The escape from the beleaguered citadel was planned for the night of May 31. Preparations were taken in the utmost secrecy. A single bell was to be rung at midnight. The ships were readied to sail. Retreat back to the quays was to be covered by an elite group of captains. Suggestions to fire the town were vetoed by Albuquerque. He vowed to return and make Goa his own. Otherwise, he was ruthless. He ordered Timoji to kill all the Muslim men, women, and children they were holding. None was to be left alive. Cannons were to be spiked and horses destroyed to prevent their use in the retreat. The arsenal and military supplies were to be burned.
Timoji set about his grim task. In small groups, the Muslim men were requested to be seen by the governor, then killed in the street. However, Timoji was selective. Many of the women and children he left locked in a house. The most beautiful of the women he stripped of their jewelry, dressed as men, and stowed away on his ships. Despite the stealth of the retreat, it quickly became clear that the Portuguese were leaving. Adil Shah’s men poured through the gates. Albuquerque had devised a final stratagem to slow their advance. He had pepper and bars of copper strewn in their way, so that the pursuit was slowed down by men stopping to pilfer the takings. Others were frozen with horror at finding their relatives slaughtered in the street. Despite these attempts, there was fierce fighting all the way down the quays. Only a desperate rearguard action ensured that the ships got away. The armada pushed off into the channel, which the sunken vessel had failed to block. Probably all except the governor were relieved to escape. Their troubles, however, had only just begun.
18
Prisoners of the Rain
June–August 1510
THEY SAILED DOWNSTREAM UNDER a parting bombardment of missiles. Behind them, the sound of Adil Shah’s trumpets celebrating the recapture of the city mingled with cries of grief as the Muslims discovered their menfolk slaughtered in the street, their wives and daughters abducted. The fleet anchored close to the mouth of the Mandovi River, where it widened under the lee of the strategic fort of Pangim.
They had left late. It was now the start of June. The monsoon announced itself in earnest. Torrential rain battered the ships; winds whipped through the bending palms. With the river in spate, the ships had to be tethered at both bow and stern to prevent them from twisting in the current. On board there were fierce debates among the senior commanders about whether they could make it out of the river mouth and plow the seas to the island of Anjediva. The mood among the captains was surly. They blamed Albuquerque personally for this plight: they should have sailed sooner. They demanded an escape from the trap. The pilots were equally insistent that it could now not be done. Albuquerque finally agreed to risk one ship under Fernão Peres in an attempt to pass out through the sand spits at the river mouth. The fierce currents swept his vessel onto the shoals. It was lost to the battering of the waves, though the men escaped and the cannons were salvaged from the wreck. Another captain tried an unauthorized escape but was intercepted and stripped of his command. The Portuguese were trapped, facing a river siege that might last until August. It was a situation of unique and grave difficulty.
As they lay tethered midstream, a boat appeared sporting a white flag. Adil Shah had again dispatched João Machado to try to negotiate, ostensibly to offer peace terms. In fact, the shah was buying time. Fearful that the intruders might storm and occupy the fort at Pangim, he wanted to tie them up for long enough to reoccupy it himself. Albuquerque gave a short and sharp reply to the effect that “Goa belonged to his lord, the king of Portugal, and there would never be any peace with the shah unless he changed his mind and handed it back along with all its territories.”
The effrontery of Albuquerque’s style shocked the shah. This man—hemmed in, defeated, facing starvation—was brusquely dictating terms. The most polite oath that passed his lips was “sons of the devil.” He tried again, returning Machado with two important men of the town and a revised offer: he could not give up Goa. Instead, he would present Albuquerque with Dabul and all the Ormuz horse revenues. Albuquerque bluntly told the messengers to go: he would hear nothing more until Goa was returned. It was the start of a new contest that was psychological as much as physical. During this pretense at negotiation, Adil had regarrisoned the fort at Pangim with a large company of men and installed cannons in wooden bastions. A further battery had been positioned on the mainland opposite. From their uneasy position midstream between the two, the Portuguese could gaze up at the banners flying from the twin batteries and hear the shouts of their enemies and the blaring of their drums and trumpets. They were held squarely in the jaws of the trap.
Torment was to be visited on the Portuguese in many forms. First the artillery bombardment: the ships were caught in the cross fire from both banks. Their hulls were too stout to be seriously damaged by the caliber of the shah’s guns, but the incessant gunfire, by day and night, induced a dreadful sense of insecurity. Albuquerque’s ship, the Frol de la Mar, identifiable by its captain’s banners, was the most obvious target, sometimes receiving fifty shots a day. It became unwise to appear on the bridge or mount the crow’s nest. They had to keep shifting the position of the vessels to limit the threat, which was difficult and dangerous work. No attempts were made to reply. It was better to preserve stores of powder for a later occasion. Cooped up below deck, with the rain drumming furiously overhead, the men started to sicken.
And then, sometime in June, the rain stopped. For fifteen days the skies cleared—and another problem arose: lack of drinking water. Rainwater could no longer be collected, and the Mandovi was too salty to be drunk. Men started to gasp in the sapping heat. Adil guarded all the water sources around the river and waited. He was certain he could crush the intruders just by holding them there long enough. The only consolation for the fleet was the continuous help of Timoji, who knew the terrain, and his intelligence sources. With his aid, a commando raid was launched to tap a spring in the jungle. There was fierce fighting for small rewards: “with great difficulty we managed to fill sixty or seventy caskets with water, but none of our big barrels, because many men were wounded.” In the words of another account, “a drop of water cost three of blood.”
The unexpected reappearance of fine weather reanimated the faction clamoring for an attempt to escape the hellhole of the river. The captains importuned Albuquerque unceasingly to weigh anchor and try again. Albuquerque and the pilots held firm, citing the fate of Peres’s ship. As at Ormuz, their commander’s obstinacy was stoking a slow-burning resentment. Among the men, there was a widely held belief that they were being led by an obsessive madman who would push pride to the point of death: “that out of stubbornness he wanted to die and kill them all.”
When rain and turbulent seas returned, confirming that an attempt to sail away would probably have ended in disaster, the thirst eased. Water could be collected on the ships in barrels, and the water coming downstream was now fresh enough to be drinkable, as long as the mud was left to settle for a day or two; but hunger was also beginning to sap the morale and physical stamina of the men. Supplies were running low. Albuquerque imposed strict rationing. He kept the storeroom tightly under lock and key, opened only on his signature. Men were issued four ounces of biscuits a day. The small quantities of fish that could be caught from the river were reserved for the sick. Meanwhile, Timoji scouted out whatever he could find, putting his men ashore stealthily in small boats. On board the men hunted rats; those with sea chests stripped off their leather coverings, boiled, and ate them. “The common people did this who couldn’t put up with the hunger, with which they were totally desperate,” Correia observed, implying that the nobility were above such things, though there is no record as to whether they shared the same diet. Men came to the governor begging for something to eat, and the storekeeper received particular abuse. The captains pointed the finger of blame at Albuquerque for subjecting them to this torment: “If they had not wintered here—and they had advised him not to—they would have avoided this suffering�
�.He was a maniac keeping them there.” People’s faces darkened with fear. In the rain, with the continuous gunfire, in a tropical hell, soaking and sweating in their rotting clothes, they were increasingly gripped by morbid terror that they were all going to die.
Then the desertions started. Three men dived overboard and swam to the shore. They were received with open arms by Adil, fed well, and pumped for information about the dissent in the ranks and the desperate food shortage. The captains were forced to spend as much time watching their own men as the riverbanks occupied by an implacable foe.
For Albuquerque, everything was at stake. All the principal figures of the Indian administration were besieged in the Mandovi in the rain, with the shots of the enemy crashing in; the men and their captains cursed him for the lack of food, for his obstinacy, his obsessiveness, his vanity. All he had was his belief in a certain strategic vision, encouraging words, and the severities of discipline. It was perhaps his supreme moment of crisis. He had failed to carry men with him at Ormuz; he had experienced a vote of no confidence at Cochin; he was facing disaster in his self-invented project at Goa. In his darkest hour, he “shut himself up in his cabin and looked up to heaven and prayed.” Only a small group fully supported the governor; Albuquerque’s nephew António de Noronha played a critical role as a softening intermediary between the intemperate commander and his increasingly restive captains.
In his palace in Goa, Adil Shah had been listening attentively to the accounts of the enemy’s plight from the renegades. He wanted to test the words of these men, perhaps overly keen to tell their new master what he wanted to hear. He devised a new tactic for breaking his intransigent rival. Sometime in June (the dates are unclear), a vessel laden with food—sacks of rice, chickens, figs, and vegetables—approached the Frol de la Mar flying a white flag. A ship’s boat was put out to ascertain its mission and was told that the shah wished to win an honorable war, not defeat his enemy through hunger. Keeping the messenger waiting in the river, Albuquerque arranged his own response to such mind games. He ordered a barrel to be cut in two and filled with wine; the dwindling stock of biscuits was also brought up from the storeroom and displayed in buckets. A group of sailors were tipped to disport themselves on the deck in attitudes of jollity, singing and enjoying themselves. When the messenger was finally allowed on board to survey this tableau of plenty and good spirits, Albuquerque was ready with steely words: Take your food away, we have plenty; there will be no peace until Goa is returned. Adil Shah may have concluded that the deserters had lied, or he may have seen through the charade as one more shot in the war of nerves. Albuquerque’s men probably muttered unspeakable oaths under their breath as they watched the provisions being rowed away. The cannon fire continued to taunt and unsettle.
Albuquerque knew that Adil Shah did not want to be detained in Goa indefinitely. He had other threats and obligations throughout his kingdom. The Portuguese leader was counting on the shah cracking first. In the meanwhile, to raise morale, he proposed an attack to destroy the shore guns. The mood among the fidalgos was sullen. It proved impossible to get their assent. Exasperated, he decided to push ahead anyway: “I am your governor. With God’s will, I’m landing on the shore at Pangim with the royal flag….When I embark I will order the sounding of Timoji’s trumpets. Come if you want or stay behind.” They all signed up.
Timoji’s fleet of shallow river craft was essential for an amphibious landing. Before dawn, the Portuguese fell upon the artillery emplacements outside the castle, routed the surprised defenders, and carried off the cannons and a supply of food. The guns on the opposite shore were also silenced. It was evening before Adil dispatched reinforcements to counterattack, by which time his enemies were safely back on board.
Adil had presumed that he could starve the Portuguese into submission, but the attack on Pangim dented his pride. It was now necessary to go on the offensive. In Goa harbor he ordered the secret preparation of a large number of incendiary rafts to destroy the fleet. Yet it proved impossible to hide these activities. The indispensable Timoji was always able to put spies ashore to seek information. Albuquerque decided to launch his own preemptive counterstrike, using light cannons in the boats. The surprise raid was entirely successful, despite resistance. The rafts were simply blown apart by the destructive power of Portuguese gunnery. António de Noronha, carried away by excitement and seeing a light galley temptingly beached, tried to tow it away as a prize. He was hit in the knee by an arrow and had to withdraw. Leg wounds were the blight of Portuguese battles in this sea; they often proved to be mortal blows, either because an arrow had hit a vein or artery or because of infection and the complete lack of medical supplies. Noronha took to his cabin and was dead within three days. Albuquerque seems to have been deeply affected by his nephew’s death. Noronha had acted as a mediator between the governor and disaffected captains; he had been the governor’s designated successor in the event of death. It was a blow that Albuquerque tried, without success, to keep from Adil Shah.
—
In their floating prisons on the Mandovi, the weary days drew on: the rain, the lack of food, the weakening men. The only bright spot for Albuquerque was the news that Adil’s truce with Vijayanagar was over: the shah was needed elsewhere. For Albuquerque, it was a further incentive to hold out. But the men continued to desert. Eight days after the fight at Goa, a man named João Romão swam ashore with fresh news about the plight on the ships: Dom António dead, people ill and dying of hunger, people wounded in the battles for whom there was no cure. More desertions followed: five, ten, then fifteen, dropping over the side at night and swimming to shore. Morale on the ships was dwindling, but Adil Shah badly needed peace. It was becoming a test of wills.
The shah tried to wrestle the initiative back again: more peace messengers were sent. Albuquerque was tired of the comings and goings of these visitors. He distrusted their motives, undermining morale, wearing down resistance. Additionally, the shah supplied the renegade Romão with a horse. He appeared on the beach in Arab dress, well fed, taunting the men with his better fortune as a Muslim convert. Albuquerque again refused the shah’s emissaries, but this time the fidalgos demanded that he at least listen to their proposals. He acceded but resolved to fix the desertion problem once and for all.
An exchange of hostages was agreed for the next day. Adil Shah sent his regent, the most distinguished noble in the city, to parley, accompanied by a large cavalcade and an ostentatious show of ceremony. A tent of black satin was set up on the beach, where the regent awaited the negotiator with the necessary interpreters, cavalry, and foot soldiers. Albuquerque sent his auditor, Pêro d’Alpoym, an important figure in the Indian administration, to fetch the ambassador to his ship, and with him, in one of Timoji’s boats, a crack marksman named João d’Oeiras, armed with a crossbow. As they approached to the ceremonial beating of drums, they could see the deserters among the throng, well dressed, on horses; among them was Romão, in a silk caftan, armed with lance and shield taunting the Portuguese. Oeiras crouched down in the bow in front of the oarsman as they drew near the beach. Now they could make out Romão’s words. He was telling the governor and everyone else to go and eat shit. A word from Alpoym, and the archer stood up, took aim, and fired. The bolt caught Romão full on, passed straight through him, and dropped him dead on the spot. There was a stunned silence, then uproar on the beach at this breach of a truce. It was explained that the renegades were speaking ill of the governor, that he would not tolerate this, and that they should not appear again.
When the regent finally made it on board, he was equally surprised by the brevity of the negotiations. He offered flowery salutations in the style of Oriental diplomacy, a site for a fortress outside Goa with a good port, fifty thousand gold cruzados in cash—with just one concession. He asked for Timoji to be handed over. Albuquerque sighed and gave a short, sharp response. It was Goa or nothing; Timoji would never be surrendered. He hustled the astonished man off the ship in a style distinctly sho
rt of diplomatic protocol, with the parting request to send no more messengers unless they were bringing the keys of the city.
Adil Shah gave up trying to negotiate with a man who disdained all the rules. The crossbowman received ten cruzados for his shot, but it failed to deter deserters. Men continued to swim away at night. The situation was at a stalemate. The fleet remained in the river. And almost from nowhere, the dissent of the fidalgos suddenly erupted into open rebellion in the strangest circumstances.
It involved the Muslim women and girls, some from the harem, who had been spirited away by Timoji when the city fell. It was suggested that they could now be used as bargaining chips. Albuquerque was startled. He had forgotten their very existence. He quizzed Timoji as to their whereabouts and why he had not been informed. Timoji was evasive: they had been handed over to the captains and divided among the ships “and many of them had turned Christian.” The governor was furious at this conspiracy of silence and the implications for discipline of having women aboard the ships, not to mention the obvious opportunities for sin. He demanded that the women be produced. Digging deeper, he was told that some of them had got “married” to men in the fleet, who would not be separated from their paramours. Pragmatically, and fearing trouble in the ranks, he decided simply to legalize these unions without formal ceremony, to the scandal of his chaplain, who declared that this was not in accord with church law. “Then according to the law of Afonso de Albuquerque,” the autocrat replied.
There remained another group of harem women and girls who had not converted. These included the more beautiful among them, who would not consort with the common sailors but were the subject of the attention of some of the young nobles. Albuquerque had this group transferred to the Frol de la Mar and sequestered in a cabin at the rear of the ship, under lock and key and guarded by a eunuch. This move was the subject of covert bitterness among the young fidalgos whose dalliances had been cut short. Soon the eunuch reported suspicious goings-on to the governor; he was sure that men were finding their way into the locked cabin at night, though he had no idea who they were. Albuquerque set a boat to watch. Over the following nights, the observers saw men, sometimes one, sometimes three, swimming over from the nearby Frol da Rosa. Stealthily one climbed up onto the rudder, a hatch was opened, and he slipped into the harem. He was positively identified as a young nobleman named Ruy Dias.
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