Conquerors

by Roger Crowley

  Each man decided what to take and what to leave behind in a dash for booty. To the Portuguese, Malacca was an Arabian Nights treasure-house of the wealth of the farther Orient. It was a glimpse of what lay to the east of India—and it put the economy of the Malabar Coast into perspective. “Believe me,” Empoli wrote to his father, “things here are of great substance, and there are very great things and great walled cities, trade in merchandise and wealth, different customs and ways of living. We are mere nothings; India is the least and poorest thing there is here.”

  At the end of the day, with the collapse of the sun into the western straits, the streets of Malacca were left strewn with extraordinary merchandise of all sorts: jewels, jars of musk, chests crammed with damask cloth, silks, taffetas, and camphor. “There were rooms full of sandalwood not worth the trouble of carrying away,” and rare blue-and-white Chinese porcelain, too fragile and bulky to be worth the bother. Gold bars, jars of gold dust, perfumes, and rare gemstones were the plunder of preference. A large number of iron cannons were carried off, some of which were thought to have been sent by the samudri of Calicut. From the sultan’s palace, men under Albuquerque’s orders gathered objects of dazzling opulence as gifts for the king, while the governor, who lived with the idea of his own death as much as his life, took for himself six bronze lions to adorn his tomb. The palace was then burned to the ground.

  The capture of Malacca, with its huge population, by a few hundred Portuguese in leaky ships had been an extraordinary coup, a risky feat of breathtaking daring and outrageous self-belief, undertaken against vastly superior numbers armed with their own gunpowder weapons. In purely military terms, it stands easy comparison with any of the asymmetrical victories of the Spanish conquistadors in the Americas. However, as Albuquerque had anticipated, the will to hold the city was another matter.

  Enriched, the captains, and doubtless the men, were ready to leave. They petitioned the governor to return to India—the fleet could come back another time. Albuquerque had anticipated this reaction. He pointed out that he had their written depositions on the subject of the fort, and declared that if they were to depart without leaving the city “held and secure in the king’s name…I would deserve to have my head cut off and soul sent to hell…don’t talk about such a thing. All of us must put ourselves to work with goodwill to make our fort—and do it quickly.” Albuquerque was a man in a hurry: the need to consolidate the Portuguese position, the need to leave before the monsoon, the fear of what might be happening in Goa—all these things drove him on.

  The doubters were correct to be less than enthusiastic about the task. Constructing a fort by the river in the center of the city turned out to be another kind of hell. Empoli, never one to underplay the difficulty, gave his own account: “The captain-major with some of the men, with great haste by day, and by night with torches, built a fort with wooden planks with many heavy logs around it and much artillery, and in a month made it strong.” It was a process of continual consolidation: “as soon as it was strong enough, we set about making one of stone.” Doubtless much to the disappointment of the workforce, sufficient stone was pillaged from mosques and houses.

  It was a difficult task carrying the stone on our backs, and every man was laborer, bricklayer, and stonemason….The fort was built with our arms always besides us in the unbearable heat of the sun, because the position of this country is two degrees north of the equator. The land is low-lying and marshy, inhabited by wild beasts, and this produces in it a great stench and unhealthy air. We had nothing to eat but rice, with the result that all our men became ill….There was not a man left who was not suffering from a diabolic fever, so that there were dead men in the captain’s barracks for two or three days because no one could be found to bury them. I took ill at the beginning of October, and for fifty days I had a continual fever, so severe that I was completely unconscious.

  The miasmic conditions, the poor diet, and malaria felled so many Portuguese that they were almost incapable of proceeding. It was left to the local labor to push the work forward. Albuquerque himself shivered with fever but continued to oversee the construction.

  The fortress, fear of counterattacks, and sickness had delayed Albuquerque. By the end of 1511, it was time to go or be trapped in Malacca for another year. Albuquerque left a garrison of three hundred men and eight ships, to be crewed by another two hundred. The remaining three ships, the Frol de la Mar, the Emxobregas, and the Trinidade, were to return to India, carrying with them the bulk of the treasure. He also put fifteen men on a captured junk, to be crewed by Javanese slaves.

  The Frol de la Mar was one of the trophy ships of the Portuguese fleet. At four hundred tons, it was the largest carrack yet built; equipped with forty cannons, distributed on three decks, its stacked high stern and forecastle made it an intimidating presence among the dhows of the Indian Ocean—a floating fortress that could fire in all directions. At the battle of Diu, it had slammed six hundred cannonballs into the Egyptian fleet in the course of a single day, but its size made it awkward to maneuver in tricky conditions, and it was now old. The average life of a ship on the India run was perhaps four years; the battering of the long voyages and the ravages of the teredo worm turned stout planks to pulp in a short time. By 1512 the Frol had been at sea for ten. It was seriously leaky and required continuous patching and pumping. Albuquerque wanted to nurse it back to Cochin and conduct repairs, but the common consensus was that the ship was a death trap. Many of those leaving flatly refused to sail in it. Only the formidable confidence of the governor ensured a crew. Because of its size, it carried the bulk of the treasure as well as many of the sick and wounded and some slaves as presents for the queen.

  Empoli, sailing in the Trinidade, left his own eyewitness account of what followed. “And so we set out, sailing in very bad weather, because it was already late even if one left Malacca for India on the twentieth day of December.” In fact, they were leaving a month later. Six days out, the flotilla was hit by a hurricane.

  At about three o’clock in the night, we heard a thundering noise….We found ourselves with our ship in barely four fathoms of water. We cast anchor immediately….The wind was strong and blowing onto the shore, and, when day came, we saw the sea breaking all around us for four or five leagues, because we were in the midst of the shoals. The captain-general’s ship was in the shallowest part; a huge wave hit it in the forecastle, and swept away sixteen men, drowned in the sea.

  The Frol was in trouble, now leaking badly and unable to maneuver with the burden of its cargo and the growing weight of water. It had also anchored to ride out the storm, but water was coming in so fast that the pumps were useless. According to Empoli, “another wave struck it, and the rudder broke off, and it swung sideways and ran aground. It immediately filled with water; the crew gathered on the poop deck, and stood there awaiting God’s mercy.”

  It was time to abandon ship. Albuquerque ordered some of the masts cut down and lashed together to make a crude raft. The sick and wounded were put in the one ship’s boat, while the remaining crewmen were transferred to the raft in a rowboat. Albuquerque, with one rope tied around his waist and the other tethered to the Frol, steered the skiff back and forward until all the Portuguese had been taken off. Disciplined to the last, he ordered all to leave the ship in just jacket and breeches; anyone who wanted to keep any possessions could stay behind. As for the slaves, they could fend for themselves. Their only recourse was jumping into the sea; those who could not swim drowned. Some were able to cling to the raft but were prevented at the point of a spear from climbing aboard and overloading it. At sea, it was always survival of the most important. Behind them the Frol broke in two, so that only her poop deck and mainmast were visible above the water. The ship’s boat and the raft drifted through the night, “and so they stayed with their souls in their mouths begging God’s mercy, until dawn, when the wind and the sea abated.”

  In the confusion of the night, the Emxobregas, farther ahead, took soundi
ngs and decided to save itself, sailing away from the wreckage. The captive crewmen of the junk, seizing the moment, murdered their Portuguese masters and made off with the ship and a vast amount of valuable merchandise. Only the Trinidade was close enough to help, but it was also in great trouble, according to Empoli, “and touching bottom, so that we had to throw overboard all the deck fittings and the artillery and part of the spices, commending ourselves to God, because I could see no other solution, as there was no hope of anyone being saved by swimming because of the great extent of the water.” With the morning light and the sea calming, they were able to make out the raft, with a makeshift flag hoisted on a spear as a signal.

  The survivors were taken aboard the Trinidade. “In the ship…there were about two hundred of us, and we did not have enough to eat and drink for so many people…so many people came on board…that it threw us into great confusion.” Despite the shortage of food, Albuquerque, anxious about the state of Cochin and Goa in his absence, refused to agree to a landing for supplies, “urging the need in which India stood, and many other reasons.” The governor’s intransigence made the voyage to Cochin a nightmare, if Empoli is to be believed. “We found ourselves in great trouble and want; we were reduced to six ounces of rotten biscuit and a mouthful of water….The complaints and murmuring [were] so great…that the captain shut himself in his cabin so that no one saw him.” Some Muslim captives were thrown overboard while they slept to reduce the number of mouths to feed. And so they “made their way to Cochin, where they arrived with a great deal of work at the pumps, half dead,” with nothing but the clothes they stood up in. According to one source, Albuquerque had saved a crown, a sword of gold, and a ruby ring sent by the king of Siam as a present for Manuel.

  Behind them, only the superstructure of the Frol de la Mar remained visible above the Sumatran reef, and somewhere beneath the sea lay all the treasure from the king’s palace and a great deal more beside. “I heard [him] say,” wrote Correia in a rare personal reminiscence, “that in the king’s house they had found a four-legged table with stones worth seventy thousand cruzados.” In the Frol “was lost a greater wealth of gold and jewels than were ever lost in any part of India, or ever would be.” All of this had vanished into the depths, besides the gems and bars of gold intended for the king and queen, along with beautiful slaves drowned in the catastrophe and the bronze lions Albuquerque had reserved for his own memorial. And there was something else, equally precious to the geographically hungry Portuguese as they attempted to take more and more of the world into their comprehension and their grasp. It was a fabulous world map, of which only a portion survived. Albuquerque lamented its loss to the king:

  a great map drawn by a Javanese pilot, which showed the Cape of Good Hope, Portugal and the land of Brazil, the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, the spice islands, the sailing routes of the Chinese and the people of Formosa [Taiwan], with the rhumbs [lines marking compass bearings] and the courses taken by their ships and the interiors of the various kingdoms which border on each other. It seems to me, sire, that it’s the best thing I’ve ever seen, and Your Highness would have been delighted to see it. The place names are written in the Javanese script. I had a Javanese who knew how to read and write it. I send this fragment…in which Your Highness will be able to see where the Chinese and the Formosans really come from, and the routes your ships must take to the spice islands, and where the gold mines are, the islands of Java and Banda, source of nutmeg and mace, and the kingdom of Siam, and also the extent of Chinese navigation, where they return to and the point beyond which they don’t voyage. The main map was lost in the Frol de la Mar.

  But Albuquerque was already using the new bridgehead of Malacca to seek out and explore these seas for himself. He sent embassies to Pegu (Bago in Burma), Siam (Thailand), and Sumatra; an expedition visited and mapped the spice islands of eastern Indonesia in 1512; reaching farther east, ships sent to China in 1513 and 1515 landed at Canton and sought trade relations with the Ming dynasty. He was tying together the farthest ends of the world, fulfilling everything Manuel could demand.

  Unfortunately for the Portuguese, these bold extensions had unforeseen consequences. The Malacca strike had been partially undertaken to snuff out Spanish ambitions in the Far East. Instead it provided the personnel, the information, and the maps to advance them. Among those at Malacca was Fernão de Magalhães (Magellan); he returned to Portugal, wealthy from the booty, with a Sumatran slave, baptized as Henrique. When Magalhães quarreled with King Manuel and defected to Spain, he took Henrique with him, as well as Portuguese maps of the spice islands and detailed letters from a friend who had made the voyage. All these he put to use a few years later in the first circumnavigation of the world, under the flag of Spain, during which Henrique was to prove an invaluable interpreter—knowledge that allowed Portugal’s rival to claim the spice islands of the East Indies as its own.

  21

  The Wax Bullet

  April 1512–January 1513

  ALBUQUERQUE ARRIVED IN COCHIN like a man back from the grave, dressed just in a gray jacket and breeches. His arrival was not a completely pleasant surprise. Since the return of the Ormuz mutineers in 1508, Cochin had become the center of a strong faction opposed to the governor. Every fleet returning to Lisbon carried letters to the king detailing his excesses. “Those who wanted to take revenge on your undertakings,” Albuquerque wrote to Manuel, “they proclaimed that I was dead, lost along with the whole fleet.”

  The apparently indestructible governor stepped ashore to find that corruption, abuse, and incompetence had reigned in his absence. His orders had not been obeyed; his appointees had been slighted; the casados married to local women had been excommunicated; men stole and absconded; discipline was lax. Over the next few months, he fired off twenty thousand words of high-voltage rhetoric to the king, in which he laid before his sovereign exactly what should be done to control the ocean, and he claimed the authority of long experience: “I am fifty years old and I have seen two kings before you and what they did in their time.” This was not exactly flattering to the present incumbent.

  It is a letter that reveals the empire builder in action—exasperated, direct, passionate, and apparently all-seeing. At times he is breathlessly blunt, railing against the fidalgos for their indiscipline (they “feel free to do as they please…and care not a jot for my decisions”); castigating his monarch for lavishing resources on campaigns in Morocco, “yet you abandon India”; irate at the lack of men, materials, and money—not least the rotten ships—and bitter at the dire results: “Does Your Highness know the consequences of neglect and the necessity in which I find myself? I’ve had to take Malacca twice, Goa twice, make two attacks on Ormuz, and travel on the sea on a raft to remedy your affairs and fulfill my duties.”

  At times he is downright rude but always fiercely loyal, full of advice but strangely humble, boundlessly self-confident but afflicted by a sense of sin. No detail seems too small to convey to the king. He is sending pulleys to Malacca, along with “two fine robes” for church vestments; he needs church organs and medium-sized missals, “people to dig ditches and make walls,” masons to build forts and construct water mills at Malacca, “where there is a great flow of water at high tide”; he puts in requests for carpenters and captains experienced in the Swiss tactics to train his companies. He frets over attempts by clergymen to subvert the mixed-marriage policy and notes that “in Cochin I found a chest of books for teaching children [to read] and it seemed to me that Your Highness had not sent them to rot away in a chest, so I ordered a casado here to teach the little boys to read and write”; he comments that “they are very intelligent and learn what they are taught in a short time. They are all Christians.” Above all, he asks for men. He is forever counting the numbers available. They are always too few. Over and over: “And again I come back to saying that if you want to avoid war in India and have peace with all the kings here, you must send plenty of troops and good weapons.”

 
In the torrent of words Albuquerque addressed to Manuel he sketched all the dimensions—military, political, economic, social, and religious—of the empire he was single-handedly trying to build with just a few thousand men. This highly intelligent, tortured man reiterated a core of cast-iron principles for dominating the Indian Ocean: “Sire, put your trust in good fortresses”; “Kings and lords cannot easily take fortresses from Portuguese soldiers with helmets on their heads among the battlements….Places here, controlled by Your Highness with a good fort, once taken will remain so until Judgement Day.” Good forts linked to the control of the choke points of the seas would grant the Portuguese a complete domination. His praise for his key military architect, Tomás Fernandes, was boundless.