as recounted in the stilted language of his chronicler, ‘O man of little comprehension! . . . Why did I let slip an enterprise of so great importance?’

  The next morning, as Columbus prepared to return to his ship, the king gave him a message for Ferdinand and Isabella, then bade him farewell. Columbus detoured to pay a brief courtesy call on the queen, Leonor, as she had asked to see him before he left. Her entourage was present for their meeting and the admiral’s description of his voyage and the discoveries. Among them was the queen’s younger brother Dom Manuel, the Duke of Beja, unaware he was destined to become king of Portugal within two years.

  The next day Columbus received word that King John was prepared to give his party all they needed to make the journey to Spain by land if he wished. Fearing this to be a ruse during which he and his men would be murdered and the affair dismissed as banditry, Columbus noted that word of his success had already been sent to Spain. He refused the offer and instead promptly returned to his ship, now restored and provisioned.5 At eight o’clock on the morning of 13 March the Niña set sail with the ebb tide and, graced by a fair wind, entered the still rolling open sea. Two days later Admiral Christopher Columbus sailed into the harbour at Saltes, from which he had departed eight months earlier, and took his place in history.

  Despite the absence of substantive proof, this unexpected development was disturbing to King John. He was especially concerned over the complexion of the ‘Indians’ with Columbus, which was not dark; nor was their hair curly like that of the African slaves in which the Portuguese dealt. They might very well be Asians. If what Columbus claimed was true, and despite what he had told the admiral, Spain might now hold exclusive rights to trade with Asia by sailing west. Even should the Portuguese succeed in reaching India by rounding the cape of Africa, it would, by treaty and papal bull, be a Spanish monopoly from which the Portuguese would be excluded.

  After due consideration, however, the king’s junta reached the conclusion that Columbus was simply wrong. He had discovered new lands in the Atlantic, just as the Portugese had, but he had not reached India. That prize still lay unclaimed.

  Columbus’s voyage was, however, a cautionary event. Since Dias’s return from the tip of Africa the Portuguese had yet to launch a fleet for the final push to India. It was apparent now that if the Portuguese delayed, the prize of the ages could well slip from their grasp. With this in mind and against the steady clock of his own looming death, John II made preparations for the final effort.

  Bordered by its historic enemy Spain, Portugal faces the Atlantic. Off the beaten path, it has lain since its founding in the early twelfth century in quiet, beautiful isolation. However, for a brief time in history it was the centre of the greatest explorations the world has ever seen. From those discoveries came to the Portuguese unimaginable wealth and a worldwide empire that stretched from the Chinese coast to Java, from there to Sri Lanka and Gôa, to Angola and Brazil. To this day Portuguese names dot the world map.

  The vast sweep of the Portuguese discoveries during the fifteenth century is generally unappreciated for its consequences on the world at large. It is not too much to say that the world as we know it, for better and for worse, came into being because of the Portuguese.

  It was the Portuguese who opened the way into the Atlantic. They were the first to sail south down the west coast of Africa, the first Europeans to pass the equator, to double the African continent, the first to reach India by sea from Europe. They were the first Europeans to reach Ceylon, Sumatra, Malacca and Timor, the first to find the mythical Spice Islands, the Moluccas. They were the first Europeans to reach and trade with both China and Japan by sea, the first to view Australia. And in the Americas they ‘discovered’ Brazil. There is credible evidence they were the first to land on North America in 1500. The methodical Portuguese expeditions were all a part of a decades-long, systematic exploration and discovery of the unknown world.

  Before this monumental undertaking Europe was an island of civilization in a vast world of obscurity. The rest of the Earth existed as tradition, legend, rumour or myth. Although many of the maps of that era were fundamentally accurate as far as they went, they were contradicted by others of apparently equal merit. There was no single repository of reliable knowledge. Information came by word of mouth, or from faded documents of dubious worth, few of which agreed on much of anything.

  Ships of all the European nations sailed within sight of land, venturing into blue water only briefly or inadvertently to flee pirates or as the result of a storm. There was no certain profit in sailing into new seas – and much peril. Ships and crews were routinely lost on well-established routes, so why risk the unknown? The purpose of sailing was not discovery or pleasure but to move goods and passengers for value.

  Although the enormous fortune to be made by wresting control of trade with the East from the Muslim infidels was one motive, and a very powerful one, the Portuguese explorations were always about more than empire and spices, although that has become the standard textbook telling. The Portuguese equally sought to establish contact with long-lost pockets of Christians known to be in the East, convert pagans and colonize new lands; and, as much as anything else, they were driven by the desire to know.

  At Sagres in the extreme southwest of Portugal, Prince Henry –Henry the Navigator as he came to be known –welcomed his crews home with lavish dinners and spent long nights being regaled by his captains with stories of what they had seen and experienced. The world was a mystery and every reliable word of what lay beyond the known was eagerly embraced and carefully documented. Henry’s captains were noted for their courage, their seamanship and their steadfast, reliable temperament. Henry wanted reports in which he could have faith and selected men who would give them to him.

  The story of the Portuguese explorations is not one of quaint men in picturesque wooden ships. It is a tale of passion, of blood and treachery, of incomparable bravery, of majestic sweeps of vision, of nation- and empire-building. It is a drama played across a world stage, in a time that will never be repeated, for it was the last era when the physical world and its peoples were largely unknown, when each ship returned with new knowledge, when myth was finally separated from reality. It is no wonder ‘The Discoveries’, as the Portuguese came to call them, filled so many with such hunger and compelled so much sacrifice.

  The cost was enormous and in many ways is immeasurable. ‘God gave the Portuguese a small country as cradle but all the world as their grave’, observed the seventeenth-century Portuguese Jesuit António Vieira.6 Indeed, the oceans of the world can be described as one vast watery grave for Portuguese seamen.

  If the decisions and motives of the players appear alien to us it is because, while technically these were men of the Renaissance, their hearts and thinking were still medieval. It was a time when Muslims and Christians alike converted great populations to the ‘true faith’ by sword and cannon, or by the expedient of seducing, or buying, the ruler. Where we have doubts, they had none. There was much they did not know about the world at large, but in matters of rel
igion and conquest they were unhesitating. The people they discovered en route to India and those they encountered once there –the Moors, blacks, Hindus and others –were in their eyes heathens and, as one Portuguese recorded, possessed ‘the badness of all bad men’.7 A captain wrote on observing the people of Brazil, although he could just as easily have said the same of all those the Portuguese encountered, that ‘Since our Lord . . . brought us here, I believe it was not without purpose.’8

  Only on the most superficial level is this the story about a trade monopoly in spices. For Prince Henry, John I, John II and Manuel, those who had the most to do with directing the effort, it was nothing less than the Crusades, reborn in a different manifestation but with the same objective. It was believed, correctly, that flanking the Muslims who controlled the gateway to Asian spices would weaken the infidel. It was hoped, futilely, this would lead to the reconquest of Jerusalem.

  The Portuguese achievement, however, had far greater implications by imposing European superiority in technology and weapons across the world. It spread Christianity and Western culture to the most distant lands, the effects of which are profound to this day and the ramifications of which continue to be felt. The conflict between Christians and Muslims has scarcely played itself out.

  This is in large part the story of a number of Portuguese sea captains. They appear to act out their role, stepping into history from poorly recorded pasts, disappearing into obscure futures, but for a period of time the role of each was essential. Gil Eanes, Antão Gonçalves, Nuno Tristão, Diogo Cão, Bartholomeu Dias, all played key roles in the Portuguese feat, each building on the success of those, known and unknown, who went before them.

  The pivotal act of the Portuguese accomplishment, however, was Vasco da Gama’s discovery of the all-sea passage to India. The story of his first epic voyage forms the single greatest part of this account. Because of his accomplishment Gama became the greatest Portuguese of all time.2 No king, no general or admiral, no cardinal or bishop, no writer, poet or artist, even comes close. His name is still spoken throughout the country with respect and awe. It is a significant measure of the character of the Portuguese people that this should be so. But if it had not been Gama, then it would have been another. When he returned to Lisbon two years after his departure preparations for another India fleet were already under way.

  The most disturbing aspect of the Discoveries was the introduction of black African slaves into the European economy. The Portuguese did not invent slavery, nor did they create African slavery, but they gave it a scale unknown previously and brought untold misery and suffering to countless millions through its merciless application.

  They did not see it like that. The Christian nations of Europe, or for that matter the Hindu and Muslim nations who likewise practised widespread slavery, considered it to be the natural state of the world. In Europe it was accepted that it was better for a pagan black African to spend his or her life in Christian bondage than to remain in Africa and burn in hell for eternity.

  Recounting these historic events presents unique obstacles in the telling as historians of this time attached little importance to dates and often failed to include them. This requires a painstaking, occasionally imprecise, reconstruction of events to determine a probable date. Highly regarded historians have made crucial errors in calculations, so every fact must be checked and rechecked.

  Certain key documents are also lacking. Many sources that do exist are at best second-hand, relying on original documents that have not survived. Some have simply vanished, while others were destroyed in the devastating Lisbon earthquake of 1755. We know, to name just one conspicuous example, that Gama maintained a log during his first voyage to India, for it existed some time after his death; but it has disappeared.

  Sources very close to events, however, have survived. Two are The Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea, by the royal chronicler Gomes Eannes da Azurara, and The Three Voyages of Vasco da Gama and his Viceroyalty, from the Lendas da India by Gaspar Correa. Azurara’s work was completed in 1453 and recounts nearly at first hand the early years of the Portuguese discoveries. It is especially fortunate that Azurara interviewed participants in the voyages, and knew and worked with Prince Henry. Correa wrote at the other end of the Discoveries, sailing to India when very young, in 1514. He too drew on interviews with participants in the events about which he wrote. Both works have deficiencies, Correa being the more unreliable, but each possesses remarkable insights and details that would otherwise be unknown.

  A third source, and the best, comes from a member of the crew of the first voyage to India by Vasco da Gama who maintained a contemporaneous record that has survived. Known simply as the Roteiro (or ‘Journal’), its authorship is an unresolvable dispute. A name can be affixed only by an imprecise process of elimination. What matters is that it is accepted as authentic and offers a first-hand account of the voyage and of many of the historic events that took place during it. Also available are English-language selections from Décades de Asia, by João de Barros, the most respected of the royal chroniclers but writing at greater distance from events.

  Although it was Vasco da Gama who actually reached India by sea, it is Christopher Columbus who is best remembered beyond Portugal. Both men changed the course of the world, but it is arguable which of them changed it more. Adam Smith wrote that, ‘The discovery of America and that of the passage to the East Indies by the Cape of Good Hope are the two greatest and most important events recorded in the history of mankind.’

  Contemporaries had no doubt which of the two accomplishments was the greater. New lands were being discovered routinely at the time, and their full potential took several centuries to grasp. The Portuguese, and Gama, had opened the way east, and all of Europe appreciated the immediate and lasting implications of this achievement.

  In their quest to reach India by sea, the Portuguese invented, or adapted, the latest advances in navigation and modified their ships repeatedly to the needs of the explorations. The reputation of the Portuguese spread throughout Europe with each passing year and each fresh, amazing discovery. When the explorations began, sailors from the Mediterranean nations and northern Europe gazed at the Portuguese caravels (caravelas) in Lisbon harbour with the exotic lines of their hulls and triangular-shaped lateen sails (from the word latin3) and observed that only a Portuguese vessel was capable of rounding Africa. Fifty years, and many accomplishments, later they allowed with awe that only a Portuguese vessel and a Portuguese crew were capable of reaching the East.

  Yet before the fifteenth century Portugal had been a nation of farmers and of coastal fishermen, with no indication of what was to come. As each captain’s success led to the next, by the time of Gama’s expedition, less than a century after the first ship set forth, no nation on earth commanded the seas as did the Portuguese. Gama’s three-month sweep through the central and south Atlantic to make landfall within 100 miles of his destination, lacking so much as a sextant, was the greatest feat of sailing the world had ever seen and is still ranked as one of the most extraordinary sailing accomplishments of all time.

  The strain of the Portuguese achievement was written on the faces of the widows and on those of the mothers who never again saw their husbands and sons. In a nation of scarcely more than 1 million, the drain on manpower to sustain the effort of discovery was enormous. Men routinely fled the boredom and poverty of the farm to seek the excitement and opportunity of Lisbon, and from there joined the annual expeditions into the unknown. Once the empire was created, fresh soldiers, sailors and administrators were required each year to serve its needs. Official indifference, storms, violence and tropical disease exacted a relentless toll on them. Only a small portion of those who left the shores of Portugal ever returned, and those who did, such as Luis Vaz de Camoens, soldier, royal official, poet and writer, author of The Lusiads, the Portuguese national epic, were often prematurely broken in body.

  Portugal’s greatest modern poet, Fernando Pes
soa, centuries later wrote of the sacrifice in the Mensagem:

  O sea. How much of your salt

  Consists of Portugal’s tears.

  How many mothers have wept,

  How many children in vain have prayed,

  How many brides remained single

  For you to become ours, O sea.

  Fado, the native Portuguese music, was born on these long voyages of discovery. Its haunting melodies and melancholy laments tell of the sorrow and heartache the men experienced on distant seas so far from home. Bartholomeu Dias returned from the tip of Africa with a depleted crew, and even these survivors were seriously ill. Many ships never returned at all. Because of the secrecy imposed on much of the explorations the full cost of the Portuguese achievement will never be known.

  The historian E. G. Ravenstein, in his foreword to the Roteiro, questions ‘whether Portugal would not be happier now, and richer, too, had . . . her strength not been wasted in a struggle to which she was materially unequal, and which ended in exhaustion and ruin’.9 Such a thought is sacrilege to the contemporary Portuguese, who hold no such view.

  The first passage to India by sea was the equivalent in its time not of a moon shot but of a mission to Mars. Gama sailed with the best vessels available, using the latest technology, manned almost entirely by volunteers, many of them veterans of the earlier Dias expedition which had discovered the tip of Africa and opened the way east. To complete this voyage Gama sailed further than the distance around the world following the equator, an estimated 23,000 nautical miles.