Conquerors

by Roger Crowley

  Payo de Sousa was still intent on using his galley to free his commander’s ship. It was now that fear began to infect the fleet, dividing its sailors into those who would fight and those who would run away, and coloring the accounts they would give later. Many of those in the galley were wounded, the São Miguel would not budge, and the enemy was closing in. Some claimed afterward that the tow rope just snapped as the oarsmen attempted to heave the sinking São Miguel away; more likely, it was cut. The galley was swept downriver on the current; Sousa tried to spin it back for another attempt, but the men could not or would not do so. Frantic efforts were made by other ships to reverse and aid the stricken flagship, but they were too far downstream to help.

  Ayaz and Hussain sensed that it was time for the kill. The growing weight of water settled the tilting São Miguel lower and lower. The busy fustas and the carracks rained shots in. To the fidalgos, the imperative was to get Dom Lourenço away alive because “whether he survived or not was for the honor of Portugal.” They ordered the boatswain to prepare the ship’s boat with a complement of men still able to row. But Lourenço was not to be moved. He would fight and die. When his men became insistent, he threatened them with his halberd.

  Water was continuing to drain into the ship; there were only some thirty able-bodied men left aboard. Lourenço split those who could still stand into three groups, each under a captain, to attempt to defend the São Miguel: at the stern, the mainmast, and the forecastle, respectively. The boatswain’s nerve cracked. He untied the ship’s boat and made off on the current to the São António, where he lied to the faithful Pêro Barreto that he had been sent to ask for help. Barreto’s sailing ship was powerless against the current and the tide; climbing into the boat, he ordered the boatswain to the nearest galley, the São Cristóvão, which might have at least some chance of rowing back toward the stricken flagship. He begged the captain, Diogo Pirez, to do all he could, telling him “the survival of Dom Lourenço lay in his hands.” Pirez set about attempting to rouse his galley slaves into action. They were exhausted and refused to budge. Desperate and furious, Barreto began to belabor them with his sword. He killed seven before conceding the futility; turning to the free Portuguese, who similarly “wanted to row as little as possible,” he tried to force them into the rowing benches. It was hopeless. There was nothing more he could do but retire to his ship and hope that a shift in the wind might still push the São Miguel away. It was becoming more obvious by the minute that this would require a miracle.

  It was mayhem aboard the São Miguel. Shots from the fustas were smacking into the immobilized vessel; clouds of arrows buzzed and whined through the air. Thick gun smoke obscured the increasingly defenseless ship. The deck sloped at a steepening angle; some of the cannons were submerged; the powder supplies lay spoiled with the steady seep of the water. The defenders beat off one, two attempts to board. They “fought like men who wanted revenge before they died,” but the ship was being destroyed around them. The deck was a shambles, littered with dead and dying men, dismembered heads and legs, blood running down the planks, jagged timber splinters, ropes, discarded weapons, shouting and screaming.

  Lourenço, tall and conspicuous in bright armor, was an unmissable target. The ball from a light cannon severed his leg at the thigh. He started to hemorrhage uncontrollably. Still conscious, but with his life draining away, he asked to be sat in a chair at the foot of the mast. Shortly after, another shot smashed his chest and killed him. His servant Lourenço Freire, bending over his fallen captain and weeping, was shot down by his side. It was apparent to those left alive that the ship must fall. Desperate to prevent Lourenço’s body from being seized as a trophy of war, skinned, stuffed with straw, and paraded around the Islamic world—an unendurable coup—they dragged him down into the flooded hold, along with the body of his faithful servant.

  The Portuguese fought on. Men who could no longer walk propped themselves up and resolutely clasped their swords. The Muslims had pounded the São Miguel from a distance; now they closed in. A third, fourth, and fifth attempt to board were seen off. Many of Ayaz’s men were killed. By the sixth the ship had been reduced to a tableau of destruction. There was no answering fire. With shouts of triumph, the Muslims leaped aboard and rounded up the survivors. Conquest quickly turned to thoughts of plunder. The victors were eager to see what they could salvage from the sinking ship. Marching some of their captives forward at sword point, a hundred men descended into the flooded hold in search of booty. The vast throng of people caused the lower decks to collapse; pitched into the water in the dark, they all drowned.

  Eighteen remaining men, nearly all wounded, were taken prisoner. There was one final act of resistance. André Fernandez, a sailor from Porto, climbed up into the crow’s nest and defied all attempts to dislodge him from the top of the foundered vessel. He stayed there for two days, hurling stones and insults on those below. Finally Ayaz had to grant the gallant seaman a safe-conduct before he could be coaxed down.

  Hussain’s two carracks detached themselves from the wreck of the São Miguel and set out to pursue the other ships, anchored and watching from within and without the mouth of the river. Some of these cut their cables and fled ignominiously, south toward Cochin. Pêro Barreto, however, stood his ground, furled his sails, and prepared to fight. The Egyptian ships backed off.

  Ayaz was disappointed at being denied the prestige of taking Lourenço alive; he still hoped that the body might be retrieved. But the illustrious corpse, weighted down with its plate armor, had vanished, probably dragged out of one of the holes in the bottom of the ship into the Chaul River, and was never recovered. “And so ended Dom Lourenço,” wrote the chronicler Castanheda, “and the eighty Portuguese who died with him, among whom were João Rodrigues Pacanha, Jorge Pacanha, António de São Payo, Diogo Velho the fleet factor, and a brother of Pêro Barreto—and others whose names are not known.”

  —

  Honor, glory, fear, a greed for booty, and bad luck had inflicted this wound. The Portuguese could have destroyed the entire Egyptian fleet at a distance if they had followed the advice of their master gunner. But this was not the Portuguese way. As it was they sailed away, badly scarred. They had lost probably two hundred men at Chaul. The killing of the viceroy’s son conferred immense prestige on the sultan in Cairo, and on the valor of the Muslim world. When word of the victory over “the Europeans who infest the Indian Ocean” reached Cairo several months later, it was greeted ecstatically. “The sultan, enchanted with the news, ordered drums to be beaten for three whole days,” reported Ibn Iyas. “Hussain called for reinforcements to put an end to the remaining European forces.”

  Hussain certainly needed fresh manpower. The victory at Chaul had been largely pyrrhic. He had lost somewhere between six hundred and seven hundred men out of a total hardly exceeding eight hundred, and his fighters had come to fear the power of European gunnery. As for Ayaz, he refused to hand over the nineteen Portuguese prisoners to the Egyptian commander; he treated them well, ensured that their wounds were cared for, and showed them off to important visitors. He was wise and cautious enough to know that there would be further consequences of this battle. The prisoners were bargaining chips.

  The Portuguese ships fled toward Cochin to face the wrath and grief of the viceroy. They were thrown into further confusion by the appearance of three large vessels trailing in their wake. It was only as these ships closed that the seamen saw the Portuguese flags flying from their mastheads. These were the vessels of the captains who had mutinied against the command of Afonso de Albuquerque and were making their way to Cochin with their tale of complaint.

  14

  “The Wrath of the Franks”

  March–December 1508

  THE MUTINEERS WHO ACCOMPANIED the Chaul survivors back to Cochin had left a furious Albuquerque in Ormuz. He had only two ships; he was forced to abandon the siege ignominiously and sail back to Socotra to relieve the famished garrison. He returned to Ormuz in August in the ho
pe of finally taking the city, but he found his unfinished fort armed against him and the streets barred. He was compelled to withdraw for a second time.

  During the middle of 1508, letters were flying back and forth across the Indian Ocean, as well as reports back to Lisbon. Albuquerque wrote angrily to Almeida, still his superior until the end of 1508:

  If these men had not deserted me, in fifteen days Ormuz would have surrendered….I cannot imagine what grievances made them go! If they say I have ill-treated them I beg your lordship to have set down in writing what they say I did….Nevertheless, sir, [nothing] could absolve them from the crime and evil they have committed, deserting me in time of war…whatever punishment your lordship may give them—they deserve it!

  Almeida’s rebuke, in a letter that was never dispatched, probably expressed the bitterness at Lourenço’s death and the culpability of Albuquerque in failing to intercept the Mamluks: “Sir, I remind you that the principal end to which His Highness sent you was to guard the mouth of the Straits [of the Red Sea], so that spices from India couldn’t enter there, and that was totally changed by your sojourn in Ormuz and the Straits were abandoned.”

  Albuquerque was intelligent, fearless, incorruptible, and strategically brilliant—in all senses the king’s most loyal servant—but Manuel would prove too obtuse to fully appreciate him. His aloof, arrogant, obsessive, and somewhat egocentric character alienated many. In the second half of 1508, the desertion from Ormuz split opinion across the Portuguese ocean, as it has divided the subsequent judgments of history, and it led to factional infighting. The episode revealed Albuquerque often to be maladroit and isolated as a leader of men. As a conqueror, he had already proved himself formidable, but events at Ormuz had wounded him. He vowed never to trim his beard until the city should be taken back. It remained in his tally of scores to be settled.

  Beards were an issue in Cochin, too. Among the fidalgos, a man’s beard was a sacrosanct symbol of his manhood, status, and martial prowess. Paintings of the great Portuguese conquistadors portray these men standing proudly in almost identical postures: arms akimbo, dressed in black velvet and sleeves slashed with colored silk, their coats of arms and attributed titles painted in the backdrop, looking stern beneath long black beards like Mars, the Roman god of war. João de Nova, outraged at Albuquerque’s attack on his beard, solemnly preserved the ripped-out hairs in a piece of paper and carried them back to the viceroy as evidence of the insult. These relics made a powerful impression on a sympathetic noble audience.

  Almeida issued no punishment to the deserting captains. Instead he co-opted them into his fleet. Worse than that, he wrote a letter to Hwaga Ata, in Ormuz, apologizing for Albuquerque’s behavior, which the vizier gleefully showed to a stunned Albuquerque. But during 1508, Almeida had other things on his mind. The catastrophe at Chaul and the death of his son had marked the viceroy deeply. Strategically, he realized that the continued Rume presence in the sea threatened the very existence of the Portuguese project; personally, he had Lourenço to avenge. In his reported words: “he who eats the chicken also has to eat the cockerel, or pay the price.”

  —

  It took almost nine months to prepare a new campaign. First the monsoon, then the overriding requirement to load and dispatch the annual spice fleet delayed his plans. If Almeida was wounded by the news from Chaul, he was doubly hurt by the growing frostiness of Manuel’s tone. The viceroy had lost his master’s confidence. The king’s letter of 1507 contained a long list of grievances and peremptory commands, based on the seeping complaints of dissident captains and envious courtiers. Almeida was accused of acting beyond his authority, of maladministration, of failing to secure Malacca, of failing to keep the king informed. Albuquerque’s parallel mission within his area of jurisdiction had been a heavy blow for the viceroy. In 1508, he also learned that this was the man due to replace him at the year’s end. The expansion of Manuel’s strategic dreams and the time and distance lags had created a widening gap between the king’s priorities in Lisbon and Almeida’s interpretation of them in India.

  By the end of 1508, it was clear to the viceroy that the destruction of the Rume fleet was his overriding priority and his last opportunity before his term of office expired. By December he had gathered a formidable war fleet in Cochin of eighteen ships and twelve hundred men. These included the dissident captains Albuquerque had requested him to punish.

  On the eve of departure, Almeida wrote a lengthy letter to his king. The viceroy believed he was possibly composing his last will and testament, at once an expression of personal grief, a justification for his actions, a point-by-point rebuttal of the accusations leveled against him, an apology, and a preparation for death. It is the testament of a man worn down by work and duty. India used men up: the climate, the corruption, the distance from home, the hostility of surrounding enemies—all these were attritional factors of the Portuguese colonial experience:

  To the very high and mighty king, My Lord,

  I have a great desire to write to Your Highness because I cannot forbear to touch on matters that wound my soul and of which I have determined to leave a memory, whatever happens to me….My son is dead, as God willed and my sins deserve. The Venetians and the sultan’s Muslims killed him…as a result of this the Muslims in these parts are hopeful of great help. It seems to me that this year we cannot avoid a trial of strength with them, which is the thing I most desire, because it seems to me that with God’s help we have to remove them totally from the sea, so that they do not return to this land. And if Our Lord is served by my ending my days in this way, I will have obtained the rest I seek—to see my son in glory, where Our Lord has taken him in his mercy, then we die for him and for you.

  Signature of Francisco de Almeida

  There was a dire warning in the rationale for this venture: “there are more Muslims from Malacca to Ormuz than in the kingdom of Fez and Tunis—and all of them damaging to us.” He completed the letter in his cabin on December 5, 1508. Almeida was clear in his mind. He was ready for the final battle, which would decide the fate of the Portuguese in India, and he was prepared to die.

  The letter was ready for sealing when ships were spotted approaching the coast. Almeida’s fleet sailed out to fight. It was only as they drew near that they could pick out the Portuguese flags. It was Albuquerque finally coming to Cochin to claim his governorship. He had been at sea almost continuously for nearly two and a half years. His ship, the Cirne, was so rotten with worms that fish were swimming in the hold. It took thirty men working at the pumps day and night to keep it afloat.

  There followed an uncomfortable meeting between the two commanders. Initially it was friendly. Albuquerque had come politely to claim governorship of the Indies. Almeida pointed out that his term of office did not end until January and that he was preparing to sail for war. In some accounts Albuquerque offered to take the fleet and finish the job for him; in others he excused himself from Almeida’s offer to join the expedition: he was exhausted and would prefer to remain in Cochin. Probably he had no taste for accompanying the captains who had deserted him at Ormuz. The following morning, Almeida’s ships slipped anchor and set sail to hunt the Egyptian fleet.

  Terror and vengeance, a trial of strength. Almeida sailed up the west coast of India impelled by powerful forces both personal and strategic, and aware that a final confrontation with the forces of Islam was inevitable and pressing. The viceroy had been accused of being overly cautious in his interpretation of Manuel’s orders. In refusing to cede the governorship of India to Albuquerque, he was now openly disobeying them. He was convinced that a showdown with the Egyptian fleet was necessary for the security of the Portuguese enterprise. At the same time, he sought revenge. He had decided to take the law into his own hands, whatever the consequences for himself if he made it back to Lisbon.

  The Muslim “victory” at Chaul had inspired a new heart and hope that the Portuguese could be expelled from the Indian Ocean. The samudri was preparing to send sh
ips to join up with the fleet at Diu to finally uproot the cursed intruders. Yet up close, the Egyptian-led coalition was divided and uneasy. Hussain knew that it was only a matter of time before the Portuguese came again, and he was not sanguine. He had experienced European cannon fire at close quarters. His fleet had been severely damaged at Chaul; he was short of men and short of the money to pay them, and his alliance with Malik Ayaz was fractious. Retreat, and facing the sultan’s wrath, was not an option. All Hussain could do was hope for reinforcements. He ardently desired to kill the Portuguese captives being held by Ayaz and send their flayed corpses, stuffed with straw, to Cairo as firsthand proof of his successes. But Ayaz was not cooperating. He kept the prisoners carefully guarded and pondered how to manage the situation, caught between the fervor of the Islamic world and the ferocity of its enemies.

  A demonstration of their power was not long in coming. With the reinforcements recently arrived from Lisbon, Almeida had the best fleet seen in the Indian Ocean since the withdrawal of the Chinese. And the viceroy was in a grim mood, raiding the coast as he sailed north, demanding submission from the tiny trading states as he passed, and food for his crews. By the end of December 1508, he had reached Dabul, which Lourenço had disastrously failed to attack two years earlier, and which he suspected of being in league with the Egyptian fleet. On the last day of the year, he brought his ships into the mouth of the river, carefully sounding his way, intent on retribution.

  Dabul was a wealthy Muslim trading port—and well protected by a double wooden wall, fronted by a ditch, and equipped with reasonable artillery. There were four Gujarati merchant ships in the harbor at the time, doubling Almeida’s ire. On the eve of attack, the viceroy gathered his captains and delivered an incendiary message. The asymmetry of numbers between the Portuguese and their perceived enemies justified extreme methods. Almeida reminded his captains that they needed not just to take the city but to “instill terror in the enemy that you’re going after so that they remain completely traumatized—you know that they’re presently puffed up and haughty at the death of my son and the others.”