Conquerors
Page 4
The latitudes that Columbus mentioned have been the subject of heated historical debate, but there seems no doubt that he was present as the king and his cosmographers pored over the details of the voyage, whose features would quickly seep into contemporary maps. Dias had achieved two major breakthroughs. He had shown definitively that Africa was a continent with a seaway to India, abolishing some of the precepts of Ptolemy’s geography; and by his inspirational swing out to sea, he had unlocked the final part of the riddle of the winds and suggested the way to get there—not by slogging down the African coast but by arcing out into the empty Atlantic in a widening loop and trusting to the reliable westerlies to carry ships around the continent’s tip. It was the culmination of sixty years of effort by Portuguese sailors, but it is not clear that the achievement was apparent to the men to whom Dias told his tale. After so many false dawns, they were perhaps more cautious. There were no meritorious honors for Dias, no public pronouncements that the promised land had been glimpsed, as if they couldn’t quite believe the revealed evidence: the warmer seas, the curve of the coast. Still holding to the shreds of classical geography, the consensus seems to have been that there might still be a farther point to be passed. The following year in another speech, which was almost a repeat of the earlier one made to the pope, it was claimed that “every day we are trying to reach those headlands…and also the sands of the Nile, by which one reaches the Indian Ocean and from there the Barbarian gulf, source of infinite riches.” It would be another nine years before the value of Dias’s voyage would become manifest. As for Columbus, he sensed that João’s interest had died. He returned to lobbying the Spanish court.
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Far away in the Indian Ocean itself, Covilhã was still traveling. In the autumn of that year, he caught a trading dhow across the Indian Ocean to Calicut (now Kozhikode), the hub of the spice trade and the terminus for much of the long-distance commerce from farther east. By early 1488 he was probably in Goa; he then sailed north to Ormuz, at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, another hub of the Indian Ocean. Crisscrossing the ocean, collecting and secretly recording information about sailing routes, winds, currents, ports, and politics, he picked up a ship going from the east coast of Africa to Sofala, far to the south, opposite Madagascar, the farthest point of Arab navigation in the southern Indian Ocean. He was attempting to find out about the feasibility of rounding Africa by sea, and navigation along its east coast. By the time he returned to Cairo, in 1490 or early 1491, he had been traveling for almost four years; he had scouted the major trade routes of the Indian Ocean and was in a position to provide the king with a detailed account.
Back in Cairo he learned that Paiva had died, somewhere on the way to Ethiopia. Meanwhile, João had sent out two Jews, a rabbi and a shoemaker, to look for his lost spies. Mysteriously, they somehow found and recognized Covilhã in the hubbub of Cairo and brought him letters from the king. The order was to return to Lisbon, but not before “he had seen and found out about the great king Prester John.” Covilhã wrote the king a long letter, sent back with the shoemaker, detailing everything he had seen and knew—about the trade and navigation of the Indian Ocean, and adding that João’s “caravels that frequent Guinea, by sailing from place to place and seeking the coast of the isle of Madagascar and Sofala, could easily enter these eastern seas and reach the shore of Calicut, because there is sea all the way.”
By this time Covilhã seems to have been bitten by incurable wanderlust. He decided to finish off Paiva’s business but interpreted João’s orders freely. Accompanying the rabbi to Aden and Ormuz, he then made his own heavily disguised tour of the holy places of Islam—Mecca and Medina—before striking out for the Ethiopian highlands. Here he became the first Portuguese to meet the man they knew as Prester John, the Christian emperor of Ethiopia. The current ruler, Eskender, received him honorably but refused to let him leave. He was discovered in the country thirty years later by a Portuguese expedition, to whom he would tell his story. He remained in Ethiopia until the day he died.
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Dias and Covilhã between them had effectively joined up the dots on a possible sea route to the Indies. The India plan was complete, though it is not clear when or even if Covilhã’s report reached the king, nor what the silence surrounding Dias’s achievement meant in court circles. However, in the interim, by coincidence, an Ethiopian priest came to Lisbon, forwarded by the pope. João returned him with a letter addressed to Prester John, stating “the desire he had for his friendship and of how he had explored the whole coast of Africa and Ethiopia.” This wording might suggest that he had received news from Covilhã. By the early 1490s, João probably had all the necessary information to make the final push to the Orient and link up the world.
Instead, nothing happened. There would be a pause of eight years before the Portuguese followed up their decades of patient investigation. In the years after Dias’s return, João was beset by problems. He was involved in bitter campaigns in Morocco toward the end of the 1480s—always a religious duty for crusading Portuguese kings; he was starting to be afflicted by the kidney disease that would finally kill him; and he was hard hit by unexpected turns of fortune. In 1491 his only son and heir, Afonso, died in a riding accident. In 1492, when the Jews were expelled from Spain, they fled in large numbers to Portugal, and this influx, despite the benefit of a large number of industrious and educated people, involved careful attention.
The following year came another heavy blow: on March 3, 1493, one battered ship struggled into the harbor at Restelo, near Lisbon, the traditional anchorage for returning vessels, but it was not Portuguese. It was Columbus returning with news of a voyage to the “Indies” in the Santa Maria—in fact, the modern-day Bahamas, Cuba, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic—made under the patronage of rival Spain. It is unclear if Columbus, an unreliable fabulist who reinvented his own past, was blown accidentally into the Tejo by a violent storm or if this visit was intended as a calculated snub to the king who had refused him. The man waiting to interview him was Bartolomeu Dias, whose voyage had scuppered Columbus’s chances of Portuguese patronage. According to Columbus, who claimed to have reached islands close to Japan, he was then royally received by the king.
The Portuguese account was more muted. Columbus was insufferably condescending. The royal court found him “puffed up in manner, and continuously exceeding the bounds of truth in his account, and making the expedition much more significant in terms of gold, silver and riches than it actually was” and upbraiding the king for lack of belief. João was shaken by the apparent proof of the native hostages he produced. In appearance they were not African; they seemed more like what he imagined the people of the Indies to be, but no one could be certain exactly what the self-promoting Genoese had found. The king’s advisers had a simple solution: kill him discreetly and the Spanish discoveries would die. João ruled it out; it was both morally wrong and bad diplomacy, at a time when relations between the two monarchies were already strained.
What he did do was send a severe and rapid letter to Ferdinand and Isabella in Seville to the effect that Columbus had encroached on Portuguese territory. In 1479, to end an earlier war, the two monarchies had agreed to draw a horizontal frontier through the Atlantic Ocean, ratified by the pope, that defined areas of exclusive exploration. João believed that Columbus had discovered land within his domain and prepared to send his own expedition. The Spanish appealed to Alexander VI, the Spanish Borgia pope, who found in their favor, cutting Portugal out of huge swaths of the Atlantic Ocean that they believed they had carved out for themselves. Suddenly Portuguese Atlantic hegemony was threatened, and they were not about to have their decades of investment snatched away. João threatened war. The two sides agreed to face-to-face negotiations, bypassing the pope, to defuse a major diplomatic row.
At the small and ancient town of Tordesillas, on the plains of central Spain, a delegation from each side met to bargain for the world. Here they simply cut the globe in two with a verti
cal line through the Atlantic Ocean “from the Arctic to the Antarctic pole”; to the east of this line was to be Portuguese; to the west, Spanish. João and his team of astronomers and mathematicians, probably more experienced and skillful, forced their opponents to have this line moved from its original position, proposed by the pope, more than a thousand miles to the west—midway between the Portuguese Cape Verde Islands and the Caribbean islands, discovered by Columbus, which he believed to be part of the coast of Asia. Conveniently, this alteration was to bring the coast of Brazil, as yet apparently undiscovered, within the Portuguese ambit. Since there was no way of accurately fixing the longitude of the Tordesillas meridian, the exact position of the line continued to be fiercely disputed. It would remain so until 1777.
Like 1492 itself, the treaty marked a decisive moment in the end of the Middle Ages. Although what was agreed at Tordesillas was later ratified by Pope Pius III, rights to the world had effectively been removed from the hegemony of the papacy. They had been calculated by scientists and carved up according to secularized national interests. In effect, the two Iberian powers at the cutting edge of exploration had turned everywhere beyond Europe into a privatized political space, to the bemusement of other monarchs. “Show me the clause in Adam’s will,” snorted Francis I of France derisively sometime later. Yet no one else by 1500 had the Atlantic access or the experience to challenge the Iberian pioneers. And Columbus had unknowingly sailed into a cul-de-sac, barred by the Americas, in his race for the Indies. Only the Portuguese knew enough to find a sea route there and to link up the world. They had a window of opportunity denied to their Spanish competitors.
Dividing up the world: the fierce Portuguese-Spanish rivalry for discoveries beyond the Atlantic Ocean led to a series of running disputes. King João was correct in his belief that Columbus had encroached on Portuguese territory south of the 1479 line. The pope’s solution was highly favorable to Spain. In a series of bulls in 1493 he decreed that the space was to be divided by a vertical line running from pole to pole fixed 100 leagues west of the Azores and the Cape Verde Islands. This gave the Spanish the right to all discoveries west of the line, even as far as India, and seemed to grant Portugal no matching rights to any land by sailing east. Potential exclusion from India was unacceptable to João. At Tordesillas the line was moved 170 leagues west to include the apparently as-yet-undiscovered coast of Brazil. It also gave Portugal back rights to undiscovered lands east of the line. The Tordesillas settlement led to further disputes on the far side of the world when the Spanish reached the Moluccas in 1521 by sailing west, which the Portuguese had reached by sailing east in 1512.
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Although João had been badly shaken by Columbus’s claims, he revived his India plan and prepared a new expedition. But for him it was too late. “The Man is dead,” Isabella of Spain was said to have murmured when she heard the news in 1495. She had hoped to marry her daughter to João’s son, Afonso, but he had already died. The throne passed to the young Dom Manuel, duke of Beja, who had witnessed the final briefing of Paiva and Covilhã. Manuel fortuitously inherited a crown, eighty years of accumulated exploration experience, and the launchpad for the final push to India. He had even been gifted the wood to build the ships. If João passed into Portuguese history as the Perfect Prince, Manuel was destined to be the Fortunate King.
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Vasco da Gama
October 1495–March 1498
THE NEW KING HAD inherited a streak of messianic destiny that ran deep in the Portuguese royal house of Aviz. Born on the feast day of Corpus Christi and christened with the luminous name Emmanuel, “God is with us,” he read mystical significance into his coronation. He was twenty-six years old, round-faced, and possessed of disproportionately long arms, which hung down to his knees, giving him an apelike appearance. It had taken extraordinary circumstances to place him on the throne: the death or exile of six people, including the mysterious riding accident that killed João’s son, Afonso, and the murder of his brother Diogo at João’s own hands. He saw his kingship as a sign that he had been chosen by God.
In the dying years of the century, with the nearing of the fifteen hundredth anniversary of Christ’s birth, apocalyptic tendencies swept Europe, particularly the Iberian Peninsula, where the expulsion of both the Muslims and the Jews from Spain was taken as a sign. In this atmosphere Manuel believed, and was encouraged to believe, that he was predestined for extraordinary things: the extermination of Islam and the worldwide spread of Christianity under a universal monarch. “Among all the western princes of Europe,” wrote the mariner Duarte Pacheco Pereira, “God only wanted to choose Your Highness.” The possibility that great deeds might be accomplished by tiny Portugal could itself be justified by biblical quotation: “the first shall be last; and the last shall be first.”
King Manuel I as the universal monarch with the motto “[we turn] to God in heaven but to You on earth.” He is flanked by the royal coat of arms with its five escutcheons and the armillary sphere, the mystical symbol of the Portuguese exploration of the world.
The India plan, which had faltered in the later troubled years of João’s reign, became the primary outlet for these dreams. Manuel believed he had inherited the mantle of his granduncle Henrique, “the Navigator.” Since the fall of Constantinople, Christian Europe had felt itself increasingly hemmed in. To outflank Islam, link up with Prester John and the rumored Christian communities of India, seize control of the spice trade, and destroy the wealth that empowered the Mamluk sultans in Cairo—from the first months of his reign, a geostrategic vision of vast ambition was already in embryo; it would, in time, sweep the Portuguese around the world. If it was forged in the spirit of crusade, it also had a material dimension: not only to wrest trade from the Mamluks but also to replace the Venetians as the mart for the luxury goods of the Orient. The project was at the same time imperial, religious, and economic. It was in this spirit that Manuel started to assemble the expedition to reach the Indies, a vaguely defined space, given the lack of detailed knowledge, that in the European imagination probably encompassed the whole of the Indian Ocean and wherever spices might grow.
The idea was not wholeheartedly endorsed. When Manuel called a general council in December 1495, a few weeks after his coronation, there was fierce opposition from a noble class that had been bullied by King João and saw no glory and much risk in such a long-range venture, compared to the easy rewards from crusading in Morocco. During his reign, Manuel would prove at times to be vacillating and indecisive, but he could also be authoritarian. He claimed an inherited obligation to pursue the discoveries and drew on his sense of divine mission to overrule all objections.
And giving as an overriding reason, to those who cited the difficulties if India were discovered, that God, in whose hands he put this matter, would provide the means for the well-being of the kingdom [of Portugal], finally the king decided to proceed with this discovery, and when he was later in Estremoz, he appointed Vasco da Gama, fidalgo of his household, as captain-major [the commander’s title] of the ships he would send there.
It seems that Vasco da Gama was initially only the second choice for this venture. Manuel first requisitioned Gama’s older brother Paulo, who pleaded ill health but agreed to come on the voyage anyway, under Vasco’s command. Gama, “an unmarried man and of the age to be able to weather the trials of such a voyage,” was then in his thirties. His early career and experience and the reasons for his choice remain somewhat mysterious. He appears in few records prior to 1496; his seafaring knowledge is largely unknown. He came from minor nobility in the seaport of Sines, south of Lisbon, and probably had a background in corsairing along the Moroccan coast. Whatever he was or had been subsequently became, like the life of Columbus, enshrouded in myth. He was apparently short-tempered. At the time of his appointment, he had an outstanding charge of violent affray against his name. The obdurate nature of his personality would unfold in the voyage ahead: implacably steeped in the crusading tradition
of hatred of Islam, enduring before the hard life of the sea, but crucially impatient of diplomatic niceties, he came to be described as “bold in action, severe in his orders and very formidable in his anger.” Gama had probably been chosen more to command men and negotiate with the unknown kings of the Orient than to sail ships.
Vasco da Gama
By the 1490s, the exploration along the African coast had transformed Lisbon into a city buzzing with activity and expectation. The unloading of exotic produce on the gently sloping banks of the Tejo—spices, slaves, parrots, sugar—conjured up the expectation of new worlds beyond the breakwater. By 1500, probably 15 percent of the population were Guinea blacks—there were more slaves in the city than anywhere else in Europe. Lisbon was exotic, dynamic, colorful, and purposeful, “bigger than Nuremberg and much more populous,” said the German polymath Hieronymus Münzer, who came here in 1494. The city was the cutting edge of new ideas about cosmography and navigation, the shape of the world and how it might be imaged on maps. After their expulsion from Spain in 1492, a wave of Jewish immigrants, many of them learned or entrepreneurial, further enriched the city’s dynamism. Although their welcome did not last long, it brought a remarkable fund of knowledge. The refugees included the Jewish astronomer and mathematician Abraham Zacuto, whose creation of a maritime astrolabe and a book of tables for charting the position of celestial bodies would in time revolutionize navigation at sea.