Conquerors Page 8

  Then the visitors were transferred to two boats lashed together and paddled down a river between palm trees, with a floating cavalcade of other craft following and people watching from the bank; they passed large ships drawn up high and dry on the banks. “They had all come to see us,” observed the journal writer. “When we disembarked, the captain-major once more entered his palanquin.” As they approached the city, the crowds thickened; women came out of their houses carrying children and followed them down the road. A note of claustrophobia and disorientation enters the narrative. The writer’s eyes were swiveling in his head as he tried to take everything in: the unfamiliar appearance of the people, “of a tawny complexion,” so unlike the Portuguese experience of Africans; the men variously shaved or heavily bearded; the women, “as a rule, short and ugly” in his estimation, but heavily festooned with gold necklaces and bracelets, and with toe rings set with precious stones that seemed to speak of the wealth of the Indies. In general he found the people “well-disposed and apparently of mild temper,” but above all he was struck by their vast numbers.

  Entering the city, they were guided to “a large church…as large as a monastery, all built of hewn stone and covered with tiles.” There is nothing in this account to suggest that the Hindu temple they were led into was not a church of some deviant Christian sect. Outside there were two pillars, probably lingams of the god Shiva. Inside, they saw a sanctuary chapel in the center with a bronze door; “within this sanctuary stood a small image which they said represented Our Lady.” It is impossible to know what was being lost in translation: probably from the Arabic of the Portuguese to an Arabic-speaking native, who then translated into Malayalam, the language of the Malabar Coast. Gama knelt down and prayed; the priests sprinkled holy water and “gave us some white earth, which the Christians of this country are in the habit of putting on”; Gama set his to one side. The diarist noticed, as they left, the saints on the walls, wearing crowns and “painted variously, with teeth protruding an inch from the mouth, and four or five arms.”

  Out on the street, the crowd continued to build until it became impossible to move for the press of people; the guests had to be sequestered in a house while a guard was called to clear a way through the throng by beating drums, blowing trumpets and bagpipes, and firing muskets. People crowded onto the roofs to see them go by. It was nearly sunset when they reached the palace. “We passed through four doors, through which we had to force our way, giving many blows to the people.” Men were wounded at the entrance. At last they came into the king’s audience chamber, “a great hall, surrounded with seats of timber raised in rows above one another like our theaters, the floor being covered by a carpet of green velvet, and the walls hung with silk of various colors.” Before them sat a man they believed to be the Christian king they had come twelve thousand miles to find.

  5

  The Samudri

  May 1498–August 1499

  THE FIRST SIGHT OF a Hindu monarch was, to Portuguese eyes, remarkable:

  The king was of a brown complexion, large stature, and well advanced in years. On his head he had a cap or miter adorned with precious stones and pearls, and had jewels of the same kind in his ears. He wore a jacket of fine cotton cloth, having buttons of large pearls and the button-holes wrought with gold thread. About his middle he had a piece of a white calico, which came only down to his knees; and both his fingers and toes were adorned with many gold rings set with fine stones; his arms and legs were covered with many golden bracelets.

  The samudri reclined in a posture of Oriental ease on a green velvet couch, chewing betel leaves, the remnants of which he spat into a large gold spittoon. “On the right side of the king stood a basin of gold, so large that a man might just encircle it with his arms; this contained the herbs. There were likewise many silver jugs. The canopy above the couch was all gilt.”

  Gama had evidently been coached by Monçaide as to how to return the king’s greeting with the appropriate gestures: not to approach too near and to speak with his hands in front of his mouth. The guests were fed with fruits and given water. When asked to drink from the jug without touching it to their lips, “some poured the water into their throats and fell a coughing, while others poured it beside upon their faces and clothes, which much amused the king.” In the crowded auditorium, it was a situation of cultural disadvantage that probably pricked Gama’s sense of pride.

  When he was asked to address the assembled company, Gama asserted his dignity and requested to speak in private. Withdrawing into an inner room with just their interpreters, he talked up his mission: to come to the land of India, which they had been seeking for sixty years on behalf of his king, “the possessor of great wealth of every description,” to find Christian kings. He promised to bring Manuel’s letters to the samudri next day. By this time Gama had evidently assumed the samudri to be a Christian.

  By now a great deal of time had passed. As was the custom, the samudri asked if Gama would like to lodge with the Christians (in fact, the Hindus) or the Muslims. Gama warily asked for his men to lodge on their own. It was about ten o’clock at night. The rain was pouring down in the dark, churning up the street. He was carried on the palanquin under an umbrella; they wound through the streets followed by a large crowd so slowly that Gama lost patience and complained. They were taken out of the rain for a while, but the Oriental palaver continued. He was offered a horse to ride but without a saddle; he refused. Presumably he traveled on in the palanquin until they reached their lodgings, to which his bed had been delivered by sailors from the boat, along with the presents for the king. It was the end of a long and confusing day of overwhelming impressions: the massed crowds, the lack of breathing space, the unfamiliar rituals, the monsoon rain stirring rich smells. Probably still moving to the pitch and roll of a ghostly ship, they fell into exhausted sleep.

  Whatever credibility had been gained with the samudri quickly evaporated. If the gifts with which the Portuguese had been furnished in Lisbon were snubbed in Mozambique and Malindi, here it was worse. The following morning, Gama collected the items to send to the palace: twelve pieces of striped cloth, four scarlet hoods, six hats, four strings of coral, six hand-washing basins, a case of sugar, two casks each of honey and oil. These were objects to impress an African chief, not a potentate used to the rich trading culture of the Indian Ocean. The bale just laughed: “the poorest merchant from Mecca, or any other part of India, gave more…if he wanted to make a present it should be in gold.” He flatly refused to forward these paltry items to the Sovereign of the Sea. Furious backpedaling was required. Gama retorted that “he was no merchant but an ambassador…if the king of Portugal ordered him to return he would entrust him with far richer presents.” Some Muslim merchants came to further disparage the wretched objects.

  Gama asked to go and explain the situation in person. This could be done, he was told, but he must wait for a short time and then he would be taken to the palace. He waited impatiently. No one returned. Behind the scenes, something was going on. The Muslim merchants had sensed a threat from the Christian incomers; they may have received reports of the foreigners’ aggressive tactics and bombardment of the Swahili coast. For all the credited openness of Calicut to trade, there were vested interests to protect; there is evidence that the Muslims had been instrumental in driving Chinese merchants out of the city decades earlier. They probably secured an audience with the samudri to relay the suggestion that Gama was at best a chancer, more likely a pirate. The Portuguese subsequently believed that the Muslims requested Gama’s death. All day Gama waited, his temper rising. Evidently their captain’s inability to relax was not shared by his companions. “As to us others,” said the diarist, “we diverted ourselves, singing and dancing to the sound of trumpets, and enjoyed ourselves much.”

  In the morning they were taken back to the palace, where they waited four hours. To Gama, now thoroughly worked up, it was a calculated snub. Finally word came that the king would see only the captain-major and t
wo others. The whole party thought “this separation portended no good.” Gama stepped through the doorway, heavily guarded by armed men, with his secretary and interpreter.

  The second interview was frosty and perplexing. The samudri wanted to know why Gama had not come the previous day. Unable to understand what motives these strangers could have if not to trade, his questions followed in quick succession to the effect that if he were from a rich country, why had he not brought gifts? And where were his letters? Gama was forced to extemporize answers about how he had brought nothing because this was a voyage of discovery. It would be followed up by others, with rich gifts. He did at least have the letters at hand. The king probed the gift mystery again: “What had he come to discover: stones or men?” he demanded ironically. “If he came to discover men, as he said, why had he brought nothing?” He had evidently been told that one of the ships contained a golden image of St. Mary. “Not golden” was the reply—the image was probably of gilded wood—to which the stoutly resistant Gama added “that even if she were he would not part with her, as she had guided him across the ocean, and would guide him back to his own country.” When it came to the reading of the Arabic copy of the letter, Gama did not trust the Muslims to translate from Arabic to Malayalam; but although the “Christian” boy who was his interpreter could speak both languages, he was unable to read either. When it was finally translated, the samudri was partially appeased. Gama had at least established authentic credentials. Finally there was the issue of the merchandise: Gama might return to the ships, land, and sell it as best he could. He never saw the samudri again.

  Tension, uncertainty, and mistrust increased on the lengthy journey back to the ships. Gama, perhaps conscious of status, again refused a horse and demanded a palanquin. The monsoon rain battered the streets. The anonymous writer and his companions trudged behind and got lost in the downpour. Eventually they reached the seaside port of Pandarani, exhausted, and caught up with their captain, sheltering in a guesthouse. By this time Gama was again in a foul mood. He asked for a boat to take them back to the ships. The bale replied, quite reasonably, that it was dark and it might be difficult to locate the ships standing some way offshore. Mutual antagonism between the two men was ratcheted up. The party was exhausted; they were given a meal, which “we ate, notwithstanding our fatigue, having been all day on our feet.”

  The following morning, Gama asked again for boats. The bale requested the ships to be brought closer inshore to make the transfer easier in the monsoon weather. The Portuguese feared a trap, orchestrated by the Muslim faction in the city; the bale suspected that these strange visitors might try to leave without paying their customs dues. “The captain said that if he ordered his vessels to approach, his brother would think that he was being held a prisoner, and that he gave this order on compulsion, and would hoist the sails and return to Portugal.” He demanded to return, with his complaints, to the samudri, “who was a Christian like himself.” The bale agreed but then placed a heavily armed guard on the doors, “none of us being allowed to go outside without being accompanied by several of these guards.” The bale requested that if the ships remained offshore, they should give up their rudders and sails so as not to make off. Gama refused. When he declared that they would die of hunger, the reply was that “if we died of hunger we must bear it.” There was a tense standoff.

  In the midst of this, Gama did contrive to slip a man out to meet up with a boat waiting offshore “with orders to go back to the ships and put them in a secure place.” The messenger boat was pursued by local craft but managed to return to the ships. A measure of paranoia infected the hostages. Gama feared that if the ships came into port, “once inside they could easily be captured, after which they would first kill him, and then us others, as we were already in their power.”

  The journal recorded a day of tightening fear, offset by an ability to live in the moment.

  We passed all that day most anxiously. At night more people surrounded us than ever before, and we were no longer allowed to walk in the compound, within which we were, but confined within a small tiled court, with a multitude of people around us. We quite expected that on the following day we should be separated, or that some harm would befall us, for we noticed that our jailers were much annoyed with us. This, however, did not prevent our making a good supper off the things found in the village. Throughout that night we were guarded by over a hundred men, all armed with swords, two-edged battle-axes, shields and bows and arrows. While some of these slept, others kept guard, each taking his turn of duty throughout the night.

  There was an anxiety that this might be their last night on earth.

  Next morning, the whole problem inexplicably vanished. Their captors came back, with “better faces,” as the journal writer said. They would do as the king had requested: if the Portuguese landed their goods, they might go. They explained what the bristling Gama had failed to understand: that “it was the custom of the country that every ship on its arrival should at once land the merchandise it brought, as also the crews, and that the vendors should not return on board until the whole of it had been sold.” Gama promptly sent a message to his brother to send “certain things”—not all. Some goods were landed; two men remained behind to manage and sell them, the prisoners were released back to their ships. “At this we rejoiced greatly, and rendered thanks to God for having extricated us from the hands of people who had no more sense than beasts.”

  The samudri probably remained uncertain how to play these strange visitors; they fitted no known category of merchant, yet they evidently came from a great king, and the commercially oriented monarch, whose wealth derived from the trading vessels that came to his open port, was reluctant to snub a potential opportunity out of hand. At his shoulder the Muslim merchants were undoubtedly hostile to the infidel intruders; whether they were plotting the murder of the Portuguese is uncertain, but their antagonism was probably as much commercial as religious. The Portuguese had come to the Indian coast with their visors lowered. Hardened by decades of holy war in North Africa, their default strategies were suspicion, aggressive hostage taking, the half-drawn sword, and a simple binary choice between Christian and Muslim, which seemed genuinely not to have factored into calculation the existence of Hinduism. These impatient simplicities were ill suited to the complexities of the Indian Ocean, where Hindus, Muslims, Jews, and even Indian Christians were integrated into a polyethnic trading zone.

  Only a portion of the goods had been landed—not the complete stock, as was the custom—and displayed at a house in Pandarani. The king sent merchants to inspect the goods; they sniffed at the pathetic items on sale. “They spat on the ground, saying ‘Portugal! Portugal!’ ” Gama complained to the king and asked if he might have his stock carried to Calicut itself. In a show of goodwill, the samudri ordered his bale to have the goods transferred at his own expense. “This was done,” said the diarist, voicing perpetual Portuguese suspicion and the tendency to misread motives, “because it was intended to do us some ill turn, for it was reported to the king that we were thieves and went about to steal.”

  Nevertheless, the situation now provided the visitors with a chance to participate, in a modest way, in the commercial life of the city. The seamen had come with a small stock of goods to trade on their own behalf—“bracelets, clothes, new shirts and other articles”—and they were allowed ashore in threes by turn. They were largely disappointed with the results. Finely worked shirts fetched a tenth of their value back home, as did their other items, but they were able to buy small quantities of spices and precious stones in return. In the weeks that followed, they started to unravel the different strata of Malabar society. Along the road to Calicut they came in contact with the low-caste fisher families (“Christians”), who were far from unwelcoming. They were invited in “to eat or to sleep”—which was probably a euphemism for the easy sexual favors of Malabar women—and people came on board with their children to exchange fish for bread, so many that “sometimes
it was night before we could get rid of them.” These people were evidently poverty-stricken. They snatched biscuits out of the hands of sailors mending their sails “and left them nothing to eat.” As a matter of policy, Gama ordered adults and children who came aboard to be fed, “to induce them to speak well of us and not evil.”

  The culturally curious Portuguese were starting to note the divisions in society, and they were quick learners. These weeks of informal dealing allowed them to glimpse the mechanisms and rhythms of the Indian Ocean trade and an outline of the supply networks, information they would store for future reference. Calicut itself was a major producer of ginger, pepper, and cinnamon, although better quality of the latter could be had from “an island called Ceylon, which is eight days journey to the south.” Cloves came from an “island called Malacca.” “The Mecca vessels” (from the Arabian Peninsula, fifty days’ sailing away) would carry spices to the Red Sea, and then, via a series of transshipments, successively to Cairo and up the Nile to Alexandria, where the galleys of Venice and Genoa would load up. The Portuguese noted all the checks and barriers in this trade: the inefficient transshipments, the robbery on the road to Cairo, the exorbitant taxes paid to the sultan there. It was this complex supply chain that they were keen to disrupt.