Similarly with merchants, who often were happy to tacitly support piracy in order to acquire dubious, 'hot' goods. Writing from Kedah, Bowrey said:
Anno Domini 1675. A Small Vessell belonginge to the English was Sent from Achin hither laden with very fine goods, and was mett with the Pyrats.... They Sett Upon her and killed Samuel Ware, the master and two more of his men, and tooke the Vessell, which done, they Sent away the Other Seamen in a Prow bound for Achin and came boldly Up to Queda and Sold the goods to Sarajah Cawn [Suraj Khan], a Chulyar, and chiefe Shabandar of Quedah, an rogue Enough too. This Rogue by reason he bought them very Cheape made noe question how they came by the goods, although he Saw English marks and Number upon Each particular baile.
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Piracy can be a sign of flourishing trade. They can be seen as macroparasites, human groups that draw sustenance from the toil and enterprise of others, offering nothing in return. As parasites they do best when trade is flourishing as then hosts are readily available. Pirates also move depending on how easy the pickings are. Many European pirates, such as Captain Kidd, moved from the Caribbean to the Indian Ocean in the late seventeenth century. The most celebrated capture in this 'pirate round' of the last decade of the century was that of the Mughal ship the
Ganj-i-sawai
, in 1695, taken by Captain Every and four other pirate ships off the mouth of the Red Sea. The ship carried a huge and valuable cargo, including jewels and a saddle and bridle meant for the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb. Among the passengers were many pilgrims, some of them elite people and even relations of the emperor. The women were raped, the ship plundered, and some 400 pirates got the huge sum of £1,000 each.
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Piracy is thus an international matter, and also a slippery one, for one person's pirate is another's legitimate trader, or even 'freedom fighter'. So also with an analysis of the success of the Portuguese presence in the Indian Ocean in the sixteenth century. We need to distinguish several levels of their activity, in several different places. But the obvious place to start is with a survey of their attempt to monopolise the trade in spices, for this was their prime ambition, and their success or failure here can stand as a model of their total achievement in the century.
By monopolising Asian trade in spices the Portuguese hoped to achieve two, related, goals.
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When they arrived they found that most of the trade was done by Muslims. To dispossess these traders was to strike a blow for the True Faith, that being Christianity. Perhaps more important, a monopoly would mean that the Portuguese could buy cheap in Asia and sell dear in Europe, a happy conjunction indeed of God and Mammon. In the first few decades of the sixteenth century the Portuguese got close to achieving this aim.
The profits could be enormous. Historians have produced many estimates. One finds that the Portuguese paid 6 cruzados for a quintal of pepper in Malabar, including the cost of freight. The minimum price in Lisbon was 22 cruzados, producing then a profit of 260 per cent. Another costing adds in an estimate for wastage and still finds profits of 150 per cent. Even if the cost of the forts in Malabar which made possible the Portuguese monopoly are deducted, we are still left with profits of 90 per cent. In 1505 prices were fixed in India and in Lisbon. Pepper cost 3 ducats per hundredweight in India, and sold for 22 in Lisbon. Other ratios are: for cinnamon 0.75 to 19; cloves 7.5 to 60–65; nutmeg 4 to 300. Later in the century the Portuguese bought cinnamon in Sri Lanka for as little as 15 cruzados the quintal, and sold it for at least 75, and sometimes 100. Godinho has tried to put the spice trade into a more comparative perspective. Around 1515 the spice trade made profits for Portugal of about 1,000,000 cruzados. This was equal to all ecclesiastical revenues, and was double the value of trade in gold and metals.
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Portuguese success marked, for a while, a reorientation of where Europe got its spices. Lisbon replaced Venice, at least temporarily. This was clear to see early on. In 1502–3 twenty-four per cent of Hungarian copper exported by the great Central European bankers the Fuggers went to Antwerp, but in 1508–9 the figure was 49 per cent, and this was used to pay Lisbon for spices. In 1501 the Portuguese captain Cabral came back to Lisbon with a good cargo of spices, and the king, Manuel, told a Venetian envoy he should tell Venice 'that from now on you should send your ships to carry spices from here.' Venetian authorities predicted gloomily that 'There is no doubt that the Hungarians, Germans, Flemish and French, and those beyond the mountains, who formerly came to Venice to buy spices with their money, will all turn towards Lisbon.'
Yet by the middle of the century the Levant trade had revived, and the Portuguese share of the supply to European was falling fast. In the earlier sixteenth century the Portuguese took some 20,000 to 30,000 quintals of pepper to Europe each year. By the end of the century this had fallen to about 10,000 quintals, while Aceh in 1585 was sending 40,000 to 50,000 quintals of spices, mostly pepper, a year to the Red Sea, and so to markets in the Middle East and the Mediterranean. In 1515 the Portuguese took 30 per cent of Malabar production, but by the end of the century only 3 or 4 per cent.
What had gone wrong with the Portuguese effort, that the Levant was able to revive, in Braudel's words that by mid century 'The Mediterranean was recapturing the treasures of the Indian Ocean?'
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The Portuguese had to conciliate several local rulers by allowing them some trade in spices. Existing traders, especially the Mapillahs of Kerala, boldly evaded Portuguese fleets. Much pepper was traded by land, where the Portuguese had no control. Finally, the failure to take Aden left open an easy route for spices to reach the Red Sea, the Middle East, and the Mediterranean.
However, it was not just spices that were traded between Asia and Europe in the sixteenth century. Another very important product was bullion. The Spanish in the Americas exported large amounts of gold across the Atlantic to Iberia from early in
this century, and from mid century even vaster amounts of silver, especially from the incredibly rich mine at Potosí in Peru. Much of this bullion flowed through Europe and so on to the Indian Ocean and Asia. However, again the Portuguese and the Cape route were far from being dominant in this trade. It is clear that much more bullion came into the Indian Ocean area via the Red Sea than came around the Cape of Good Hope. There certainly was a vast drain of bullion from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean, but most of this was not handled by the Portuguese, a matter we will return to presently.
To modern eyes and susceptibilities the official claims and actions of the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries seem to represent a presence which is more or less totally reprehensible, not in any way to be condoned or justified. They found a peaceful open trading system, and tried forcefully to monopolise some parts of it and control and tax the rest. It looks like a black, completely unacceptable, picture.
Yet the reality on the ground, or at sea, was very different. As we noted, the Portuguese were in Asia to buy spices cheap and sell them dear in Europe, thereby undercutting the traditional Mediterranean route. To forbid this trade to all others was one thing, and in any case this effort met with little success, as we saw. But the Portuguese still had to be able to buy the spices themselves, for they monopolised, partially, sea trade only, and not land trade, let alone production. Nor did they have the domestic resources to be able to send large amounts of money out from Portugal. This requirement, to find money to pay for the spices, meant that the Portuguese were soon intricately linked into the country trade of Asia.
East Africa provides an excellent case study of this matter. The Portuguese quickly found out that a commodity which could be used to pay for the spices was available in East Africa, namely gold from the Zimbabwe plateau. If they could secure supplies of this, or better still a monopoly, then payment for spices would be no problem. But it soon also became apparent that gold had to be paid for too. It could be acquired only in exchange for goods, and not Portuguese goods either.
Similarly with East Africa's other prized export, ivory. Here the Portuguese had no hope of controlling supply, for elephants were hunted in very far-flung areas. However, perhaps they could block its export. But they still had to be able to pay for it. The only items in demand on the plateau and elsewhere were beads and cloths from Gujarat; these were the traditional trade items which the producers of gold and ivory wanted, and here, as in so many other areas, the Portuguese then had to fit in to existing patterns. A continuing supply of Gujarati cloths to East Africa was essential in their wider designs. Thus were the Portuguese immersed in an intricate web of country trade in the Arabian Sea, in this case cloths from Gujarat to exchange for gold and ivory which then could pay for spices which then could be extracted from the Indian Ocean network and sent outside it to European markets.
A more detailed analysis area by area confirms this overview, and also shows a considerable variation in Portuguese policies, and successes, over the sixteenth century. In particular, later in the century the concern was more to encourage and
tax trade than to restrict it too rigorously. Most recent studies stress that increasingly during the century the Portuguese looked to trade rather than conquest, that they became immersed in Asian life and economics, while the connection with the metropole became more and more tenuous. We will first sketch the political impact of the Portuguese around the shores of the ocean, and then turn to their effect on trade.
In East Africa south of the Sahara the only major state was the Mutapa state or Monomotapa, located in the area which is now Zimbabwe. This state had no sea access, though it produced large amounts of gold and ivory which were taken down to the coast, to Sofala or Kilwa, and then exported. The Portuguese had very little effect on this trade. They tried to monopolise it, but achieved very little. Gold exports had been in decline before they arrived, and this decline continued in the sixteenth century. Ivory was an important export for the Portuguese, but this product was also traded by various Muslim groups. Later in the sixteenth century the Portuguese penetrated far inland up the Zambezi valley. One of the first was the intrepid Jesuit Father Gonçalo de Silveira, who was killed at the Mutapa court in 1561. Later other Portuguese established estates, or
prazos
. Sometimes these recognised the authority of the Mutapa ruler, sometimes they did not. The Mutapa state declined in the seventeenth century, and Portuguese activities may have contributed a little to this.
Moving north, the Portuguese had various diplomatic and military dealings with the Ottoman Turks. This strong and expansionist Islamic state was a source of great concern for the Portuguese authorities. In the first half of the sixteenth century it took over Egypt and the Red Sea area, including the Islamic holy places. It also established itself in Iraq, in the area around Basra and Baghdad. A small Turkish fleet raided the East African coast in the 1580s, and caused the Portuguese much concern: they responded by building the huge Fort Jesus in Mombasa. Much more famous was the expedition to Diu in 1538, where a strong Ottoman fleet acting in conjunction with Gujarati forces besieged the Portuguese fort, and were defeated only with very great difficulty. The Ottomans remained a feared adversary for the rest of the century. However, this land-oriented power was much more focused on the Mediterranean and the Middle East, especially Iran, than on the Indian Ocean, and Portuguese fears were largely unnecessary.
The next major state with which the Portuguese had contact was Safavid Iran. This state was founded in 1500, just as the Portuguese were establishing themselves in the Indian Ocean. It fought a series of wars with the Ottomans in the sixteenth century, and for this reason the Portuguese tried to have good relations with the Safavids, and encouraged them to confront the Ottomans. Pepper was allowed to pass through the Straits of Hurmuz to Iranian ports, and silk was provided by the Persians in return. Yet this tacit alliance was built on sand, for in 1622 the Safavids and the English combined to take over Hurmuz from the Portuguese.
The Estado da India's main interlocutors were two important Indian Muslim states, Bijapur and the Mughal empire. Bijapur was contiguous to the Portuguese capital of Goa; indeed Goa had been conquered from them in 1510. Relations
were tense throughout the century. The local controllers of Ponda, right next to Portuguese territory, were often a worry, while in 1570 Bijapur joined in a major attack on Portuguese areas. It may have been because of these tense relations that Goa did not trade very much with Bijapur. One major trade item, cotton cloths, was obtained from Gujarat in preference to Bijapur, and Goa's food came mostly from the Kanara area further south. Certainly Portuguese activities had very little influence on the progress of Bijapur. The area was conquered by the Mughals in the 1680s, but the Portuguese played no role in this.
As they came to terms with the Indian Ocean trading system, the Portuguese very soon realised that their relations with Gujarat would determine the success or failure of their wider aims. Central was control of the trade in spices, yet while Gujarat produced no spices its merchants played a large role in the trade in these products all the way from Melaka to the Red Sea. So also with the second strand of Portuguese concern with Asian trade, the cartaz system. If this were to work anywhere, it would be in Gujarat, where most of the great ports in the Gulf of Cambay could be monitored by Portuguese fleets cruising off the mouth of this narrow gulf. Another central aim was to acquire goods, other than spices, which could be sent back to Lisbon on the carreira. Gujarati cloths came to make up a very large part of the homeward bound cargoes. Finally, as the Portuguese got more involved in the inter-Asian trade they realised that access to products from Gujarat was vital, for they were widely known all over seaborne Asia and found a ready market wherever the Portuguese travelled.