Increasingly emaciated, thirsty, sleep-deprived, and weakened by seasickness, those unused to the shipboard life succumbed to dysentery and fever, and, almost unnoticed, despite whatever dried fruit, onions, or beans were initially included in their diet before they became inedible, the whole crew experienced the slow but steady advance of the sailor’s disease. Without adequate vitamin C, symptoms present themselves after sixty-eight days; men start to die after eighty-four; in 111 days, scurvy wipes out a whole crew. For Gama’s men, the clock was ticking.
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Despite the ravages of the sea—the hot days of the equator, the increasingly cold, violent waters to the south—the ships sailed on, averaging about forty-five miles a day. At a latitude of perhaps twenty degrees south, the navigators felt the pull of variable winds, turned their prows to the southeast, and began to sweep back in the hope of rounding the Cape. On Saturday, November 4, the laconic diarist picks up his pen again with hardly a mention of the voyage behind: “we had soundings in 110 fathoms, and at nine o’clock we sighted the land. We then drew near to each other, and having put on our gala clothes, we saluted the captain-major by firing our bombards, and dressed the ships with flags and standards.” The release of pent-up emotion behind the terse words was evident. They had been out of sight of land for ninety-three days, sailed some forty-five hundred miles across open sea, and endured. It was a remarkable feat of navigation. Columbus’s crossing to the Bahamas took a mere thirty-seven.
They had, in fact, fallen slightly short of the Cape and landed in a broad bay 125 miles to the northwest. Landfall was the opportunity for scrupulous repairs: cleaning the ships, mending sails and yardarms, hunting for meat, and taking on water. It seems that for the first time they were able to assemble their astrolabe, unusable on the shifting deck of a ship, and take accurate readings of the latitude. There were edgy meetings with the natives, “tawny colored” men, according to the diarist, who was surprised that “their numerous dogs resemble those of Portugal, and bark like them.” They captured one man, brought him to the ship, and fed him. However, the local language proved inaccessible to the interpreters: “they speak as if they have hiccups,” the diary recorded. These were the Khoikhoi, pastoral people of southwest Africa, whom Europeans would later come to label Hottentots, in imitation of the sound of their words. Initially the exchanges were friendly—the diarist acquired “one of the sheaths which they wore over their penises”—but relations ended with a skirmish, in which Gama was lightly wounded by a spear. “All this happened because we looked upon these people as men of little spirit, quite incapable of violence, and had therefore landed without first arming ourselves.” It was perhaps a seminal moment for the expedition. Henceforth, landfalls would be extremely cautious and heavily armed. The tendency was to shoot at the slightest provocation.
It took six days and several attempts to battle round the Cape of Good Hope in stormy weather. When they landed again, at the Bay of Cowherds—now rechristened St. Brás—where Dias had been nine years earlier, it was with shows of force: breastplates, drawn crossbows, and swivel guns loaded in the longboats to show the people who had come to see them “that we had the means of doing them an injury, although we had no desire to employ them.” The mutual incomprehension of these meetings, which had marked many previous encounters down the coast of West Africa, contrasted with entrancing moments of shared humanity across the barriers of culture and language. Here the crew started to transfer goods from the supply ship, which they then burned on the beach.
On December 2, a large number of the natives, about two hundred, came down to the beach.
They brought with them about a dozen oxen and cows and four or five sheep. As soon as we saw them we went ashore. They forthwith began to play on four or five flutes, some producing high notes and other low ones, thus making a pretty harmony for Negroes who are not expected to be musicians; and they danced in the style of Negroes. The captain-major then ordered the trumpets to be sounded, and we, in the boats, danced, and the captain-major did so likewise when he rejoined us.
The Africans and the Europeans were temporarily united by rhythm and melody, but the mutual suspicion remained. It ended days later with the Portuguese, fearful of ambush, firing their berços from the longboats to scatter the pastoralists. Their last sight of the bay, as they sailed away, was of the Khoikhoi demolishing the stone pillar and cross they had just erected. To relieve their feelings, the ships’ crews used their cannons to blast a colony of seals and flightless penguins as they went.
The little flotilla paid a high price for not having cleanly rounded the Cape. The ships became temporarily separated by a storm; on December 15, they battled past Dias’s last pillar against the prevailing current. By December 20, they had been swept back there again. It was here that Dias’s men had refused to go on. Gama’s ships were released from this coastal labyrinth only by an overpowering stern wind that swept them forward. “Henceforward it pleased God in His mercy to allow us to make headway!” the journal writer recorded with relief. “May it please Him that it be thus always!”
However, the contest to round Africa had frayed both men and ships. The Rafael’s main mast cracked near the top; then it lost an anchor. Drinking water was running low. Each man was now down to a third of a quart a day, and their thirst was not helped by having the food cooked in seawater. Scurvy was beginning to ravage the crews. The respite of a welcoming landfall was urgent.
On January 11, 1498, they reached a small river. Immediately they sensed that they had entered a different world. The clustering groups of tall people who came to meet them were quite unlike the Khoikhoi. They were unafraid and received the strange white men hospitably. These were Bantu people, with whom the interpreters were able to strike up some kind of communication. Water was taken on board, but a stay could not be prolonged, as the wind was favorable. By January 22, they had reached a low, thickly wooded coast and the delta of a much vaster river, in which crocodiles and hippopotamuses lurked. “Black and well-made” people came out in dugout boats to see them and to trade, though some of their visitors, described in the journal as “very haughty…valued nothing which we gave them.”
By this time, the ravages of scurvy were advanced and many of the crew were in a ghastly state. Their hands, feet, and legs were monstrously swollen; their bloody and putrid gums grew over their teeth, as if devouring them, so that they could not eat. The smell from their mouths became intolerable. Men started to die. Paulo da Gama went continuously to comfort and doctor the sick and the dying with his own medical supplies. What saved the whole expedition from annihilation was not Paulo’s ministrations nor the healthy air, as some believed, but, more accidentally, the abundance of fruits growing on the banks of the Zambezi River.
They spent a month anchored off the immense delta, careening the hulls of the ships, repairing the Rafael’s mast, refilling their water barrels, and recovering from the intense battering of the seas. Before they left, they erected a pillar dedicated to St. Raphael and christened the Zambezi the River of Good Omens. There was in the air, in the greater warmth and the perceived higher level of civilization of the native people, a sense of expectation. After seven months at sea, Gama’s men were on the threshold of the Indian Ocean.
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The ships left on February 24 and were now within the Mozambique Channel, the wide strait between the coast of East Africa and the island of Madagascar, whose eddies and currents could pose a serious hazard to sailing ships. The heat was mounting; the sky and sea a brilliant blue; the view to landward a fringe of green trees, white sand, breaking surf. Cautious of shoals, they sailed only by day. By night they anchored up. Their progress was unhindered until they sighted a large bay, on March 2. The light caravel, the Bérrio, testing the depths, mistook the channel and became temporarily wedged on a sandbank. As Coelho, the pilot, was extricating the ship and anchoring, they noticed a deputation of men in dugout canoes approaching from a nearby island to the sound of brass trumpets. �
�They invited us to proceed further into the bay, offering to take us into port if we desired it. Those among them who boarded our ships ate and drank what we did, and went on their way when they were satisfied.” The port, they learned, was called Mozambique, and the language of communication was Arabic. They had entered the Muslim world. It was now that the complexity of their dealings took a fresh turn.
4
“The Devil Take You!”
March–May 1498
THOUSANDS OF MILES AWAY, on the walls of the royal palace of St. George in Lisbon, the great circular map of Fra Mauro projected its own image of the world. Its Africa was grossly distorted, its India less a defined subcontinent than the torn edge of a vast and circular Asia. Many of its annotations and place-names derived from the wanderings of Niccolò de’ Conti, the fifteenth-century Venetian traveler. But it clearly showed an Indian ocean to be crossed, and it marked the coastal city of Calicut, which Conti had identified as the hub of Indian commerce, with the promising legend “here pepper grows.” The spy Pêro da Covilhã also claimed to have sent back details of his mission to India in a letter handed over in Cairo, before vanishing into the uplands of Ethiopia. This should have given the Portuguese much information about the world into which they had now sailed, but it remains unclear to this day whether Covilhã’s letter made it back to Lisbon or was ever transmitted beyond King João, and whatever secret instructions, maps, destinations, or mental geography Gama carried with him were probably hidden from the anonymous writer on his voyage. Gama seems to have been furnished with a letter addressed only vaguely to “the Christian king of India” in Calicut; that it was written in Arabic suggests that the Portuguese were aware of a significant Muslim presence in the Indian Ocean. Beyond this, it appears from everything that ensued that their knowledge of this world—its weather systems, its ancient trading networks, the intricate cultural relations between Islam and Hinduism, its conventions for doing business and its politics—was woefully limited. Their blunders and misunderstandings would be multiple and have long-term consequences.
The Indian Ocean, thirty times the size of the Mediterranean, is shaped like an enormous M, with India as its central V. It is flanked on its western edge by the arid shores of the Arabian Peninsula and the long Swahili coast of East Africa; on its east, the barrier islands of Java and Sumatra and the blunt end of Western Australia separate it from the Pacific; to the south run the cold and violent waters of the Antarctic. The timing and trade routes of everything that moved across its surface in the age of sail were dictated by the metronomic rhythm of the monsoon winds, one of the great meteorological dramas of the planet, by whose seasonal fluctuations and reversals, like the operation of a series of intermeshing cogs, goods could be moved across great stretches of the globe. The traditional ship that plied the waters of the western Indian Ocean was the dhow—that is, any of a large family of long, thin vessels with triangular lateen sails of various sizes and regional designs, ranging from coastal craft of between five and fifteen tons up to oceangoing ships of several hundred tons that could overtop Gama’s carracks. Historically, these were sewn vessels, held together by coir ropes, made from coconut fiber without the use of nails.
Unlike Columbus, the Portuguese had not burst into silent seas. For thousands of years, the Indian Ocean had been the crossroads of the world’s trade, shifting goods across a vast space from Canton to Cairo, Burma to Baghdad, through a complex interlocking of trading systems, maritime styles, cultures and religions, and a series of hubs: Malacca, on the Malay Peninsula, larger than Venice, for goods from China and the farther spice islands; Calicut, on the west coast of India, for pepper; Ormuz, gateway to the Persian Gulf and Baghdad; Aden, at the entrance to the Red Sea and the routes to Cairo, the nerve center of the Islamic world. Scores of other small city-states dotted its shores. It dispatched gold, black slaves, and mangrove poles from Africa, incense and dates from Arabia, bullion from Europe, horses from Persia, opium from Egypt, porcelain from China, war elephants from Ceylon, rice from Bengal, sulfur from Sumatra, nutmeg from the Moluccas, diamonds from the Deccan Plateau, cotton cloth from Gujarat. No one had a monopoly in this terrain—it was too extensive and complex, and the great continental powers of Asia left the sea to the merchants. There was small-scale piracy but there were no protectionist war fleets, and little notion of territorial waters prevailed; the star fleets of the Ming dynasty, the one maritime superpower, had advanced and withdrawn. It constituted a vast and comparatively peaceful free-trade zone: over half the world’s wealth passed through its waters in a commercial commonwealth that was fragmented between many players. “God,” it was said, “had given the sea in common.”
This was the world of Sindbad. Its key merchant groups, distributed thinly around its shores, from the palm-fringed beaches of East Africa to the spice islands of the East Indies, were largely Muslims. Islam had been spread, not at the point of a sword, but by missionaries and merchants from the deck of a dhow. This was a polyethnic world, in which trade depended on social and cultural interaction, long-range migration, and a measure of mutual accommodation among Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism, local Christians and Jews; it was richer, more deeply layered and complex than the Portuguese could initially grasp. Their mindset was defined by the assumption of monopoly trading rights, as developed on the west coasts of Africa and by holy war in Morocco. The existence of Hinduism appears to have been occluded, and their default position when checked was aggression: hostage taking and the lighted taper ever ready at the touchhole of a bombard. They broke into this sea with their fast-firing, ship-mounted cannons, a player from outside the rules. The vessels they would encounter in the Indian Ocean lacked any comparable defenses.
It became immediately apparent as Gama’s ships approached the town of Mozambique that this was different from the Africa of their previous experience. The houses, thatched with straw, were well built; they could glimpse minarets and wooden mosques. The people, evidently Muslim merchants richly dressed in caftans fringed with silk and embroidered with gold, were urban Arabic speakers with whom their translators could communicate. The welcome was unusually friendly. “They came immediately on board with as much confidence as if they were long acquainted and entered into familiar conversation.” For the first time the Portuguese heard news of the world they had come to find. Through the interpreters they learned of the trade of the “white Muslims”—merchants from the Arabian Peninsula; there were four of their vessels in the harbor, bringing “gold, silver, cloves, pepper, ginger and silver rings…pearls, jewels and rubies.” “Further on, where we were going,” the anonymous writer added with a justifiable note of incredulity, “they abounded, and…precious stones, pearls and spices were so plentiful that there was no need to purchase them as they could be collected in baskets.” This heady vision of wealth was encouraging enough; but they also learned of a large presence of Christians along the coast and that “Prester John resided not far from this place; that he held many cities along the coast, and that the inhabitants of those cities were great merchants and owned big ships.” Whatever might have been lost in translation, “we cried with joy and prayed God to grant us health, so that we might behold what we so much desired.”
Gradually it dawned on the Portuguese that they themselves were also assumed to be Muslim merchants. Initially the sultan came on board in the spirit of friendship, and despite Gama’s attempts to lay on a show—probably not easy, given the battered appearance of both ships and men—he was disappointed by the quality of the presents on offer. The Portuguese, apparently ignorant of the wealth of this new world, had departed from Lisbon with trinkets to delight a West African chief: brass bells and basins, coral, hats, and modest garments. The sultan wanted scarlet cloth. With the failure of these curious and emaciated sailors to establish their credibility as traders or people of substance, questions arose about their identity and intentions. Initially the sultan took them for Turks and was keen to see their famed bows and their Korans. Gama was force
d to dissimulate: they were from a country near Turkey and had not wished to entrust their sacred books to the sea; but he did lay on an impressive firing of crossbows and a display of armor, “with all of which he was much pleased, and greatly astonished.”
They had already learned how treacherous the coast could be—the Bérrio had grounded entering the harbor—and that the way ahead was dotted with shoals. Gama asked the sultan for the loan of a pilot. He provided two, to be paid in gold; inherently suspicious of the intentions of Muslims, Gama insisted that one should always remain on board. If doubt was growing in their hosts’ mind, the mood soon darkened. On Saturday, March 10, when the ships were moved from the town to an island three miles away with the aim of conducting a secret Mass there, one of the pilots absconded. Gama sent two boats to hunt for him, but they were met by six armed vessels coming from the island with an order for them to return to Mozambique town. At this point the Christians probably thought that their cover had been blown. The one pilot they had was trussed up to prevent escape, and the bombards put the Muslims to flight. It was time to move on.
Conquerors Page 6