Conquerors

by Roger Crowley

  With the Sodrés’ departure, the samudri acted promptly. He advanced with a large army toward Cochin and dispatched a peremptory letter to its raja, pointing out the evil consequences of offering “a place to the Christians, from whom we have received so much harm,” and demanding that he hand them over. Otherwise the samudri was “determined to enter your land and to destroy it, and to seize the Christians with all their things.”

  This thunderous message was met with a refusal. The raja had thrown in his lot with the Christians and would live or die by his decision. The Portuguese interpreted this steadfastness as an act of high chivalry, for which, in the long run, he would receive scant reward. The samudri had probably assessed the consequences of siding with the incomers more realistically, but the raja stood firm. He sent out his troops to do or die under his nephew and heir, Narayan. After some initial success, the samudri bribed Narayan’s men into disaffection and their leader was killed; the territory of Cochin was overrun. According to the laws of the Hindu military caste, the two hundred survivors swore themselves to ritual death. They shaved off all their hair and advanced toward Calicut, killing everyone they met until they had been hacked down to the last man.

  But Narayan had bought the king and the Portuguese time. They retreated from Cochin to the offshore island of Vypin. The samudri burned the town but was unable to reach the island as the monsoon weather set in; he fell back on Calicut as rain and rough seas started to batter the Malabar Coast, leaving a small garrison. He swore to return in August and destroy all who resisted. The Portuguese presence in India was hanging on by its fingertips, but the raja had confidence that their ships would return with the regular rhythm of the sailing season. Meanwhile, the Sodrés, intent on plundering Muslim shipping from the Red Sea, had been shipwrecked on a small island. Vicente was drowned; his brother Brás, deeply loathed for his greed, survived but was then probably killed by his own men. To pious chroniclers it was a just comeuppance: “It seems clear that the loss of the two brothers, because of the sins they committed, is the result of their not helping the king of Cochin, and leaving [their fellow] Portuguese in such great danger.”

  With the Sodrés now unable to help, the small Portuguese colony and the king of Cochin, along with his immediate followers, remained holed up on Vypin, awaiting rescue. At the start of September 1503, their faith was rewarded by the arrival of two ships from Lisbon, the first installment of the year’s spice convoy, commanded by Francisco de Albuquerque. Hard on his heels a fortnight later, four more ships reached the island. They carried two of the most talented commanders Portugal was ever to produce.

  The captain of this second squadron was Francisco’s cousin Afonso de Albuquerque, the man destined to irreversibly alter the course of events in the Indian Ocean, to shape and shock the world. He was probably over forty in 1503 and had behind him a lifetime of military experience in the service of the crown. Of striking appearance—lean and hawk-nosed, with shrewd eyes and a waist-length beard that was already turning white—he had fought the Ottoman Turks in Italy, the Arabs in North Africa, and the Castilians in Portugal; he had seen his brother cut down beside him in Morocco and campaigned alongside João II as a young prince. Like Gama, he had imbibed the honor code of the fidalgos, with its rooted hatred of Islam and its unbending ethic of retribution and punitive revenge. He was unmarried, though with an illegitimate son, fiercely loyal to the crown, incorruptibly honest, and utterly sure of his abilities: to sail ships, command fleets and armies, build fortresses, and rule empires. “I am a man who, if you entrusted me with a dozen kingdoms, would know how to govern them with great prudence, discretion and knowledge,” he once wrote to Manuel, who was initially wary of him. “This is not because of any special merits of my own but because I am very experienced in such matters and of an age to tell good from bad.” He was a man in a hurry, possessed of demonic energy, and he did not suffer fools. Afonso divided people, but he shared Manuel’s sense of charismatic mission and world empire. He evidently believed that his moment had come.

  Afonso de Albuquerque

  With him, as captain of one of the ships, came the equally talented Duarte Pacheco Pereira; seaman, leader, and tactical genius, geographer and experimental scientist, savant and mathematician. Pereira had been one of the cosmographers tasked with hammering out the treaty of Tordesillas in 1494; a man who may have secretly been to Brazil before it was officially discovered; who produced the first written account of the chimpanzee’s ability to use tools; who calculated the degree of the meridian arc to a level of accuracy unrivaled at the time; who recorded the tides of the Indian Ocean and was able to put this knowledge to good use; a man whom the epic poet Camões later came to laud as the Portuguese Achilles—“with a pen in one hand, a sword in the other.”

  King Manuel had given neither of the Albuquerques overall command, and relations between the two quickly deteriorated. The highly competitive Afonso had hurried to depart from Lisbon first, but his fleet had been hit by a storm and lost a merchant ship. He arrived in a foul mood to find Francisco already in place and basking in the glory of having put the samudri’s garrison in Cochin to flight and restored the raja to his throne. He had also bought up the available stocks of pepper in the city.

  Strained relations were made worse by the unexpectedness of the situation. Their orders from Manuel were simply to buy spices and return. Instead they found their trading post under threat; the Sodrés, charged with protecting it, dead; and the certainty that the samudri would return in due course to destroy it. The resident agent and his companions gave due notice that they would not stay unless provided with a secure fortress and a garrison. It was therefore necessary to deviate from the king’s written instructions, and Francisco had already persuaded the reluctant king of Cochin to grant them a site and provide both wood and manpower for the task. The fort was to be built at the tip of Cochin’s long peninsula, guarding the mouth of a large inner lagoon and a network of rivers and towns in the hinterland.

  The construction of a wooden fort was hurried forward. “Every ship contributed to the outfitting,” according to Giovanni da Empoli, a young Tuscan who accompanied the voyage as a commercial agent. The primitive fort, square in shape, with a stockade of earth and wood and a rough stone keep, took little more than a month to construct. It was, according to Empoli, “very strong…with deep ditches and moats around it, and well garrisoned and fortified.” It marked a significant milestone in the Portuguese imperial adventure. This was the first solid foothold on Indian soil, and its completion was auspiciously celebrated with all the ceremony that could be mustered on All Saints’ Day, November 1, 1503. Dressed in their finest clothes, with flags flying from the walls, they attended a solemn Mass. The raja came, splendidly arrayed on his elephant and attended by his warriors, to view the finished edifice.

  Although they had been careful to keep any internal disagreements hidden from their Hindu allies, the atmosphere between the two Albuquerques was poisonous. They quarreled about everything—the share of spices, the speed of the building work, even the fort’s name. One of the friars, horrified by these rifts, was brought in to arbitrate. Francisco wanted the fort to be called Albuquerque Castle; Afonso, tied into messianic ideas of Manuel’s kingship, wanted to name it after him. Eventually Afonso prevailed, but his intemperance, competitiveness, and impatience, which sometimes compromised his judgment, were already a hallmark of his leadership.

  Hostilities with the samudri guttered and flared; the two sides agreed to a cynical truce, the Portuguese to make up their loads of pepper along the Malabar Coast for the Lisbon return, the samudri to plan a fresh strike. The peace was quickly broken by the Portuguese, who attacked a spice consignment without justification, and the war restarted. The samudri, however, was biding his time. He knew, as certain as the seasonal rhythm of the winds, that early in 1504 the bulk of their laden spice fleet must sail home. The Portuguese knew this, too. In Calicut, the samudri began to assemble a new army to finally drive the Por
tuguese out.

  As January 1504 advanced, the need for the Albuquerques’ departure was pressing. The easterly winds would soon fail. Manuel had ordered that the whole fleet should sail together, but in the event this did not happen. In Cannanore, Francisco was still loading spices at a leisurely pace, and Afonso would wait no longer. On January 27 he set sail, leaving his cousin dallying. Francisco finally departed on February 5. They left behind just a tiny force to guard Fort Manuel and the kingdom of Cochin: ninety men and three small ships under the command of Duarte Pacheco Pereira. All had volunteered. It seemed to those sailing away to be a sure assignation with death. “God rest the souls of Duarte Pacheco and his men” was the word on their lips, and they crossed themselves as the Malabar Coast vanished from sight. The king of Cochin looked aghast at the fragile promises of his allies. It would be eight months before further reinforcements could reach him from the ends of the earth.

  The return voyage of Afonso’s ships was typical of the enduring hardships of the India venture: storms, contrary winds, shortages of supplies, huge swings of fortune. The Tuscan Giovanni da Empoli left a vivid account of a nightmare voyage, becalmed for fifty-four days off the Guinea coast:

  with little water…and no wine or other ship’s stores; the sails and everything else were worn out, so that people began to fall ill, and in five days we threw overboard from our ship seventy-six people, and there were only nine, and no more of us, who remained on the ship…we were in complete despair. The ship was sinking because of the ship-worm which consumed it; there was no hope of salvation except with the help of God…it was so bad I cannot find words to describe it.

  Somehow they made it back to Lisbon at the last gasp.

  The wind was against us, and the black people we had brought, as soon as they felt the cold, began to die, and once again, on the brink of entering port, with a contrary wind we were on the point of sinking. We were in such a bad state that, if we had had to stay half a day more, we would have gone to the bottom at the mouth of the river.

  They were luckier than they knew. Francisco’s flotilla departed from Cannanore on February 5. He was never seen again, his ships swallowed up somewhere in the Southern Ocean. It was Afonso’s account of deeds done that reached the king’s ears.

  —

  Back in India, the samudri started his advance on Cochin in March 1504. He had assembled a vast army, some fifty thousand men, composed of troops drawn from his own territories and those of his vassal cities, comprising a large contingent of Nayars, the military caste of the Malabar Coast, supported by the Muslim community of Calicut, along with the baggage and paraphernalia required: three hundred war elephants, artillery, and a force of some two hundred ships to close the port of Cochin. The raja judged the situation hopeless. He begged the Portuguese to catch the winds and winter on the coast of Arabia, rather than die pointlessly, presumably leaving him to make a humble submission to the lord of Calicut.

  Duarte Pacheco Pereira, however, had come for the fight. He understood perfectly what was at stake: lose Cochin, and the other friendly ports would submit to Calicut. The whole Portuguese venture would be over. He had already spent some months fighting the samudri’s forces during the Albuquerques’ stay and had had time to study the terrain. Cochin was situated on a long tongue of land on the rim of the ocean, backed by a lagoon. The region, peppered with mudflats, islands, and tidal fords fringed with palm trees, was a complex labyrinth, ideal terrain for ambush. Pereira would not back off.

  His response was forthright. He told the king that he would defeat the samudri or “we will die serving you if necessary.” Cochin was to be a last stand—a Portuguese Thermopylae. Pereira had at best 150 men and five ships—one carrack, two caravels, and two sizable ship’s boats. The Cochinese could nominally call on eight thousand men, though it was doubtful how many would actually fight for an unpopular cause. The raja thought that Pereira had taken leave of his senses. Yet when a large relief fleet reached Cochin in the autumn of 1504, they found the Portuguese commander and nearly all his men alive and the samudri in ignominious retreat.

  In between, Pereira had pulled off a brilliant strategic victory. He had realized that access to Cochin, situated on its peninsula surrounded by saltwater creeks and channels, depended on the crossing of a few narrow fords, according to the tides. By close observation, Pereira, probably the first man to scientifically study the relationship between tides and lunar phases, was able to predict when each ford would be passable and to shuttle his few ships and men accordingly to meet points of attack. The fords were stockaded with lines of sharpened stakes chained together and protruding from the water, and his ships were heavily planked with defensive wooden screens. The samudri’s military operations were tactically inflexible and heavily leaked. At each attack across a narrow ford, Portuguese firepower shredded the wading Nayars as they attempted to hack their way through the stockades. So successful was Pereira in restoring local morale that when the Nayars encountered low-caste peasants working in the paddy fields, they were attacked with hoes and spades and fled in terror of ritual contamination. Over four months the samudri mounted seven major assaults; they all failed. As casualties from battle and cholera mounted, he lost heart. In July 1504 he finally withdrew, with massive loss of prestige, abdicated his throne, and retired into the religious life. His nephew succeeded him.

  The fleet that relieved Cochin in the autumn of 1504 was substantial: fourteen carracks, including five large and newly built ones, carrying a substantial complement of soldiers and sailors and great firepower. With news of the samudri’s abject defeat resounding along the Malabar Coast, the new arrivals made a powerful impression on the trading cities and their rulers. The Portuguese were evidently invincible. Defections to their cause grew; another of the samudri’s vassals, the king of Tanur, pledged his allegiance to the Portuguese when the fleet reached Cochin. The mood among the Muslims of Mecca darkened. One by one, the trading ports were being closed to their business.

  The implacable opposition of the Portuguese, the ferocity of their actions, the mobility of their fleets, the superiority of their firepower, and their relish for the fight seemed an irresistible force. Not just down the Malabar Coast but along the palm-fringed sands of East Africa, a dejection came upon the traveling merchants of Cairo and Jeddah. Toward the end of 1504, dispirited by the turn of events, a large number decided to take their families, their goods, and their wares and return to Egypt. On the last day of the year, Lopes’s fleet caught and burned this convoy and killed possibly two thousand Muslims. It was a final blow to the samudri’s alliance with his commercial allies from the Arab world. “And with this defeat the king felt himself to be ruined; henceforward the good times could not be restored, because he had lost so much, and the Moors were all going away from Calicut; because there was such great hunger there that the city was being depopulated.” The great days for Calicut were drawing to a close. The Portuguese entered the new year of 1505 with the confident expectation of a permanent occupation of the Malabar Coast. Manuel was already planning the next voyage with just this in mind.

  The repercussions of this rupture in the traditional trading system were being felt in ever-widening circles. The Venetians had hoped that distance, disease, and shipwreck would defeat the Portuguese spice route. The twenty-four-thousand-mile round-trip, with convoys now sailing out of the Tejo in March each year, was an extraordinary feat of seamanship. It was also highly attritional. It was not for nothing that people stood on the beach at Restelo, weeping and watching the departing sails until they vanished. Of the 5,500 men who went to India between 1497, on Gama’s first voyage, and 1504, some 1,800—35 percent—had not returned. The majority of these had gone down in shipwrecks. Yet the rewards were excellent. Vasco da Gama’s first voyage had covered the capital investment sixty times over. It was calculated that the crown was making a million cruzados a year after costs—a vast sum—and the smell of spices on the quays of Lisbon attracted avid recruits to the boats. Man
y had nothing to lose. Portugal was poor in natural resources, peripheral to the political and economic hubs of Europe; the lure of the East was irresistible. The French king Francis I came to dub Manuel “the Grocer King,” an envious gibe at the vulgar pretensions of a petty monarch who lived on trade, yet this aspect of the Portuguese monarchy was as innovative within medieval Europe as the voyages themselves. The kings of Portugal were royal merchant capitalists, sucking in large monopolistic profits.

  Shipwreck losses haunted the Portuguese imagination.

  This fountain of money enabled Manuel to remake central Lisbon in a new image. In 1500, space was cleared on the banks of the Tejo for a vast new royal palace that overlooked the river, and from which the king could watch the wealth of the Indies sail in. The Riverside Palace was both a statement of imperial splendor and a center of commercial activity—the two were linked in royal identity. Attached to it were the administrative infrastructure departments: the India House, the Customs House, the departments that dealt with the import of wood and slaves and trade with Flanders, the royal mint, and the arsenal. In the early years of the new century Lisbon had become a world on the move, one of the most dynamic centers of Europe, electric with money and energy, and run as a price-fixing venture by the crown itself. Much of the commercial and technological infrastructure was purchased from abroad. Portuguese sailing skills were unrivaled, but the country lacked an entrepreneurial middle class. As well as cannon founders and gunners, it required knowledgeable resident agents in the Indies to buy and sell, and in Lisbon and across Europe it needed distributors, retailers, bankers, and investors with business acumen. It attracted an influx of human capital from Florence, Genoa, Bologna, Antwerp, Nuremberg, and Bruges.