Conquerors

by Roger Crowley

  July and August were dead months for trade in Calicut, too early for the monsoon winds to carry the dhows from Arabia and the Persian Gulf, but the visitors must have smelled the spices perfuming the humid air and seen the stocks of merchandise ready for their arrival, along with porcelain and lacquer from China, copper and worked metals, sulfur and precious stones. It was hardly surprising that they received so little trade.

  They also heard tales, dating back many years, of mysterious visitors who “wore their hair long like Germans, and had no beards except around the mouth.” Evidently these men had come with formidable technical resources.

  They landed, wearing a cuirass, helmet, and visor, and carrying a certain weapon attached to a spear. Their vessels are armed with bombards, shorter than those in use with us. Once every two years they return with twenty or twenty-five vessels. They are unable to tell what people they are, nor what merchandise they bring to this city, save that it includes very fine linen cloth and brass-ware. They load spices. Their vessels have four masts like those of Spain.

  It was a garbled account of the great Chinese star fleets of the Ming dynasty, long withdrawn, leaving a power vacuum in the Indian Ocean waiting to be filled—but, like all the wandering voyagers of the sea, they had left a genetic imprint. There was a Chinese mix in the population of Calicut and along the Malabar Coast.

  By the start of August, Gama was ready to leave. Whatever trade could be effected had been accomplished, and he was probably keen to get away before a heavy influx of Arab ships arrived and the winds became too unfavorable for departure. The problem was that the expedition was seriously out of sync with the climatic rhythms of the ocean.

  Encouraged, at least, that some trade had gone on, Gama made an attempt to create a small permanent commercial presence in the city. He sent the samudri presents and informed him that he wished to depart but to leave some men behind to carry on trade. At the same time, he requested ambassadors (or hostages) to accompany the ships back to Portugal. In return for the presents, he asked for some sacks of spices, which would be paid for “if he [the samudri] desired it.”

  Communications with the samudri had turned frosty again. Gama’s messenger, Diogo Dias, waited four days before being admitted to his presence. The samudri did not deign to look at the presents; they should have been sent to his agent. Then he demanded a trading tax from the Portuguese, saying “that then he might go: this was the custom of the country and of those who came to it.” Dias replied that he would return to Gama with this message, but he found himself detained in the house with his merchandise by armed men, and orders were given that no boats were to approach the Portuguese ships. The samudri was evidently concerned that they would sail away without paying.

  Once more relations unraveled. Gama failed to understand that all merchants were obliged to pay port taxes and that the poor goods they had left onshore provided no surety. Instead, the interpretation of this behavior was that “the Christian king” had been influenced by the Muslims for commercial purposes; that they had told the samudri “that we were thieves, and that if once we navigated to his country, no more ships would come from Mecca…nor from any other part…that he would derive no profit from this [trade with the Portuguese] as we had nothing to give, and would rather take away, and that thus his country would be ruined.” The basic strategic assumption would prove accurate, even if Portuguese fears that the Muslims had offered “rich bribes to the king to capture and kill us” might not. During all this period, Gama continued to receive advice and insights from the two Tunisian Muslims they had met on first landing, and who played a significant part in their understanding of this confusing world.

  Meanwhile, the detainees managed to slip a message out to the ships to the effect that they were being held as hostages. Because Gama now knew this and the samudri’s people were unaware that he did, he was able to develop a stealthy plan. On August 15, a boat appeared carrying some men offering to sell stones; in reality they had probably come to sense the mood on the ships. Gama gave no hint that he knew of the hostages; he wrote a letter to Diogo Dias ashore, as if nothing were amiss. Seeing no threat, more merchants came out to visit the ships: “all were made welcome by us and given to eat.” On August 19, twenty-five men came out, including “six persons of quality” (high-caste Hindus). Gama saw his chance and promptly kidnapped eighteen of them and demanded his men back. On August 23, he bluffed that he was leaving for Portugal, sailed away, and waited twelve miles offshore. The next day he returned and anchored within sight of the city.

  Cagey negotiations ensued. A boat called to offer to exchange Dias for the hostages. Suspicious as ever, Gama chose to believe that his man was dead and that this was just a delaying tactic “until the ships of Mecca able to capture us had arrived.” He was playing tough, threatening to fire his bombards and to decapitate the hostages unless the men were returned. He bluffed a farther retreat down the coast.

  In Calicut there was evidently consternation. The samudri sent for Dias and tried to untie the knot. He offered to return him for the hostages on board, and via a double interpretation process—Malayalam to Arabic, Arabic to Portuguese—he dictated a letter, addressed to King Manuel and written by Dias with an iron pen upon a palm leaf, “as is the custom of the country.” The gist read: “Vasco Gama, a gentleman of your household, came to my country, whereat I was pleased. My country is rich in cinnamon, cloves, ginger, pepper and precious stones. That which I ask of you in return is gold, silver, corals and scarlet cloth.” The samudri was perhaps hedging his bets against future trade. He also permitted the erection of a stone pillar—the ominous calling card of Portuguese intentions.

  Offshore, the bargaining went on. Dias was brought out and the hostages were exchanged in a rowboat, as none of the accompanying people dared step aboard the Rafael. The stone pillar was winched into the boat, and six of the hostages were released. The other six Gama “promised to surrender if on the morrow the merchandise was restored to him.” The following day he received a surprise visitor. Monçaide, the Tunisian, begged to be taken on board. His help to the unwelcome visitors had turned people against him, and he feared for his life. Later, seven boats approached with the merchandise, with many men. The bargain had been to swap the men for the goods, but Gama broke it. He summarily decided to abandon the goods and carry the hostages off to Portugal. He left with a parting shot: “be careful, as he hoped shortly to be back in Calicut, when they would know whether we were thieves.” Gama was not one to forgive or forget. “We therefore set sail and left for Portugal, greatly rejoicing at our good fortune in having made so great a discovery,” the diarist reported with satisfaction.

  They had already left behind them a bitter legacy. The samudri was furious at the broken bargain and sent a swarm of boats in pursuit. They caught the Portuguese, becalmed farther up the coast, on August 30. “About seventy boats approached us…crowded with people wearing a kind of cuirass made of red cloth.” As they came within range, the Portuguese fired their bombards. A running fight ensued for an hour and a half, until “there arose a thunderstorm which carried us out to sea; and when they could no longer do us harm they turned back, while we pursued our route.” It was to be the first of many naval engagements in the Indian Ocean.

  It took further entanglements before the little flotilla could cut out to sea; the vessels were not in good shape, and they needed water. They worked their way slowly up the coast, hunting for water sources and receiving a friendly reception from the local fishermen, bartering for food and being able to cut cinnamon growing wild along the coast. On September 15, they erected the third of their pillars on an island. A few days later they landed on one of a cluster of small islands with plentiful water sources, the names of which they misheard from local Hindus as Anjediva.

  During this time, their movements were being closely observed. On September 22, they sustained a second attack from a flotilla from Calicut, but Portuguese gunnery crippled the lead ship and the others fled. The presen
ce of these alien vessels was causing continuous interest and suspicion, and Gama was finding the coast increasingly uncomfortable. On the following two days, deputations of boats came waving flags of friendship. Gama beat them off with warning shots. Visitors to the ships provided contradictory accounts of the comings and goings. Another friendly visitation, this one bringing gifts of sugarcane, was repulsed. There was a growing sense that curiosity was usually a front for some evil intention. They were warned by local fishermen that one of these attempts had been made by a noted pirate of the region, called Timoji, a man who would figure prominently in the subsequent doings of the Portuguese.

  While they were careening the Bérrio on the beach, they received yet another visitor—an extremely well-dressed man who spoke the Venetian dialect and addressed Gama as a friend. He had a tale to tell. He was a Christian who had been captured and converted to Islam, “although at heart still a Christian.” He was in the service of a rich lord, from whom he sent a message—that “we might have anything in his country which suited us, including ships and provisions, and that if we desired to remain permanently it would give him much pleasure.” Initially his claims seemed plausible, but as time went on the Portuguese noticed that he talked “so much and about so many things, that at times he contradicted himself.”

  Paulo da Gama, meanwhile, was checking the mysterious visitor’s credentials with the Hindus who had accompanied him: “they said he was a pirate who had come to attack us.” The Venetian was seized and beaten. After he had been “questioned” three or four times, a different story emerged. He admitted that there were a growing number of ships gathering to attack, but he could not be broken down further.

  It was evidently time to get out. The coast was becoming too hot to handle. Soon Muslim trading ships would start to arrive from the Arabian Peninsula, and Anjediva was a frequented stopover for water. The Portuguese ships, with the exception of the Rafael, had been careened; fresh water had been loaded; boatloads of cinnamon had been collected, with the help of local fishermen. In a final act of contempt, Gama refused a handsome offer from its captain for the return of a vessel he had captured. He “said that it was not for sale, and as it belonged to an enemy he preferred to burn it.” Such intransigence was a foretaste of what was to come.

  —

  On October 5, the ships put out to sea, carrying away with them the enigmatic Venetian spy; he might prove useful. They now had no pilot. No one who had knowledge of the monsoon winds would have set out to sail west at this time. They probably had little choice, given the circumstances, but whether Gama was aware that it would prove a terrible mistake is unknown. When six hundred miles were between them and India, the “Venetian” finally confessed, though his story would unfold in stages. He was indeed the agent of a rich lord, the sultan of Goa. He had been dispatched to assess whether the ships could be taken by the sultan, rather than by a privateer, with the aim of employing the Portuguese in his wars with neighboring kings. For Gama, this shed an interesting light on the politics of western India, which would later be put to advantage, and it flagged the importance of Goa. The Venetian’s story became increasingly surprising as the voyage went on. He was a Polish Jew, a victim of the pogroms of central Europe whose wanderings had led him through successive identities. During the voyage he acquired another: by the time he reached Portugal, he had been baptized a Christian in the name of Gaspar da Gama.

  The return across the Indian Ocean descended into nightmare. The details are muffled in the anonymous journal, which refers only briefly to “frequent calms and foul winds,” but the reality of being imprisoned in the Indian Ocean for three months can be read between the lines: dispiriting and contrary breezes pushing them back, then the far more terrible calms, with the ships sitting unmoving for days on a sea of hot zinc; nights lit by an unpitying moon; the men bickering over whatever shade was afforded by the bulwarks or the dejected sails, tortured by thirst and hunger, calling on the saints for aid; vermin crawling from the biscuits; the water fouled. It would have been necessary to keep wetting the planks to stop the wood from splitting and rendering the ships unseaworthy.

  The dread symptoms of scurvy reappeared: “all our people again suffered from their gums, which grew over their teeth, so that they could not eat. Their legs also swelled and other parts of the body, and these swellings spread until the sufferer died.” The high-caste Hindu hostages would probably have been the first to go, forbidden under Brahmanic law from eating on the high seas; one by one the dead were lowered over the side, with a soft splash and the murmuring of prayers; those left alive just tottering. “Thirty of our men died in this manner—an equal number having died previously—and those able to navigate each ship were only seven or eight.” “We had come to such a pass that all bonds of discipline had gone” was the diarist’s tight-lipped comment on what appears to have been a mutiny in the making. There was evidently a call to return to India, possibly even a plot to take control of the ships. The commanders agreed in principle to turn back, should a westerly wind prevail. Another fortnight, according to the anonymous writer, and they would all have been dead.

  Then, as despair reached its zenith, a favorable wind picked up and carried them west for six days. On January 2, 1499, the battered ships sighted the African coast. It had taken just twenty-three days to make the voyage across; the return took ninety-three. The lessons of the seasonal monsoon were hard won.

  Sailing down the African coast, they passed the Muslim port of Mogadishu; Gama, still seized with anger at the Muslims of the Malabar Coast, gratuitously bombarded the town and swept on. On January 7, the tattered ships arrived at Malindi, where again they received a warm welcome. Oranges were supplied, “much desired by our sick,” but for many it was too late. Amity with the sultan of Malindi resulted in an exchange of gifts, including an elephant tusk for King Manuel; a stone pillar was erected, and a young Muslim taken on board who “desired to go with us to Portugal.” They passed on, skirting inhospitable Mombasa, but by January 13 it became apparent that there were too few men to sail all three ships. The Rafael, which had not been careened on the Indian coast, was the most worm-eaten. They transferred all her goods and the graceful red-and-gold figurine of the archangel and burned the ship on the beach. At Zanzibar they made peaceful contact with the sultan, then stopped at the island of St. George, near Mozambique, to say Mass and erect their last pillar, but “the rain fell so heavily that we could not light a fire for melting the lead to fix the cross, and it therefore remained without one.”

  Picking up colder winds, they made a stop at the bay of St. Brás on March 3, rounded the Cape on March 20, though “at times nearly dead from the cold…[and] pursued our route with a great desire of reaching home.” Here the anonymous account breaks off abruptly on April 25, in unknown circumstances, near the shoals at the mouth of the Gambia, off the coast of West Africa. The conclusion of the voyage was recorded in other sources. The Bérrio and the Gabriel got separated in a storm, but by this time Gama had deeper concerns. His brother Paulo was dying. At the island of Santiago, he relinquished the Gabriel to his pilot, João de Sá, chartered a caravel, and hurried Paulo to the island of Terceira, in the Azores. The Bérrio sailed into the mouth of the Tejo and landed at Cascais, near Lisbon, on July 10, 1499, with the news; the Gabriel followed soon after. Paulo, who had faithfully accompanied his brother on the epic voyage, died the day after reaching Terceira and was buried there. The mourning Vasco did not make it back to Lisbon until, probably, the end of August. He spent nine days in retirement with the monks at the chapel of Santa Maria de Belém mourning the death, before making a triumphant entry into Lisbon in early September.

  —

  The voyage had been epic; they had been away a year, traveled twenty-four thousand miles. It was a feat of endurance, courage, and great luck. The toll had been heavy. Two-thirds of the crew had died. Unaware of the rhythms of the monsoon, they had been fortunate to survive; scurvy and adverse weather could have taken all of them in
the Indian Ocean, leaving ghost ships floating on an empty sea.

  Gama was received with great acclamation; he was made grants of land and money, elevated to the higher nobility, and given the further honorific title of admiral of the Indies. Manuel ordered processions and ritual Masses across the land and, with a sure instinct for public relations, set about projecting Portugal’s great success to the papacy and the royal houses of Europe. He took sly delight in informing Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain that his ships “did reach and discover India” and had bought quantities of “cinnamon, cloves, ginger, nutmegs and pepper…also many fine stones of all sorts, such as rubies and others.” “We are aware,” he disingenuously continued, “that Your Highness will hear of these things with much pleasure and satisfaction”—with certain enjoyment that the opposite would be the case. To Pope Alexander Borgia and his cardinals, he wrote trumpeting the discovery of a Christian India: “His Holiness and Your Reverence must publicly rejoice and give many praises to God.” The fact that much of the information about this world had come via Gaspar da Gama, a converted Jew, was taken as a sign that “God ordered and wished to constitute Portugal as a kingdom for a great mystery of His service and for the exaltation of the Holy Faith.” Manuel saw in this the hand of destiny.

  The ennobled Gama’s coat of arms

  The commercial implications spread quickly across Europe. Even as the first ships docked in Lisbon, faint whispers reached Venice. On August 8, the Venetian diarist Girolamo Priuli recorded a rumor from Cairo that “three caravels belonging to the king of Portugal have arrived at Aden and Calicut in India and that they have been sent to find out about the spice islands and that their captain is Columbus…this news affects me greatly, if it’s true; however I don’t give credence to it.” In Lisbon, Italian merchants were soon gathering detailed firsthand information to confirm the expedition and its true commander from returning sailors. The prospect of the wealth of the Indies being in direct reach was immediately obvious—as were its commercial advantages and its ability to threaten vested interests in Europe. The Florentine Girolamo Sernigi pointed out that the taxes and transportation costs of the present Red Sea route raised purchase prices sixfold.