Conquerors

by Roger Crowley

  Albuquerque’s first objective was the sandy, low-lying island of Kamaran, two hundred miles past the strait, hard against the Arabian Peninsula, the only source of water along the whole stretch of coast. Having taken a supply on board, he was eager to push on to Jeddah, but already the wind had become fickle. It turned to the west, making forward progress impossible; when it spun east again, Albuquerque hustled his ships out of their sheltered anchorage. In due course, it swung back again. For twenty-two days he kept the fleet anchored in the middle of the sea, waiting for the chance to sail north, while his men fretted. When the water ran out, there was no option but to return to Kamaran. “And there they sat,” according to Correia, “during May, June and July, with never any rain,” effectively trapped with only goats and camels for company, which they ate, along with fish from the sea, among mangrove swamps and sandy scrub under the hot sun. Albuquerque remained boundlessly optimistic, sending out small caravels on scouting expeditions, capturing passing ships and pumping their hapless crews for intelligence. To the terror of his put-upon men, he ordered his masons to experiment with making lime. It could be done, they reported, and “we found plenty of suitable rock and much stone and masonry in the houses, mosques and ancient buildings….For a fort it has the best site and amenities in the world,” he wrote back to the king. “A harbor protected from all winds…plentiful water…a great abundance of good fish.” The men were petrified that he was going to demand the construction of yet another fort.

  To the court in Lisbon, Albuquerque presented the island as the healthiest place in the world. The reality of the situation was otherwise. When he set out from Kamaran to Jeddah, there was another great clamor against the decision, the men saying that “he was taking them to die.” Contrary to his optimistic accounts to the king, they did perish in large numbers. Food was evidently in short supply on the island, and they were worked hard overhauling the ships. They started to succumb to a mysterious epidemic: “after only two or three fits of fever and great pain in the chest, an unknown illness, blood clogging the chest, many men died, more than five hundred [out of a total of seventeen hundred] and almost all the native troops—of work and poor food.” Not a word of this surfaced in his report to the king.

  If Albuquerque believed in a God-given mission, it was reinforced by a miraculous sign in the night sky. One moonless night,

  while we were anchored in that place, over the lands of Prester John there appeared to us a sign in the heavens in the shape of a cross, shining brightly, and a cloud hanging over it. When the cloud reached the cross, it split into pieces, without touching it or muffling its brightness. It was visible from many ships and a great number of the men fell to their knees and revered it. Others of those who reverently adored it wept many tears.

  Albuquerque tried to persuade the pilots and captains to cross the sea against the wind to the western shore, but they refused to budge.

  During these months in the hot sun among the sand dunes, Albuquerque continued to compile a detailed report on the Red Sea, which he filed back to Lisbon. He collected every scrap of information he could on its climate, geography and navigation, ports, politics, and tribal affiliations. He sent out caravels to investigate the pearl fisheries, inquired about the rich gold mines of Prester John, and finally came to the conclusion—to the relief of his men—that Massawa, on the western shore, would be a better place for a fortress than the island he was presently on, because “the coasts behind it are ruled by Prester John,” and the belief in the power of the semimythical Christian remained strong. “I now have full information on all aspects of the Red Sea,” he told Manuel.

  The restless inquisitiveness of Portuguese intelligence gathering took many forms. There were always men prepared for adventure, however reckless. In the spirit of Pêro da Covilhã, the spy King João had sent to India, a man named Fernão Dias volunteered himself for long-range spying duties. Dias was either a Muslim who had been converted to Christianity or a Portuguese who had been captured and held by the Moroccans on Gibraltar for a long time—the sources are unclear. At any rate, he spoke good Arabic and had an excellent knowledge of Islamic rituals, prayers, and Koranic verses. He offered to be landed on the desert shores of Arabia and travel by way of Jeddah, Mecca, and Suez to Cairo, pick up a Venetian ship at Alexandria, then return to Portugal with information for the king. His alibi was to be that of a runaway slave. To this end, a shackle was put on his leg and he was ferried to the mainland in a canoe, with gemstones sewn into his clothing to sell as he went along. He made the journey back unscathed and reported to Manuel. Dias subsequently returned to India and apparently had a long further career spying in the Red Sea. Correia, who knew him, said that “he died very poor.”

  Albuquerque was particularly keen to seek out information about Suez, at the northern end of the Red Sea, and the composition of the Mamluk fleet. He came to a conclusion, from sources he believed to be reliable, confirming what he had thought for years: that it hardly existed. The defeat at Diu, followed by the interception of wood supplies from Lebanon by the Knights of St. John, had dealt the sultan’s naval capacity a fatal blow. Suez, Albuquerque claimed, was a ruin. There were only fifteen pinnaces (small sailing boats) there.

  After Hussain left India, enthusiasm [for naval combat] waned, and they carried out no more shipbuilding of any kind. They had at Suez only thirty men to guard the boats against attacks by occasional Arab raiders…[they] water the boats every morning, to stop the sun splitting the planking. There are no carracks left there, no wood, carpenters, masts or sails.

  In effect, the annual rumors of a major Islamic fleet were a chimera.

  Albuquerque, with his usual way of putting things, went on to claim that the Portuguese probe into the sea had been devastating. “I can assure Your Highness that no boat or canoe sailed the sea, even the birds did not alight there, so terrified was the Red Sea at our entrance and so empty.” His analysis concluded that there was a shortage of food in Jeddah and Mecca now, and that the sultan’s regime was tottering.

  If there was an element of exaggeration in this, overall his assessment was surprisingly accurate. The incursion into the Red Sea stunned the Islamic world. After the attack on Aden, its sheikh had dispatched fast racing camels with the news up the Arabian Peninsula to Jeddah and Mecca. The Mecca garrison marched to Jeddah ready for a last-ditch defense. Another camel hurried the news from Mecca to Cairo in just nine days. By May 23, it was common knowledge there. In the city, panic. The sultan was in consternation; there were special invocations at Friday prayers. A regimental corps was hurriedly gathered for inspection in the hippodrome: “they were presented dressed in mail tunics, helmets on their heads, scimitars in bandoliers. Three hundred men were enrolled on the list for departure…a contingent of the sultan’s Mamluks were given the mission to base themselves at Suez and undertake shipbuilding.” In mid-June, the sultan ordered the director of the arsenal and his men to escort cannons to Suez “without payment.”

  The Cairo chronicler Ibn Iyas recorded the unfolding of this initiative. No men actually left. Reassembled in the hippodrome on June 15, they refused to budge: “ ‘We won’t go unless we get a bonus. We don’t want to die of hunger and thirst in the desert.’ The sultan immediately left the parade ground in a fury.” In fact, the regime was tottering. There were fears of a revolt in the city. By September, Iyas could report that the situation was unchanged and the news from the Red Sea had worsened. He documented “the audacity of the Europeans impeding the Red Sea commerce, seizing the cargoes; they have occupied Kamaran, a vital entrepôt on the route to India.” Month by month, stretching through into 1514 and 1515, this litany of paralysis went on, detailing the effects of the Portuguese on one side and the naval blockade by the Knights of St. John on the other. “The port of Alexandria hasn’t received any ships in the past year; nothing reaches Jeddah because of the European corsairs roaming the Indian Ocean; it has been all of six years since goods have been unloaded at Jeddah.” In July 1515
, Hussain, the commander at Diu, who was now in Jeddah, was still begging the sultan “to send reinforcements as quickly as possible before the Europeans occupy the whole coast of India, and besides he feared an attack on Jeddah…everywhere the sultan has real causes for concern.” Not until August 1515, and after a certain number of men had been weeded out as being “too weak or stricken with venereal disease,” did any sizable body of troops leave for Suez.

  Albuquerque had summed the situation up extremely well. He believed that there existed a window of opportunity; that the Red Sea could be effectively cut in two; that there was no fleet capable of resisting the Portuguese; that the heartlands of the Islamic world lay open; and that with one concerted effort, the Mamluks could be destroyed: “The sultan’s position is very weak. As well as having few troops he does not leave Cairo in person or go anywhere to fight, nor does he leave his fortress. He has Shah Ismail at his gates, pursuing him remorselessly.”

  In the culmination of a long letter sent in December, he presented King Manuel with a clear but fervent strategic vision and laid before him the prospect of the ultimate prize:

  It seems to me that if you make yourself powerful in the Red Sea you will have all the riches of the world in your hands, because all the gold of Prester John will be available to you—such a huge sum that I don’t dare speak of it—traded for spices and the merchandise of India….I take the liberty of writing like this to Your Highness because I have seen India on both sides of the Ganges and I observe how Our Lord is helping you and placing it in your grasp. Great tranquillity and stability have come over India since Your Highness gained Goa and Malacca and ordered us to enter the Red Sea, seek out the sultan’s fleet and cut the shipping lanes to Jeddah and Mecca….It is no small service that you will perform for Our Lord in destroying the seat of perdition and all their depravity.

  This was lightly encoded for the destruction of Mecca and Medina, and the body of the prophet Muhammad himself, a project so breathtaking in its daring that it was kept from all but the smallest group of Manueline ideologues. It was to be undertaken with the help of Prester John.

  I have been told that he greatly desires to destroy the city of Mecca and it seems to him that, if Your Highness provides shipping, he would send a great number of cavalry, infantry and elephants….The Muslims themselves believe that Prester John’s horses and elephants will feed in the very shrine at Mecca….It will please Our Lord to give Your Highness help in such a feat and it will be your ships, your captains and your men who will perform it because the crossing only takes two days and a night.

  Manuel represented as king of the sea in the 1516 world map of the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller

  Albuquerque was projecting the idea that tiny Portugal could control the center of the world, that Manuel might be the greatest of Christian kings, and he indicated how it should be done. He would construct fortresses at Aden and Massawa, consolidate a position and station fleets there, but make no attempt to penetrate the hinterland of Arabia. He would link up with Prester John; then “your fleet can get to Suez, only three days from Cairo. This will create turmoil in the capital, because the sultan’s power is not as great as you have been led to believe.” He noted, “The business of India we will leave behind. Goa will keep your affairs calm and peaceful.” Albuquerque’s strategy had swiveled the globe: no longer were the Indies the objective. Now they were the base camp. The summit was to be the destruction of Islam and the recapture of Jerusalem.

  But this would have to wait. By mid-July the wind had shifted, the monsoon season was over. It was time to sail back to India. On the way, he again visited Aden, bombarded it, and worked out exactly how to capture it the following year by cutting off its water supplies.

  23

  The Last Voyage

  July 1513–November 1515

  “YOUR HIGHNESS BLAMES ME, blames me, blames me!”

  Letters from Portugal reached Goa once a year, with the arrival of the spice fleet in September; replies returned with it the following January or February. These mal-coordinated communications provided ample scope for misunderstandings and misconceptions. Manuel’s were becoming increasingly tetchy at the failure to achieve objectives that seemed, viewed down a distant telescope in Lisbon, to be simple. The Red Sea must be locked up, the spices must be sent promptly, the men must be paid. “Men who are well paid will serve with greater satisfaction and be happy to remain abroad,” he informed Albuquerque sententiously. “Our pleasure is therefore that they be well paid and content…but, we enjoin you, let this be done with other people’s money [plunder]—not our own.” This was a particularly sore point with the governor, who never had enough money or men to fulfill the king’s ambitions. Worse still for Albuquerque, he airily doubted the value of Goa. Fortunately for the governor, he was fully backed up by his captains in a vote to hold the island. Manuel was also exasperatingly inconsistent. “Do you know that you change your policy every year,” Albuquerque wrote back in frustration. But the voices raised against him were growing louder; he made enemies easily, and they sent their own accounts home in the yearly mail. The failure at the walls of Aden went down particularly badly.

  It had been his intention to return there in January 1514, but that did not happen, for the simple reason that he lacked seaworthy ships. One had sunk on the voyage back to Goa from Aden; there was a shortage of skilled carpenters and dockyard workers to carry out repairs—refitting the spice fleet for the return voyage always took precedence. After the shipwreck of the Frol de la Mar, Albuquerque always sailed with some trepidation, “with one hand upon my beard and the other on the pump,” as he graphically put it to Manuel. It was necessary to await reinforcements in September.

  Instead he spent the whole year in Goa, building the colony and negotiating with the potentates of the Indian subcontinent. A great deal of time was taken up with preparations for the delayed Aden campaign. He stockpiled quantities of gunpowder and cannonballs, oversaw the manufacture of weapons, particularly pikes, the baking of ship’s biscuit, and the creation of siege equipment. After the humiliating failure to scale the walls, particular attention was paid to the construction of many very stout ladders, tall enough to top the city’s ramparts. Albuquerque was keen to increase the number of musketeers. A proclamation issued in Goa, Cochin, and Cannanore offered financial rewards for those willing to come forward for training. On Sundays and the first Saturday of each month, shooting practice took place, with a prize of a cruzado for those who could hit the target. Twice a month the trained bands were drilled in the Swiss fighting tactics; their pikes were stored in the armory in secure conditions—those among the nobility opposed to the new military fighting style that were threatening to render their role redundant had taken to trying to break their weapons. On Sunday afternoons Albuquerque went out personally with the horsemen to practice skirmishing maneuvers and to familiarize them with the Muslim style of saddle. He did not return to the stables until after nightfall, by the light of torches.

  Albuquerque oversaw everything, ruled everything, worked tirelessly. His secretary Gaspar Correia left a picture of his daily round: “The governor used to get up before dawn and go with his guard to hear Mass, and then ride alone with a cane in his hand and a straw hat on his head, and with his halberdiers he toured the shore and the walls to inspect the work that was in hand, so that he saw everything with his own eyes and commanded what was to be done.” The hapless Correia could not resist a personal note: “His four secretaries trailed after him, servants of the king, with paper and ink, so that he issued orders and dispatches, which he signed there on horseback as he went. And I Gaspar Correia, who am writing this history, I went around in this way as his secretary.” “Whenever I receive a petition,” Albuquerque could write to Manuel with justifiable pride, “I answer it on the spot.”

  Albuquerque, the imperial visionary, was intent on building a Portuguese presence in the Indian Ocean that might last forever. The practical man saw to the material defen
ses of the city—the walls that were bonded with dried mud had to be continually repaired against the battering of the monsoon rain; the stern moralist worked to create a durable and just social order. He was aware of the propensity of his men, alongside their bravery and their talent for spontaneous self-sacrifice, for unruliness, violence, and greed. It required constant oversight. “So long as I am present all goes well, but the minute my back is turned each man acts according to his nature,” he observed. He labored unceasingly to stamp out corruption and injustice toward the local population. He understood that the battle for hearts and minds was as important as successful campaigns. He was fully aware that his men needed to be paid, else they would inevitably revert to corruption and looting. The good name of Portugal mattered, and he feared the consequences should “the sugar turn to poison,” as the king of Cannanore had once put it. He sought to protect local women against sexual violence and vigorously promoted the mixed-marriage policy. He banned all forms of gambling; only chess and checkers were allowed; he sent men to the galleys for misdemeanors and packed the quarrelsome and unruly back to Lisbon with the spice fleets. He provided monthly handouts for orphans and fatherless children, and paid a tutor to teach them to read and to draw them into the Christian faith. There was a heavy element of social engineering.

  Albuquerque might appear a stern autocrat, but there was enjoyment, too. In the ceremonial hall of the raja’s palace he had inherited with Goa, he sat down to eat at night with four hundred men to the sound of trumpets. On Sundays the local Goan troops would perform in front of the palace to the music of their native instruments; the twenty-four working fortress elephants, brought from Ceylon, would parade before the governor and, at the command of their mahouts, perform obeisance to him, and dancing girls would sing and dance by torchlight during the meals. Part of Albuquerque deeply loved the spectacle, the sounds, the colors of India: he was going native.