The governor was always at hand to encourage. He slept little, ate little, seldom left the fort. When he did, he was followed by crowds of people who wanted to catch a glimpse of him. They came to the entrance of the fort to kiss his hand. He had become a legend across the Indian Ocean: the Lion of the Sea, who “dispenses justice and commands on sea and land.” Neighboring kings from the Persian Gulf and beyond wrote seeking friendship. Persian rulers addressed him as “First of the First, Captain of many Captains, Fortunate Lion, Captain General and Governor of India.” Others sent painters “to draw him from life.” For Albuquerque, it was the crowning moment of his life. “With this achievement,” he wrote to the king, “we shall have settled everything in India except the Red Sea and Aden, to which Ormuz brings us very near and greatly increases our prestige in India.” He envisaged a rapid advance into the Red Sea, a fort at Massawa, control of the pearl fisheries, Portuguese hands on the throat of Islam and the Mamluk sultanate. Total control of the Indian Ocean seemed within reach. But in August, dysentery seized him.
—
Albuquerque had been in the Indian Ocean for nine years. He had worked continually and at a furious pace to build Manuel’s empire, during which time he had endured the incessant voyaging, the wars, the intriguing, the rigors of the climate. He had been wounded at Calicut, shipwrecked on Sumatra, imprisoned in Cannanore, poisoned in Goa; for three months he had been besieged in the Mandovi River in the rain. He had negotiated, intimidated, persuaded, and killed. To outsiders he appeared indestructible. The bullets and the spear wounds had not felled him; the cannonballs had whistled past his head; he had stood up in his boat to taunt the Turkish gunners of Benastarim. But he was nearly sixty years old, and to those who saw him up close, such as his secretary Gaspar Correia, “he was old and very wasted in body.” Now, in the atomizing heat of Ormuz, between the brilliant blue of the sea and the blinding sunlight on the barren rocks, he was dying.
At his side was a man named Nicolau de Ferreira, returned from Lisbon as an ambassador from Ormuz. When Albuquerque asked how he stood at court, Ferreira, perhaps putting the best gloss on things, replied that the king valued him so highly that he wanted him at his side to advise on India. The old man replied sadly, “There is no honor in Portugal that can equal being governor of India. In Portugal one can have a rest from work. But how long can my body enjoy rest? And what could be better for me than to end my days, of which I now have very few, in these labors, which make me feel alive?” India had been the adventure of his life, and he wished to die in his command.
There were days when he did not leave his room. He saw no one but his immediate retinue. People put it about that he had died and the body had been hidden. The work slackened. Albuquerque showed himself at his window overlooking the fort, from where he could speak to his captains and be seen. In September, he confessed himself and called the captains to him. He took each man by the hand in turn and made him swear to obey whomever he appointed as successor. Their oaths were recorded on the twenty-sixth of the month. The captain designate of the fort, Pêro de Albuquerque, a cousin, took over control of its building.
But Albuquerque was still alive in November. He would neither leave nor die without seeing Ormuz secured. Though incomplete, the stone fort was now a defendable structure, armed with the king’s artillery. The doctors believed that the sea would do the governor some good. On November 8, he embarked on the Frol da Rosa, a ship with memories for him; it was from its yardarm that he had hanged Ruy Dias five years earlier. He ordered the captain to slip anchor during the siesta, while Ormuz lay stunned in the noon heat, to avoid goodbyes. Anchored offshore, he sent a final farewell and apologies back to Turan Shah. The king returned messages of sorrow; he had wished to see Albuquerque before he left: “I cannot restrain my tears at this departure, which I think will be forever.” The Frol da Rosa, with three other ships, raised its anchors. “And as night fell they set sail for India.”
Albuquerque’s fort at Ormuz drawn by Gaspar Correia
Close friends on board tried to console him, but Albuquerque was gloomy that he might die stripped of his governorship. Crossing the Gulf of Cambay, they captured a small dhow and questioned its captain. The word was that a new governor had come with many ships and captains; he had been at Goa a month and now had gone to Cochin; the names he did not know. For the dying man, it was a heavy blow.
Worse followed. Off Dabul, they came across a Portuguese ship; on board was a man whose path had repeatedly crisscrossed Albuquerque’s voyages through all his years in India: the Florentine merchant Giovanni da Empoli, who harbored grudges. It is not clear exactly what passed between the two but, according to one account, Empoli “very confidentially told him things that were poison to his health, and most damaging to his peace of mind…[and] that hastened his death.” Perhaps he maliciously emphasized the extent of Albuquerque’s downfall in the king’s eyes. At any rate, the dying man learned the name of his successor, Lopo Soares de Albergaria, and other appointees in his fleet to key positions in the Indian administration. They were largely his enemies, and they included Diogo Pereira, whom he had packed off back to Portugal. He turned to his friend Diogo Fernandes and said, “What do you think of that? Good news for me that the men I ordered home and of whom I wrote critically are honored and rewarded. Certainly my sins before the king are great. I am condemned before him for love of men, and by men for love of him.” With this news, he lost the will to live. He ordered the royal standard to be lowered on the ship: he no longer had authority.
—
December 6, 1515. His last letter to the king:
Sire, I do not write to Your Highness in my own hand, because at the making of this letter I am dying.
I, sire, leave behind a son to perpetuate my memory. To whom I bequeath all my property, which is little enough, but I also leave him what is owed me for all my services and that is much—the affairs of India will speak for him and for me. I leave India with all the principal points taken and in your power, the only difficulty that remains being to close, very securely, the straits. This is what Your Highness committed to me….I place my confidence in the hands of Your Highness and the Lady Queen. I commend myself to you both to promote my affairs, since I die in your service and I have deserved it of you….I kiss your hands….
Written at sea, the 6th day of December of 1515
Then in his own shaky handwriting:
The servant of Your Highness
A de Albuquerque
Signature of Afonso de Albuquerque
He wished to live until he was in sight of Goa again, and asked to be dressed in the surcoat of the military order of the Knights of Santiago, of which he was a member, and to be buried in the same. He had made his will. Among his bequests: money to say ninety Masses for the soul of Ruy Dias, hanged in a hotheaded moment; a cannonball that had miraculously missed him at Goa to be covered in silver and sent with other gifts to the church of Our Lady of Guadalupe in the Algarve. He was still just clinging to life as they sighted Goa in the predawn of December 15. The senior clergyman of the city came out to give him absolution, and a doctor helped him drink some Portuguese red wine. As they entered the Mandovi, with the faint light flushing over the Ghats, he struggled to get up and was helped to the cabin window for a last look at the place he had envisioned as the seat of empire. After that, he said nothing more. The body was taken ashore on a bier by torchlight. All the people of Goa turned out to watch the Lion of the Sea being carried to the church, the native Goans lamenting as much as the Portuguese. Monkeys chattered in the trees. Smoke rose from the morning fires.
—
March 20, 1516. Before the spice fleet brings the annual news from India, King Manuel writes a letter:
Afonso de Albuquerque, Friend!
News has reached us via Venice that the sultan’s fleet has gone to India, in which case, though we have commanded your return, we deem it imperative that you should stay! From the experience we have had of you and your s
ervice, and the victory which Our Lord has always given you, we feel it would be the greatest comfort to know we have you there….We rely wholly upon you, and if you execute these our commands, we shall feel as much at rest as though we could attend to them in person!
If it was too late for Albuquerque, it was also too late for Manuel’s great crusading dream. With Albuquerque’s death, it would never recover.
Epilogue
“They Never Stop in One Place”
Enough for us to know that the hidden half of the globe is brought to light, and the Portuguese go farther and farther beyond the equator. Thus shores unknown will soon become accessible, for one in emulation of another sets forth in labors and mighty perils.
—PETER MARTYR D’ANGHIERA (1493)
ON THE NIGHT OF October 19, 1520, a small Portuguese expedition to the Ethiopian highlands was ushered into a richly carpeted tent; on bended knees, to the low tolling of a stone bell, they waited and watched. A curtain was slowly drawn aside to reveal a man seated above them on a rich throne, his face concealed by a blue cloth suspended from invisible cords. And as the bell sounded, the final covering was briefly lowered to allow a tantalizing glimpse of the mythic figure that had provided much of the motivation for the Portuguese maritime adventure: the Christian king of Ethiopia, Dawit II, the man they called Prester John—who they believed would help fulfill Manuel’s crusading dreams. It was a meeting the Portuguese had anticipated for almost a century, the whole of western Christendom for much longer:
And there we saw Prester John sitting on a platform of six steps very richly adorned. He had on his head a high crown of gold and silver…and a silver cross in his hand….The Prester was dressed in a rich robe of brocade, and silk shirt of wide sleeves….From his knees downward he had a rich cloth well spread out like a bishop’s apron, and he was sitting as they painted God the Father on the wall….In age, complexion and stature, he is a young man, not very dark…an elegant man of middling stature, they said that he was twenty-three years of age, and he looks like that, his face is round, the eyes large, the nose high in the middle, and his beard is beginning to grow. In his presence and state he fully looks like the great lord he is. We were about a space of two lances distant from him.
The kingdom of Prester John in a sixteenth-century Portuguese map
When the news of Prester John reached Manuel, the following spring, he fired off a letter of rejoicing to the pope. In June 1521, the king publicly declared that the destruction of Mecca and the recapture of Jerusalem were in sight. Yet the truth was otherwise. Manuel was as yet unaware that, impressive as Dawit II was in person, he was not the all-conquering king whose golden image had embossed medieval maps. Up close, it was obvious that the Ethiopians were in no position militarily or economically to launch any attack on the Islamic world; on the contrary, they were hemmed in by Muslim enemies. When Dawit was killed fighting in 1540, it was a heroic expedition of four hundred Portuguese volunteers that saved Christian Ethiopia. Like the gradual revelation of the face of the real Prester, the first century of Portuguese discoveries saw a successive stripping away of layers of medieval mythology about the world and the received wisdom of ancient authority—the tales of dog-headed men and birds that could swallow elephants—by the empirical observation of geography, climate, natural history, and cultures that ushered in the early modern age.
Manuel died in December 1521. Though no one knew it at the time, his crusading plans had first faltered years back with Albuquerque’s failure at the walls of Aden, the ladders cracking like fatal pistol shots, then with the governor’s dismissal and death. He was replaced, in turn, by three fumbling and timid men, none blessed with his strategic nous. Lopo Soares de Albergaria, equipped with a huge fleet, actually refused the sheikh’s offer to build a fort at Aden because it was not in his orders, then flunked an attack on Jeddah—“the most sad and miserable tragedy ever” was the verdict of João de Barros. “Neither before or after was anything seen like it, a vast fleet just vanishing without a fight.” Albergaria did worse: he turned back the clock, abolishing the professional trained bands in favor of the fidalgos, relaxing the prohibition on private trading—which had been at the heart of Albuquerque’s quarrel with his opponents in India—and favoring the factioning self-interest of piratical captains. Corruption and abuses of power crept in.
Other blows had fallen on Manuel’s great project. In 1515 his army in Morocco, the second arm of an intended pincer movement against the Islamic world, suffered a significant defeat. His queen, Maria, the most fervent supporter of his millennial dreams, died in 1517. The same year, the Mamluk dynasty collapsed. The Ottoman sultan, Selim “the Grim,” shattered its army and hanged the last ruler from Cairo’s gates. Henceforward the Portuguese would face a far more formidable Muslim opponent in the Indian Ocean.
In Almeida and Albuquerque, Manuel had had the luck of two incorruptible and loyal commanders, the latter one of the great conquerors and visionary empire builders of world history. With never more than a few thousand men, makeshift resources, worm-eaten ships, and breathtaking ambition, Albuquerque gifted him an empire in the Indian Ocean, underpinned by a matrix of fortified bases. In the process, the Portuguese surprised the world. No one in the European arena had predicted that this tiny marginalized country would make a vaulting leap into the East, join up the hemispheres, and construct the first empire with a global reach. “Why does not the king of Castile, the king of France or the Signoria of Venice send men here?” seemed a reasonable question to ask when Gama first landed at Calicut. Only Portugal could: the answer lay in the long decades of acquired knowledge and tenacious effort on the prow of Europe, during which discovery became an organ of state policy.
With Manuel’s death, India ceased to be the launchpad for the destruction of the Islamic world; it had reverted to being an end in itself. During the sixteenth century, the Portuguese endured decades of bloody warfare, defending these acquisitions from continual Ottoman-led attacks that tested Albuquerque’s fortress policy to the limit. Small pockets of men, often hopelessly outnumbered, fought with a spirit that defied the odds. Even a massive pan-Indian assault on Goa and Chaul in the years 1570–71 died at the walls. The Franks could not be dislodged. Goa, “the Rome of the East,” justified Albuquerque’s strategic vision. It would remain a Portuguese colony for four hundred years, home to a remarkable mixed-race culture.
In time, the counterpressure of the Ottoman Empire rendered the economic blockade of the Red Sea impossible to maintain. Henceforth the spice trade would be shared between Cairo and Lisbon. The Portuguese effectively enlarged the market: European spice consumption doubled during the course of the sixteenth century. For Portugal’s overseas possessions, commerce within the Indian Ocean and the seas beyond became as important as that with the home country itself, and Portuguese expansion, now increasingly in the hands of private traders, reached out to the seas beyond Malacca—to the spice islands, China, and Japan.
—
As with all imperial adventures, the judgments of history have been mixed. Albuquerque, despite his ferocity, adhered to a robust ideal of justice. He was clear-eyed about the risks and consequences of the Portuguese adventure. Surveying the walls of Ormuz, he declared:
So long as they are upheld by justice and without oppression, they are more than sufficient. But if good faith and humanity cease to be observed in these lands, then pride will overthrow the strongest walls we have. Portugal is very poor and when the poor are covetous they become oppressors. The fumes of India are powerful—I fear the time will come when instead of our present fame as warriors we may only be known as grasping tyrants.
The samudri then and many Indian historians since have labeled the Portuguese incursions as acts of piracy; the Malaysian government has constructed a replica of the Frol de la Mar as an object lesson. At its entrance a notice reads, “The ship’s cargo consisted of precious treasures of the country plundered by the colonialists after they had conquered Malacca in 1511.
But thanks to God the vessel was shipwrecked on 26 January 1512 in the straits of Malacca on its voyage to Europe.”
Yet for all the nostalgia for a dream time before the coming of the Franks, this vast and largely pacific trade zone was an enclosed sea. The Portuguese, with their bronze cannons and capable fleets, both ruptured a self-sufficient system and joined up the world. They came as harbingers of globalization and the scientific age of discovery. Their explorers, missionaries, merchants, and soldiers fanned far across the world. They were in Nagasaki and Macao, in the uplands of Ethiopia and the mountains of Bhutan. They trudged across the Tibetan Plateau and battled upstream the length of the Amazon. As they went, they mapped, they learned languages, and they described, with a “pen in one hand, a sword in the other.” Luís Vaz de Camões, whose epic poem The Lusíads created a founding mythology for the heroism of exploration, exemplified in person the sometimes desperate qualities of their adventure. He was the most widely traveled poet of the Renaissance, a man who lost an eye in Morocco, who was exiled to the East for a sword fight, who was destitute in Goa and shipwrecked in the Mekong Delta—he swam ashore clutching his manuscript above his head while his Chinese lover drowned. “Had there been more of the world,” Camões wrote of the Portuguese explorers, they “would have discovered it.”
Though its supremacy lasted little more than a century, Portugal’s achievement was to create the prototype for new and flexible forms of empire, based on mobile sea power, and the paradigm for European expansion. Where it led, the Dutch and the English followed.
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