Brazil

by Errol Lincoln Uys

  Albuquerque’s name was already a byword for terror among the petty kings and sultans along the coast of India: O Terrível (The Terrible), they called him. The first battle for Goa was short. The Turkish mercenaries serving its Muslim rulers fled, leaving the Hindu islanders to welcome the Portuguese. But Ishmael Adil Shah, sultan of Bijapur and ruler of Goa, away at the time of the attack, returned with his war elephants and thousands of men and drove Albuquerque’s men back to their ships moored in the Mandavi.

  What could men like these aboard São Gabriel know of a time like that long monsoon in Goa? Cavalcanti wondered. For three months the ships had been trapped by the southwest winds, unable to clear the sand bars at the mouth of the Mandavi.

  There were murderous raids ashore, against the gun emplacements of Adil Shah, and desperate actions to combat fire rafts launched downriver to scorch the beleaguered fleet. Impressed by the valor of his enemy, Adil Shah offered peace.

  “Tell him,” Albuquerque had said, “that Goa is the property of the king of Portugal.”

  For eighty-four days the ships held out; on the eighty-fifth day, the monsoon over, they could finally weigh anchor. But it was not long before Albuquerque was back, this time in a great armada with 1,700 fighting men. By ten o’clock on the feast day of St. Catherine, the garrison at Goa had fallen.

  For three days and nights the fighting had raged in the city. By dawn on the fourth day, when O Terrível decreed a halt, they had slain six thousand disbelievers, men, women, and children, for Portugal — and for Christ.

  One aftermath of the massacre, Cavalcanti remembered with special clarity:

  “Spare the widows and daughters,” Albuquerque had directed. “Those of fair skin and noble grace.”

  When the sacking of Goa was ended, several hundred of its loveliest treasures stood before Albuquerque. These he offered to two hundred of his most valiant fighting men. “Choose well,” he told them, “for these daughters of mine are to mother the young in our king’s great State of India.”

  What had it all come to? Cavalcanti asked himself. That men like Gomes de Pina should lead the king’s ships? It was ridiculous that Gomes de Pina should want to consider himself in the same rank as Albuquerque. How different was this captain general from O Terrível: this one soft and vain; and Albuquerque — an iron will and a spirit given to dreams and visions.

  Cavalcanti remembered Albuquerque after Ormuz, ill and exhausted with dysentery, afflicted with the hiccups, begging the men around him not to put his goods up for auction, for he did not wish his ragged breeches to be seen.

  Even as Albuquerque lay dying, he had understood that many were coming to threaten all of his good works. As soon as their ships rounded Africa’s stormy Cape, even the meanest marinheiros wanted to be captains and commanders, and dreamt of Moorish princesses on soft cushions. Many who had been placed in charge by the king summoned their brothers and uncles and nephews and cousins, and sought only to plunder the Indies and fill their own pockets.

  Cavalcanti had been one of the few who refused to condone the corruption that came to flourish in the Portuguese enclaves. He stayed on in Goa for three years after Albuquerque’s death. In 1518, he was ordered home to Lisbon by an official who was angered by Cavalcanti’s open condemnation of bribes he had accepted from a Malay captain.

  Because of his honesty, Cavalcanti had returned to Portugal with nothing but the king’s allotment — the bonus of pepper he might sell for his own profit. Even his own father, a merchant by trade, made no effort to hide his disappointment in his son:

  “You’re a fool, Nicolau. Men go to the East to get rich. What can you show for ten years?”

  “Nothing,” Cavalcanti had to admit.

  In February 1526, a month before it sailed, he joined this present squadron. Since Goa, he’d sailed in royal merchant vessels to the Low Countries and Bristol, and to the Hanse ports, along those ancient routes that had first awakened Lisbon to the great possibilities of trade. Goa had been but one climax in a long, exhausting endeavor, launched by the little barchas and caravels that had finally broken their dependence on those northern ports and turned south, sailing through the fog of terror on legend’s Green Sea of Darkness to creep down the bulge of Africa, seeking gold and slaves and “grains of paradise,” the pepper of Guinea.

  Cavalcanti looked down and saw the men at São Gabriel’s firebox taking their rats from the grill. They settled on the deck near him, ignoring the appeals from others who begged a portion of this nauseous repast. For men without rats, there would be a handful of salted fish, weevil-riddled biscuit, and a cup of evil-smelling water. Except for Gomes de Pina: At Lisbon, he’d loaded his private supplies of meats, preserves, and dried fruits, and his pages guarded these delicacies with their lives. Rarely did he share his table with the master and his officers, and then in so grudging a manner as to leave a foul taste in the mouths of those he fed.

  Observing the comforts of a man like Gomes de Pina, Cavalcanti was coming to think that his father had been right: He should have sought more than honor and glory for Christendom in the East.

  “It is not souls,” the merchant Cavalcanti had often liked to remind him, “but wealth and power that drives men to As Conquistas.”

  As an example, his father often recounted the success of the greatest of all merchants, the infante Henry. When, after a humiliating fight with the Infidels at Tangier, the prince had realized that the Moor could not be beat at Portugal’s door, he’d sent his corsairs and factors to the enemy’s supply sites in Africa.

  “Why send legions to die in North Africa when a fortune in slaves and gold and ivory could be carried to his counting houses without a struggle? There were dreamers and thinkers around Henry, with grand ideas about the reconquest of the holy places. He listened to them, just as he heard the words of those who read his stars, but the language he liked best was that of captains who sailed home with laden ships, and of merchants like your grandfather, who owed the infante half of all profits made with his license.”

  From a friend of his father’s, an old Jew named Isaac Cardoso, Cavalcanti had learned just how grand such profits were even before he himself went to the East. It was a simple lesson, never forgotten.

  He could see the two of them now, sitting on a bench outside his father’s countinghouse, in the time the first great fleet sent to India, that of Pedro Álvares Cabral, had returned. Isaac was holding a stick of cinnamon in one hand, a sharp knife in the other. He cut off a small piece. “This,” he said, “goes to the man who took it to Calicut.” He cut off another. “This is for the Arab whose dhow will carry it to Jidda on the Red Sea; this, for the captain of the foist that will land it at Suez.

  “Here are the dues to be paid at Suez, and this for the caravan master bound for Cairo. Now the boatman of the Nile wants his piece, and here is payment for the camel carrier to Alexandria.” The little pile of cuttings grew. “Alexandria’s Moor demands this for moving cargo in his port; here is Venice’s price for the cost of her galley and the profits of her merchant. And these are the bribes to be passed out along the way.”

  Isaac had whittled the cinnamon until a small fragment lay in the palm of his hand. “From this must come the profit of the palace and merchants of Portugal,” he said. Then he took up a second cinnamon stick, the same length as the original, and cut off slightly more than a third of it. “This is what it cost for Cabral to bring this cinnamon home,” he said. “The rest is for our king.”

  Even more impressed by Isaac’s vivid illustration were Cavalcanti’s brothers: One older, one younger than he, they had gone into the countinghouse, while he had chosen this life at sea. And it hadn’t been the excitement at the Cavalcanti warehouses, where captains and traders from many realms visited, but rather the atmosphere at quiet Sintra, beyond Lisbon, that inspired him to pursue this course.

  Through his marriage to Inez Gonçalves, Cavalcanti’s father had come to possess lands on those serene vales before the Serra de Sintra. Here,
between jagged rocks of antiquity crowned with fallen battlement of Moor and the distant, azure expanse of the Atlantic, here was past and future, and whether Nicolau climbed through the thick woods to the lee of the old Infidel redoubt or stood on the windy headland at Cabo da Roça, he felt an intimacy with both.

  Ten years of his life had been spent in the East, and when he’d returned to Portugal, there were great churches and palaces he’d not seen before, royal warehouses bursting at the seams, merchants and bankers of many nations thronging the praças, all clamoring for a share of this splendid wealth. One who had aided this reality could have pride in the result, but there’d been other sights less inspiring: rotten ships and decimated crews crawling up the Tagus; shipyards where fewer and fewer replacements lay on the slips; hordes of adventurers and exiles flocking to the realm; families who came to count one, two, three sons sacrificed on some distant shore.

  He’d spoken of this to Gomes de Pina, but the fidalgo showed little concern: If there were fewer sons to till the soil of Portugal, he’d said, then bring in more peças, “pieces,” of Africa — the slaves. “Nothing must restrain the work of empire,” was his pompous pronouncement. “Nothing must restrain a people destined for greatness!”

  Their sailing, sixty-four days before, had borne little resemblance to the departure of royal fleets in the past. But Gomes de Pina, so full of his noble antecedents, seemed unaware of any diminished glory. He had ordered that his vessels tarry in the river while he held a holy vigil in the new church of the Jeronymites, built at nearby Belém in gratitude to God for the passage to India. He’d assembled his family and hangers-on and proceeded to prayerful office — in the manner of great navigators like Vasco da Gama and Pedro Álvares Cabral, who had knelt in the humble chapel that had stood on the ground now occupied by the majestic limestone monastery.

  When his lonely appeal was over, Gomes de Pina had led his entourage to the water’s edge, where a boat waited to carry him to the ships. They were anchored close to the Tower of St. Vincent, a great bulwark that rose on a group of rocks in the Tagus.

  Standing upright, his bearded jaw jutting forward, the fidalgo had allowed himself to be rowed past the fortress, oblivious to the fact that the guardsmen didn’t give this departing hero a second glance.

  And now here he was, far across the Atlantic, watching as men he commanded gnawed the bones of rodents.

  “Disgusting,” Gomes de Pina said as the marinheiros disposed of the last tidbits. “Have they no respect for themselves?”

  “They respect the dead,” Cavalcanti said pointedly.

  The captain general turned away in silence.

  Two days later, under a pale, tropical moon, São Gabriel sailed with a fair breeze, her bow lifting and dipping gently in the easy sea; the caravels rode ahead, off to port, their canvas silvered, the cresset fires dancing at their sterns.

  From the steerage, a ship’s boy sang out:

  *

  “Four glasses be gone,

  And now a fifth floweth,

  God’s will be done,

  His fair way we knoweth.”

  *

  There was a pause, and then the same lad cried, “Forecastle! Forecastle! Look sharp, up there!”

  A grunted reply from near the bowsprit signaled that the man remained alert as they passed into the third hour of the 11-to-3 watch.

  On the quarterdeck, Nicolau Cavalcanti smiled at the exaggerated challenge in the boy’s voice: Brito Correia, not quite five feet tall, was the youngest and cheekiest of the ship’s boys. A mulatto waif from Santarém, he’d given his age as thirteen, but Cavalcanti suspected him of being a year or two younger.

  The master walked over to the dimly lit binnacle box and checked their heading. He leaned toward the open hatchway above the steerage. “Steady as she is, helmsman,” he said.

  Cavalcanti looked at the caravels in the distance, his eyes searching the vast expanse of moonlit sea.

  Was it a night like this, in the year of Our Lord Jesus Christ 1492, when Cristovão Colombo first saw Ilha San Salvador? O Santa Maria! The scheming Genoese adventurer sailing for Castile and Aragon! O Portugal, robbed by Spanish dogs and the traitors who sail in their ships!

  Cavalcanti’s personal loathing for the Spaniards reflected age-old rivalries between Portugal and her Iberian neighbor. Columbus had turned to Ferdinand and Isabella for royal patronage only after being rejected by João II of Portugal, who had not been impressed by the plans of the inexperienced and impecunious Genoese. The triumphant return of Admiral Columbus with news that the “Indies” could be reached by sailing west had alarmed the Portuguese, who were seeking a passage around Africa for the same purpose and had been granted exclusive right to explore and conquer the Indies by Pope Nicolas V in 1454.

  The Catholic monarchs took the dispute that arose after Columbus’s discovery to Rome, where Pope Alexander VI issued a series of bulls embodied in the Treaty of Tordesilhas: Portuguese and Spanish discoveries were to be separated by a demarcation line running north and south, 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands. The Portuguese were granted all lands and continents discovered or to be discovered for 180 degrees east of this line; the Spaniards enjoyed the same privilege for 180 degrees to the west. When Columbus was on his third voyage in 1498, the Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama reached India via the Cape of Good Hope; two years later, Pedro Álvares Cabral, commander of the second Indies fleet, veered far to the west, making an unexpected landfall at Terra de Santa Cruz on April 22, 1500.

  Cavalcanti knew little of Terra do Brasil. No gold, silver, or spices were to be found there; it was just a vast terra incognita, which provided little else but logs and feathers and slaves hardly worth reckoning: small batches of timid men who weakened almost from the outset and, if they survived the crossing, died soon after landing.

  Cavalcanti had once seen a group of these natives in Lisbon’s Rossio Square, brought there by a captain in one of the first fleets to sail with the king’s license to collect brazilwood. There’d been eight or nine, and they drew an enormous crowd.

  They had coppery skin and muscular builds, if slighter than those of the Guinea slaves. Their owner had directed them to paint themselves in the fashion they used for war. And he revealed to the onlookers that he himself had devised the little skirts of canvas they wore, since, in their own lands, they went as naked as Adam himself. All had headdresses of parrot feathers. They went barefoot, and around their ankles hung seedpods that rattled as they moved. But nothing had intrigued Cavalcanti as much as their faces: lodged in openings bored into their cheeks and lower lips were colorful stones, and pieces of bone protruded from their noses.

  “Dance, Tupinambá!” the captain had ordered, first in Portuguese, then, to the amusement of all, in the tongue of the savages. “Dance! Great warriors you are!”

  Cavalcanti was aware that a few wild, crazy men from Portugal dwelt in Terra do Brasil. Some lived there without choice, for it was either exile to Brazil or the gibbet hook. But others had gone freely to the logwood camps along the coast as woodsmen and laborers for those who held the king’s contract to collect dyewood. It was in the interests of such men that Gomes de Pina sailed.

  Cavalcanti was standing at the port side of the quarterdeck, his arm resting on the swivel gun mounted there. He thought of the squadron’s mission — to patrol Brazil’s shores for two years — and wondered whether São Gabriel could survive this order. Ahead, toward the horizon, he could see the caravels Nossa Senhora da Consolação and São Bento, plunging and throwing spray as they coursed ahead. With every square of canvas and her bonnets latched in place, São Gabriel would still have hard work to keep up with them.

  Suddenly, Cavalcanti saw the flash from one of the Consolação port guns.

  Almost simultaneously the lookout in São Gabriel’s bow sang out “Land! Land!” though he could have seen nothing, but Consolação’s signal was clear. “Land! Land!” the lookout called again, directing his cry into the heart
of the ship.

  The caravels hove to, waiting for the slower ship. Aboard São Gabriel, as she closed the distance between them, her men raised their voices in a tremendous rendering of the Gloria.

  Pilot Fernandes could be well satisfied with this landfall. A morning’s sail to the south would bring them to Porto Seguro, the secure haven Admiral Pedro Álvares Cabral had sought after the first sighting of Brazil.

  Just before sunrise the offshore breeze freshened, and on São Gabriel and the other ships, spritsail, topsails, and mizzen were unfurled, a bonnet was latched to the foot of the main, and the yard, slung low during the night, was hoisted up. Rope-scarred hands hauled and made fast halyards and bowlines. With the wind on the starboard quarter, the ships held a southwest heading, sailing farther offshore but never losing the line of white and shaded green broken here and there by a rise of low cliff that stood golden in the early sun. Soon they caught sight of the mountain Cabral had called Pascoal, for the Easter week that had preceded his landfall.

  At last they stood in toward that wide, beautiful bay. Near the beach they saw the great cross raised by Cabral. But off to the left were piles of logs. As the ships drew nearer, tiny figures could be seen, too, moving along the white sands.

  São Gabriel hove to, the caravels drifting within hailing distance. Pilot Fernandes had a rough chart for these waters, but he was a cautious man and would not put his trust in it alone. Low waves broke over a jagged reef before the southern end of the bay, and this obstruction was marked on the chart, but the description, in the hand of an earlier navigator, was crude enough to make Fernandes wary of other, hidden dangers. Two boats, from São Gabriel and Consolação, were to go in first, taking soundings.