And it all goes to pay the carriers, the ships and the dues of the sultan. So going the other way it’s possible to strip out all these costs and middlemen. Which is why I hold that the sultan, these kings and the Muslims will do all they can to rebuff the Portuguese king in this business. If the king…continues it will be possible to sell spices at the port of Pisa many times more cheaply than at Cairo, because it’s possible to get them there [via Lisbon] at a much lower cost.
The net result would be that the Venetians and Genoese would lose their spice monopoly. Sernigi added, “I don’t doubt that they will do all they can to destroy this venture.”
Vasco da Gama’s voyage had taken everyone by surprise. It had added eighteen hundred new places to Europe’s gazetteer of the world and revealed a mine of new information about the Indies. It would quickly compel all interested parties across a vast stretch of the globe—Christian, Muslim, and Hindu—to make fresh strategic calculations, and it would lead inevitably to commercial conflict and outright war. As for Manuel, it increased his confidence. To his existing titles, “King of Portugal and of the Algarves on this side and beyond the sea in Africa, and Lord of Guinea,” he added “Lord of the Conquest, Navigation and Commerce of Ethiopia, Arabia, Persia and India.” It was a bold claim to the monopoly of trade, and an intimation of Portuguese intentions: that the sea should be owned. Even before Gama’s return, the king had been laying down keels for the next departure. By the same token, he had ordered the suppression of all the sailing charts of Gama’s voyage on pain of death. Knowledge was wealth and power.
PART II
Contest
MONOPOLIES AND HOLY WAR
1500–1510
6
Cabral
March 1500–October 1501
JUST SIX MONTHS AFTER Gama’s return, a vastly larger fleet was ready to depart from the shores of Belém: thirteen ships, twelve hundred men, and a capital investment by Florentine and Genoese bankers, now eager to participate in the opportunities of the Indies. Manuel could be irresolute, easily swayed, and perverse, but the year 1500 resounded with messianic portents, the eyes of Europe were turning toward Lisbon, and this new armada, led by the fidalgo Pedro Álvares Cabral as captain-major, was a swift follow-up aimed at winning material advantages and the crusading admiration of the Catholic world.
Cabral’s expedition marked the shift from reconnaissance to commerce and then conquest. In the first five years of the sixteenth century, Manuel would dispatch a volley of overlapping fleets of increasing size, eighty-one ships in all, to ensure success in a life-and-death struggle for a permanent position in the Indian Ocean. It was a supreme national effort that called on all the available resources of manpower, shipbuilding, material provision, and strategic vision to exploit a window of opportunity before Spain could react. In the process, the Portuguese took both Europe and the peoples of the Indies by complete surprise.
Cabral was able to apply all the knowledge gained from Gama’s voyage. The timing of departure was no longer decided by the auspicious calculations of court astrologers but by the rhythm of the monsoon. The route was to follow the looping westward sweep undertaken by the ships in 1497, and to draw on the experience of pilots and captains such as Pêro Escobar, Nicholas Coelho, who had accompanied Gama, and Bartolomeu Dias himself. Cabral’s fleet carried back Malayalam-speaking Indians who had been taught Portuguese, with the aim of cutting out the Arabic-speaking middlemen. The Jewish convert Gaspar da Gama was aboard, knowledgeable about the intricate politics of the Malabar Coast, and another converted Jew, Master John, Dom Manuel’s physician, sailed as astronomer to the fleet, with the duty of studying the stars of the Southern Hemisphere for the purposes of future navigation. After the hideous embarrassment of the gifts offered at Calicut, Cabral carried choice items to entrance the samudri. It appears that the Portuguese persisted in believing that the samudri was a Christian king, albeit of an unorthodox kind, and in accord with the remit of the pope, a delegation of Franciscan friars accompanied the expedition to correct his errors, so that “the Indians…might more completely have instruction in our faith and might be indoctrinated and taught in matters pertaining to it, as befits the service of God and the salvation of their souls.”
Equally important was the commercial mission. The personnel, secretarial resources, and goods to establish a trading post in Calicut accompanied the expedition. With the cautionary example of the failures of the previous voyage, calculated attempts were made to load wares that might be attractive to the Malabar Indians. These included coral, copper, vermilion pigment, mercury, fine and coarse cloth, velvets, satins, and damasks in a whole range of colors, and gold coins. A highly experienced factor, Ayres Corrêa, who spoke Arabic, headed up this commercial initiative, supported by a team of clerks and secretaries to keep records and accounts. These literate subordinates—such as Pêro Vaz de Caminha, who wrote the first account of Brazil—provided some of the most riveting, and sometimes heartbreaking, narratives of the deeds of the Portuguese in the years ahead.
Cabral himself was no seaman, rather a diplomat with a carefully framed set of instructions, some of which had been drawn up by Gama to smooth the troubled waters in the wake of his expedition to Calicut and to establish peaceful and lucrative relations with the “Christian” samudri. Vastly better informed than his predecessor, Cabral could consult this multi-page document, which contained branching options in the case of a whole range of eventualities. It also directed him to take peremptory and high-handed action against perceived enemies that was likely to lead to trouble.
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The departure from Belém, on March 9, 1500, took place with full pageantry. There was a penitential Mass and the blessing of the royal banner, emblazoned with five circles symbolic of Christ’s wounds. This time Manuel was there in person to hand it to Cabral; then the procession was led by the friars, “and the king went with them to the beach, where all the people of Lisbon were gathered, each to see their husbands and sons,” and they watched the longboats casting off to the carracks offshore from the Restelo beach and the unfurling of sails. Manuel accompanied the fleet by boat to the mouth of the Tejo, where the departing ships felt the hit of the sea and swung their prows to the south.
Using Gama’s experience, the pilots took a more direct route. No stop was made as they passed through the Cape Verde Islands in fair weather. With sea conditions good, the sudden disappearance of one of the ships was a mystery and an omen. Their orders were to follow the previous looping course: “when they have the wind behind them make their way toward the south. And if they must vary their course let it be in the southwest direction. And as soon as they meet with a light wind they should take a circular course until they put the Cape of Good Hope directly east.” They must have enlarged their loop, because on April 21 they caught sight to the west “first of a large mountain, very high and round, and of other lower lands to the south of it, and of flat land, with great groves of trees.”
This landfall proved to be as peaceful as it was unexpected. The naked inhabitants were vividly different from the tribes encountered on the shores of Africa: “these people are dark, and they go nude without shame, and their hair is long, and they pluck their beards. And their eyelids and over their eyebrows are painted with figures of white and black and blue and red. They have the lip of the mouth, that is, the lower lip pierced.” It was noted that “women likewise go nude without shame, and they are beautiful of body, with long hair.” For the first time the Portuguese saw hammocks—“beds set up like looms.” The people appeared to be docile; they danced to Portuguese bagpipe music, were willing to mimic the actions of the Mass performed on the tropic shore, and became easily frightened, “like sparrows at a feeding place.” To the proselytizing, they seemed promising material for conversion.
This place, which they christened the Land of the True Cross, had plentiful fresh water and fruit, and strange animals. They ate the flesh of the manatee, “large as a barrel [with] a head like
that of a pig and small eyes, and it had no teeth and had ears the length of an arm”; they saw brilliantly colored parrots, “some as large as hens; and there are other very beautiful birds.” A ship was detached to sail back to Portugal with news for Manuel of this newly claimed land. It contained a letter from Master John, the astronomer, of his observations of the southern stars, and a frank account of the difficulty of taking sightings using the newfangled astronomical instruments and latitude tables: “it seems impossible to me to take the height of any star on the sea, for I labor much at it and however little the ship rolls, one errs by four or five degrees, so that it cannot be done except on land.” Another letter, from the secretary Pêro Vaz de Caminha, provided Manuel with a minutely observed and brilliantly written account of all the wonders of this new world and the Tupinamba people who inhabited it. It was the start of the history of Brazil, and one of the last things Caminha could have written. On May 2, after nine days of trade and replenishment, they set sail, leaving two convicts ashore. “They began to weep and the men of the land comforted them and showed that they pitied them.”
Cabral’s fleet was sailing latitudes farther south than Gama’s, with the estimation of cleanly rounding the Cape. On May 12, they observed a comet “with a very long tail in the direction of Arabia,” visible for over a week, which they took ominously. Disaster struck twelve days later. On May 24, they entered the high-pressure zone of the South Atlantic. The wind appeared to be steadily behind them when they were hit head-on by a squall. The fury and direction of the blast caught them totally unprepared: “so sudden that we knew nothing of it until the sails were across the masts.” In a flash “four ships were lost with all on board, without our being able to give them aid in any way.” Among those swallowed up by the sea was Bartolomeu Dias, somewhere off the cape that he had been the first to round, twelve years earlier. The remainder of the fleet was scattered into three groups and ran before the storm for twenty days without a sail raised.
Redrawn extract from a famous Portuguese world map, the Cantino Planisphere, smuggled out of the country around 1501. Detail shows the coast of Brazil for the first time, and its parrots “large as hens.”
The battered remnants, seven ships, finally regathered at Mozambique on June 20; an eighth, that of Diogo Dias, Bartolomeu’s brother, sighted Madagascar for the first time but failed to find the fleet and eventually hobbled back to Lisbon. The reception Cabral’s ships received along the east coast of Africa was barely better than before. The sultan of Mozambique, now wary of Portuguese cannons, was at least more amenable. They were able to water and obtain pilots to steer to Kilwa, the most important trading city on the coast, where the sultan greeted them without enthusiasm. Like the Muslims of Calicut, he had no need of interlopers on his commercial territory. They avoided Mombasa altogether. It was only at Malindi that they received a welcome; men were again ill with “the mouth sickness,” “whom the oranges made well,” and a pilot was secured for the crossing to India.
It was when they reached the Anjediva islands, four hundred miles north of Calicut, that the tenor of Cabral’s instructions became clear. These islands provided a frequent stopover for ships seeking supplies and water on their way to Calicut. Vasco da Gama had careened and replenished his vessels there; Cabral did likewise. It was also known that it was on the route for Arab vessels from the Red Sea—referred to by the Portuguese as the Mecca ships. Cabral was to do all he could to establish friendly relations with the samudri; but beyond his territory he was ordered to wage war against Arab shipping:
If you encounter ships belonging to the aforesaid Muslims of Mecca at sea, you must endeavor as much as you can to take possession of them, and of their merchandise and property and also of the Muslims who are in the ships, to your profit as best you can, and to make war upon them and do them as much damage as possible as a people with whom we have so great and so ancient an enmity.
Cabral was to inform the samudri of these orders. By now the Portuguese were fully aware of the real advantage of their gunnery. They were to pummel Arab ships with their cannons rather than engage them at close quarters. Pilots and captains, valuable human resources, were to be taken alive; directions for the passengers were more vague. At the worst “you shall put them all in one of the ships, the most dismantled that there is, and shall let them go in it and you shall sink or burn all the others.” These instructions, which would be freely interpreted, were effectively bipolar: to establish peaceful trade with the “Christian” samudri, giving to the Muslim traders within the harbor there a cordial welcome (“food and drink and all other good treatment”), while engaging in aggressive all-out war with his Muslim subjects once they had sailed beyond his shores. These instructions set the future pattern of Portuguese operations in the Indian Ocean and began an irreversible train of events. Cabral waited fifteen days at the Anjediva islands to ambush Arab shipping. None came. He sailed on to Calicut, presumably anchoring, according to the persnickety instructions, “with your ships close together and placed in good order, decorated with your banners and standards and as fine as you can make them.”
Since Gama’s visit, the old samudri had died; it was now his nephew who ruled the kingdom, but relations proved no easier. It became quickly apparent that the Malabars to whom they had taught Portuguese were useless as interpreters, since they were all of low-caste origin and forbidden to sully the king’s presence. The Portuguese opened, as before, with an aggressive demand for hostage taking. Cabral was under strict orders not to disembark without this precaution. It required several days of tetchy negotiations and standoffs to arrange an exchange by which the commander could land. Cabral followed his instructions to the letter, while the samudri was upset by the prospect of high-caste Hindus being detained on the sea, where, according to taboos, they could neither eat, drink, nor sleep. When some of them tried to escape by swimming, they were put belowdecks; Cabral’s men were imprisoned in retaliation.
All Cabral’s underlying instructions had a peremptory tone. The Portuguese believed that they came by permission of the pope and the will of God to secure the commerce of India. The magnificent gifts with which Cabral presented the samudri in his audience chamber were accompanied by fulsome claims of amity to a fellow Christian king—and rigid demands. They wanted restitution for goods left behind by Gama, preferential tax tariffs and low prices for spices, a secure trading post, and exemption from the common rule that the goods of a deceased merchant became the property of the local ruler. Cabral was to get the samudri to understand that the Portuguese must wage holy war on the Muslims once they were beyond his realms, “because it comes to us by direct succession,” and to ask him to expel those who were trading there altogether “because in this he would comply with his duty as a Christian king.” In return he would receive “all the profit which until now he has had from them, and much more.” Additionally, the party of Franciscans would correct his unfortunate doctrinal errors of faith, “as befits the service of God and the salvation of souls.” There was, as yet, a complete failure to comprehend the cultural and religious realities of the Indian Ocean.
It took two and a half months of awkward negotiation, standoffs, and feinted departure by Cabral—the tactics employed by Gama—before a commercial agreement and a station could be established for the trading of goods, headed by the factor Ayres Corrêa. There was suspicion on both sides, and the inability of the Portuguese to speak directly through the medium of Malayalam remained a serious problem. Corrêa only knew Arabic, so all communication with the samudri had to be through the agency of Muslim middlemen; his confidence in relying on intermediaries hostile to the Portuguese presence might have been misjudged.
That the Portuguese had the power to inflict damage was displayed in an act of bravado that probably misfired. The samudri wanted to acquire a valuable war elephant from a merchant in the port of Cochin, farther south; his offer to purchase it had been snubbed, but when a ship carrying the animal, along with others, sailed past his coast,
he asked the Portuguese to capture it. Cabral sent out a single caravel, the São Pedro, under Pêro de Ataíde. Initially the samudri was contemptuous of this effort—there were only seventy men on board—but Cabral had equipped the caravel with a large bombard. The Indian dhow was well armed and carried three hundred men, but Ataíde chased it up the coast. The Muslims on the dhow laughed at the tiny ship beside their overtopping craft until the caravel began to land deadly shots, severely damaging its hull and killing many on board. When the ship finally surrendered, it was sailed back to Calicut and the war elephants were handed over to the samudri with great ceremony. One beast had been killed in the attack and was eaten by the Portuguese sailors. This demonstration of what the strangers could do had a considerable impact up and down the Malabar Coast, but it might also have caused the samudri to regard them with fear: they had the power to compel.
Meanwhile, the loading of spices was proceeding slowly. After three months in Calicut, only two ships had been filled; it was apparent that the Arab merchants were in some way impeding the work, while their own ships seemed to be departing secretly with full cargoes. Cabral complained, and the samudri, caught between two rival interests, appeased his unwelcome guest by giving him permission to seize any Muslim ship leaving in this way. When it happened again, Cabral did just that.
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