Conquerors

by Roger Crowley

  Upstream, there was fierce fighting between the rival galleys. The weight of gunfire cleared two Muslim galleys; once these were boarded, the Portuguese managed to turn their cannons on the remainder. Eventually the shots pouring into the flanks of the low-slung Egyptian vessels, pinioned to the shore with only forward-facing cannons, proved overwhelming, killing their chained slaves at the oars. The crews abandoned ship and made for land.

  Out in mid-channel the viceroy, dressed magnificently in a suit of mail and a superbly worked helmet and breastplate, observed the battle from the Frol de la Mar. The Frol was the largest and most magnificent ship in the Portuguese fleet, triple-decked and heavily gunned, though now eight years old and feeling its age. It leaked and required continuous pumping. At the start of the battle, eighteen of its cannons opened up a mighty broadside on the Gujarati carracks. The vibrations of the guns shaking the four-hundred-ton vessel were so violent that it began to come apart at the seams. The danger of foundering became a sudden cause of concern—the sinking of the flagship could have turned the tide of battle. Its survival was attributed to divine miracle; the rope in the seams swelled with the water, stanching all leaks so that it remained sealed and required no further pumping.

  With the battle raging, Ayaz finally felt compelled to order the commander of the fustas and small dhows, the one-eyed Sidi Ali, “the Crooked,” to sweep down on the Portuguese from behind. The Frol, however, was specifically positioned to snuff out this threat. The armada, rowing furiously at combat speed, attempted to hurtle past the flagship, but the wind and the current slowed their progress, and as they came abreast of the Frol they presented an easy target. Three heavy shots hit them as they rowed past, shattering the front line, splintering the vessels, and hurling men into the water; chaos broke out in the closely packed formation. Those coming up behind were unable to avoid the debris and smashed into the broken ships; three more shots caught the whole group. The attack disintegrated. Those behind backpedaled and half-turned to avoid further catastrophe; a few braver ships, judging that they could row past before the Portuguese fired again, kept going, but the speed at which the gunners reloaded took them by surprise. This essential part of Hussain’s plan collapsed.

  The Muslims had fought bravely, but their lack of trained fighters, the professional skill of the Portuguese, and the weight of their artillery made the outcome inevitable. One by one, their ships were captured or abandoned. Hussain’s flagship eventually surrendered, by which time Hussain himself had slipped away in a small boat and ridden off. Other vessels, in some of which the soldiers could not swim, cut their forward anchor cables and tried to haul themselves back to shore. Again the Portuguese launched their small boats to stab and massacre men in the water, so that “the sea was red with the blood of the dead.” Some of the small Calicut dhows managed to get out to sea and away down the Malabar Coast with the doleful news, and the largest of the Gujarati carracks, a twin-decked ship of some six hundred tons, manned by four hundred men, held out all day. It was pulled too close to shore for the Portuguese ships to board, and its hull was extremely stout. It took a sustained general bombardment by the whole fleet to sink it, sending it to settle on the bottom with its superstructure still above the water. Its crew fled to land.

  At the day’s end, Almeida went from ship to ship, embracing his captains, inquiring about the wounded. In the morning there was a ceremonial gathering on the flagship to the sound of trumpets, then a counting of the costs. Numbers varied between thirty and a hundred dead, and perhaps three hundred wounded—mainly by wooden shrapnel and arrows—but the victory had been complete. The Egyptian fleet had been annihilated. All its ships had been sunk, captured, or burned. Apart from Hussain and twenty-two who fled with him, few of the Rumes survived to tell the tale. According to Portuguese sources, thirteen hundred Gujaratis had died, and an unknown number from Calicut. Three of their carracks, including the flagship, were incorporated into the Portuguese fleet, along with two galleys and six hundred pieces of artillery. The battle had been devastating.

  The morning also brought a small fusta flying a white flag. Ayaz played his cards cautiously to the end. He promptly returned the Portuguese captives he had been so carefully nurturing since Chaul, all dressed magnificently in silk and supplied with purses stuffed with gold. He offered the unconditional surrender of Diu and vassalage to the king of Portugal and sent the fleet plenteous gifts of food.

  Almeida did not want Diu; he considered it impossible to defend with his existing force. He demanded substantial compensation from the Muslim merchants who had subsidized the fleet in Diu, which he got, and terrible revenge. Since Lourenço’s death, the viceroy had lost any reasonableness; his reputation was to be tarnished by pitiless and sadistic paybacks. Ayaz had to surrender all the Rumes he was sheltering in the city to a variety of ghastly fates. The governor smoothly acquiesced. Some had their hands and feet chopped off and were burned alive in a great pyre; others were tied to the mouths of cannons and blasted to pieces or put shackled into captured vessels that were sunk by gunfire. Some were compelled to kill each other. The city gates were decorated with bloody rosaries of dismembered body parts “because through these gates the Muslims who had killed his son had gone in and out.” Some he kept alive on the ships. The wrath of the Franks would be remembered for a long time. It was met in the Islamic world with stoical grief: “These cursed interlopers sailed away victorious, such being the decree of God most high, and such his will which is indisputable, and against which nothing can prevail.”

  Almeida sailed back to Cochin as he had come, traumatizing the coast as he went. The seaports they passed were treated to volleys of heads and hands; at Cannanore, captives were lynched by the sailors and hanged from the masts; more corpses adorned the yardarms as he made his triumphant return into Cochin to the blaring of trumpets. The royal standards of the Mamluk sultan were dispatched to Portugal and hung in the convent of the Order of Christ at Tomar. If the outcome of Diu was perhaps inevitable, its consequences were profound. It destroyed once and for all the credibility of the Mamluk sultans and Muslim hopes that the Portuguese could be swept from the sea. The Franks were in the Indian Ocean to stay.

  When Almeida stepped ashore at Cochin to the celebration of his victory, Albuquerque was waiting on the beach. He had come to applaud and to claim his command. Almeida brushed past him. He refused to give up his post, citing that it was too late in the year for him to sail home and that the king had told him to govern until he sailed. Behind this lay fierce factionalism surrounding the Ormuz mutineers and the fiery reputation of Albuquerque. Charges were laid against Albuquerque that he was mentally and morally unfit to govern. “In my opinion,” one of his enemies testified, “India is now in greater peril from Afonso de Albuquerque than ever from the Turks!” Men threatened to leave India rather than serve under him; an indictment was got up against him for misgovernance. In September, Almeida ordered him out of Cochin; the fortress elephant demolished his house, and the ship carrying him to Cannanore was so worm-eaten that Albuquerque thought they were trying to kill him. At Cannanore he was effectively confined to prison, though the Portuguese administration there was largely sympathetic to his cause. Albuquerque seems to have borne this situation with considerable patience; quick to anger, he was also quick to forgive. When João de Nova, the man whose beard he had abused and who had defected, died in poverty that year, he paid the funeral expenses.

  The situation was resolved only when the year’s spice fleet reached Cannanore, in November, commanded by the young but highly self-important Dom Fernando Coutinho, marshal of Portugal, a man who came with full royal authority. He carried Albuquerque with him back to Cochin and demanded the handover of power. Albuquerque finally assumed the governorship of India, to the alarm of many of his subordinates. The next day Almeida departed from India forever, to face the king’s displeasure back in Lisbon.

  A fortune-teller had predicted that Almeida would not pass the Cape alive; at sea he spent the
days composing his will. He left alms to prisoners, a large diamond to the king, money for his servants, and freedom for his slaves. In March 1510, his ship rounded the Cape without incident, then put in to Table Bay to take on wood, water, and supplies, and there he was killed in a pointless and obscure battle with the Khoikhoi that probably arose over the attempt of his men to steal some cattle and possibly to abduct children. The Portuguese must have been caught off guard. It was, by all accounts, a major disaster. Fifty men died that day, including a dozen captains and high-ranking nobles, almost as many as may have lost their lives at the battle of Diu.

  Almeida’s epitaph was said to have been placed in a church in Portugal:

  HERE LIES

  DOM FRANCISCO DE ALMEIDA

  VICEROY OF INDIA

  WHO NEVER LIED OR FLED.

  But his mortal remains lay buried in an impromptu grave on the African seashore.

  PART III

  Conquest

  THE LION OF THE SEA

  1510–1520

  16

  The Doors of the Samudri

  January 1510

  IF ALBUQUERQUE THOUGHT THAT the departure of Almeida would at last free him to fulfill his duties as governor of India, he was mistaken. Dom Fernando Coutinho might have been a relative, but he was also marshal of Portugal, the highest-ranking official yet to visit the Indies, an important personage at the royal court and much in favor there. He now laid before Albuquerque trumping orders from the king, namely to destroy Calicut, still a thorn in the side of the Portuguese and a continuous prick to royal pride. Coutinho had come with a large fleet and the authorization to act independently of the governor, who was requested to help.

  This was to be Coutinho’s show. The marshal was young, headstrong, dismissive of advice, desperate for glory, and somewhat corpulent. He had promised to return to the king with a souvenir of the mission with which he had been charged. Overlooking the beach at Calicut, the samudri had an ornately decorated pavilion called the Cerame, “made of richly carved wood,” to which he came to enjoy the pleasure of the sea breeze, and which was adorned with fabulously beautiful doors, embellished with the images of “animals and birds on plates of silver and gold.” This exotic object of desire, much talked up in the Portuguese court, was to be the trophy of the heroic deed that Coutinho would undertake. He had effectively come for the purpose of military tourism. He would show the old India hands how to settle the Calicut problem at a stroke.

  There was some justification for believing this to be a propitious moment. Spies from Cochin informed the marshal that the samudri was ill and out of the city; the visiting merchant ships, drawn up on the beach before departure to Arabia, were vulnerable. Their destruction would severely damage the samudri’s tax revenues—his sole source of wealth. At the council of war to discuss the plan, Albuquerque remained unconvinced. Privately he was temperamentally averse to joint operations. He felt that while Calicut was at peace with Cochin, as at present, it was vastly to the advantage of the Portuguese pepper trade, and he knew more about the tactical difficulties of the assault than the marshal. Calicut had no harbor of its own, and the beach in front of it was a difficult landing place. Currents ran along its shores, and the sea could be boisterous. Coutinho sharply reminded him that “the council of war couldn’t act contrary to the king’s orders. It was only to decide how the attack was to be organized. It had no other purpose.” And he threw in the rallying call to all the captains present that might serve both for the most magnificent moments of Portuguese courage and for its most disastrous military misjudgments, namely that “the best thing in all the world, after the love of God, was honor.” “Honor”: a word that rang down through all the decades of Portuguese conquest, resistance, and defeat. Albuquerque was outvoted.

  There was seldom any element of surprise possible in military operations along the Malabar Coast. The samudri quickly got wind of the large fleet at Cochin and guessed its intentions. He sent an ambassador to sue for peace on the best terms he could. Whatever sympathy Albuquerque had for the overture—and he had good reason to trust this particular visitor—he had frankly to admit that the man had come too late. The ambassador was too frightened to return to Calicut with bad news. He elected to remain with the Portuguese. On the last day of December 1509, the fleet sailed—some twenty ships and sixteen hundred men, as well as twenty small boats from Cochin, carrying sailors familiar with the sea conditions at Calicut to help with disembarkation.

  By the evening of January 2, 1510, the fleet was rocking off the city’s beach. The city lay before them, a long ribbon of sand lined with fishermen’s straw huts; behind, shops and warehouses, then whitewashed merchants’ houses glimpsed among palm trees, nobles’ houses of wood and stone, minarets and the roofs of Hindu temples. Calicut sprawled over a large area and had no visible defenses; it was a labyrinth of narrow lanes between high walls, winding back on rising ground to the foothills of the Ghats, where the samudri’s palace was situated, some three miles from the sea.

  Calicut from the sea, backed by the Western Ghats

  The intruders were not unexpected. In his absence the king had appointed a regent, who had assembled all the Nayars at his disposal, as well as archers and whatever artillery he had; the Cerame, the marshal’s ardent objective, prominently situated a bowshot back from the water, had been fortified with barricades and a number of bombards, and armed men were positioned among the houses behind, ready to defend it.

  In the marshal’s cabin, the captains met to plan the attack. They would land in two groups—Albuquerque’s “India” men to the south of the Cerame, Coutinho’s “Portugal” force to the north—and fall upon it in a pincer movement, each contingent to be led by its commander, who would have the honor of stepping ashore first with their banners, before the rest of the men. No one was to touch the Cerame’s doors, because these were for Manuel. Then they would take the city gates and fall on Calicut.

  Throughout the night the troops waited, sharpening their weapons, receiving general absolution from the priests, and commending their souls to God. Alongside these preparatory rituals for battle there was a widespread mood of covetous expectation. The city was held to be fabulously rich, and the prospect of easy plunder whetted appetites. Two hours before dawn, Coutinho lit the signal fire on his ship; the men climbed into longboats and were rowed toward the shore. A bright moon outlined the land before them, the houses among the palm trees, the copper roofs of the temples, and the spikes of the mosques. Albuquerque’s force of about six hundred men landed close to the Cerame and drew up in good order. They proceeded to march toward it. The marshal’s men, however, were carried along the shore by the current and found themselves at some distance from their objective.

  Albuquerque was expected to wait for Coutinho, but his men, spurred on by the lure of plunder, could not be restrained. Discipline broke down. Rather than risk a shambles, Albuquerque ordered the trumpets to sound and raised the battle cry “Santiago!” to signal a full-scale attack. The Nayars rushed out of the houses near the Cerame with loud shouts, and fierce fighting ensued. From the vantage point above the beach, the cannons opened up with a deafening roar, but the inexperienced gunners fired too high. Relentlessly the Portuguese pushed on with their pikes; they stormed the barricades and killed a number of men. The rest turned and ran back among the houses. Meanwhile, men with axes were prying the famous doors out of their frames. They were carried down the beach and loaded onto a ship. To stop the men from proceeding into the town before the marshal and to forestall any sudden counterattacks, Albuquerque put a guard on the entrance to the streets.

  The marshal was proceeding slowly up the beach. He could hear the shouts and the boom of guns, see fire rising from burning houses. By the time he arrived, the doors were gone. Coutinho was beside himself with fury. He could only believe that Albuquerque had deprived him of his rightful triumph and snatched the glory himself. He rounded petulantly on the governor. Albuquerque attempted to soothe him with pacif
ic words, larded with talk of glory and honor: “You are the first captain to have landed men and entered the city of Calicut, and you have gained what you sought—the doors of the Cerame are now on board.” This had no visible effect other than to reduce Coutinho to an apoplexy of rage. “What is this Afonso de Albuquerque?” he spat back. “Your words are nothing but a puff of air…” He would not be appeased: “This honor is yours…I don’t want any of it. I’d be ashamed to go and fight naked little savages who flee like goats.” In a fit of petulance, he ordered the famous doors to be thrown into the sea, took off his helmet, handed it to his page together with his shield and lance, and demanded back from him a red cap and a stick. Calling Gaspar de Almeida, the interpreter, he ordered him to show the way to the king’s palace, from which he would take other doors with greater honor than those that had been stolen from him on the beach. And “the king my lord will know that with a stick in my hand and a cap on my head, I went to the king’s houses…in this so highly famed Calicut, which contains nothing but little black men.”

  In this scene, the chronicler Gaspar Correia pictured Albuquerque leaning on his lance, his shield dropped at his side, surrounded by fighting men and trying to reason with the marshal. He was now alarmed. The troops were tired, and the enraged Coutinho had no idea what he was proposing. Albuquerque tried pleading with him:

  May the Lord help you. I must tell you that if you take that road, these little naked blacks, who flee like goats, you’ll find very formidable merchants whose goods will cost you dear. I beg you for pity’s sake don’t take that road….From here to the houses of the king it’s a long way, the roads are bad, men can only go in single file, you will put yourself in deep trouble getting there. You’ll arrive exhausted and find many of these little black men there, highly-spirited and well-armed. I’m telling you the truth. I beg you with all my heart, for pity’s sake, don’t go.