The Last Crusade: The Epic Voyages of Vasco Da Gama (19 page)

Rhodes was the home of the Knights Hospitaller and the last redoubt of long-spent Outremer. A forbidding constellation of crenellated walls and jutting towers loomed over the harbor. After they were ousted from the Holy Land, the Hospitallers had found new purpose in plundering Muslim shipping; seven years earlier, Mehmet the Conqueror had tried and failed to dislodge these final stubborn Crusaders from their island fortress.

The spies found lodgings in a monastery and set out to seek the advice of two Portuguese Hospitallers. The knights suggested they use their gold to buy a hundred barrels of honey and a new set of clothes. They were headed for Islamic lands, and from now on they were to pose as lowly merchants—though the disguise was not so much aimed at Muslims, who were unlikely to distinguish them from other Europeans, as at Italian merchants who jealously guarded their interests against interlopers.

From Rhodes, the two spies sailed south to Egypt and the ancient port of Alexandria, where their real mission began. From here on, their findings would be of the utmost importance to Vasco da Gama and his fellow seafaring pioneers.

Alexandria had once been the classical world’s greatest metropolis, the hub of trade between Europe, Arabia, and India, and the model for imperial Rome itself. Its Arab conquerors had gasped at the gleaming marble streets lined with four thousand palaces and bathhouses and four hundred theaters, and repelled by such pagan splendor, they had relocated their capital to Cairo. Soon Alexandria had dwindled to a small town built on the hollow foundations of empire. The Great Library was long lost, along with the vast palace of the Ptolemies. Earthquakes had leveled the legendary Pharos, the towering lighthouse whose beam shone thirty-five miles into the Mediterranean, and just seven years earlier the last of its mammoth stone blocks had been recycled to build a harbor fort. “At this time [Alexandria] looks very glorious without,” reported
Martin Baumgarten, a wealthy German knight who was overwhelmed with grief at the untimely death of his wife and three children and embarked in 1507, at the age of thirty-two, on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem; “the walls as they are of a large compass, so they are well built, firm and high, and the turrets upon them are numerous; but within, instead of a city, there’s nothing to be seen but a prodigious heap of stones.”

The ship nosed between the submerged rocks of the harbor, its sails lowered in the usual sign of deference to the sultan, and as soon as it moored officials came on board to search the passengers and crew. Merchants regularly tried to evade taxes by hiding their goods in the strangest places; one group of Christians, a traveler boasted, “sav’d a great part of what we did bring, by hiding it in pork, which they abominate above all things.”

Even as it crumbled Alexandria had carried on a trade in spices, silks, and slaves, and with the fall of Constantinople it had begun to regain its position as a world-class emporium. It was a messy, multilingual port city. On one side of the massive stone mole that once led to the Pharos, Italian warehouses were stacked with Eastern goods awaiting shipment to Europe; on the other side was a separate harbor reserved for Muslims. The two groups sometimes clashed violently, but the mutual search for profits usually sustained an uneasy standoff.

The spies plowed into the noisy streets and found suitably obscure lodgings. Their disguise held up, but they discovered that diseases as well as goods were exchanged in Alexandria’s fetid climate. As they tossed and sweated with Nile fever, the sultan’s deputy gave them up for dead and requisitioned their honey, which was much in demand in North Africa. By the time they recovered he had already sold it, and they retrieved what money they could and quickly left town.

The countryside was low-lying and bare but for the occasional clump of date trees. Fishermen popped up out of fens to extort protection money, and at night the two men slept fitfully on the ground, hugging their remaining belongings. Before dawn they
started again, the winds shifting hillocks of sand and obscuring the road ahead. Eventually the minarets of Rosetta rose before them at the head of the Nile, and they hired a felucca, a narrow, lateen-rigged sailboat, to take them upriver. They whiled away the time spotting the crocodiles that lurked in the canes and the mysterious monuments that littered the banks, or watching as Egyptian men and women stripped off their long blue shirts, tied them on their heads, and swam across the river at astonishing speed. At dusk the crew lighted pyramids of lanterns, tied tinkling bells to the sails, and entertained themselves by shooting fiery arrows into the night sky.

As they approached Cairo, the real pyramids reared from the desert like mountains carved by giants. Even then no traveler could leave without paying them a visit. In the sixteenth century an Englishman named John Sanderson went mummy hunting in Egypt; along with several complete corpses he brought home six hundred pounds of broken mummy to sell to London’s apothecaries and “one little hand” for his brother the Archdeacon of Rochester. Accompanied by two German friends, he crawled up to the King’s Chamber in the Pyramid of Cheops, climbed into the lidless sarcophagus, and lay inside “in sport.” Soon afterward an Italian traveler named Pietro della Valle clambered to the top of the pyramid and carved his name and the name of his lover in the stone. Like every foreigner, he was thoroughly taken in by the guides who claimed to be able to decipher the hieroglyphics, a tradition that dated back to classical times.

Cairo—in Arabic
al-Qahira
, “the Victorious”—astounded Europeans even more than its ancient precursors. The city was vast. “They do positively aver,” recorded Martin Baumgarten, “whether true or false I know not, that there are about twenty-four thousand mosques in it.” Many of the mosques boasted libraries, schools, and hospitals where treatment was free and musicians played to soothe the sick; all were built of white stone, some of it plundered from the pyramids, that dazzled the eyes in the intense light and almost
bleached out the intricate vegetal carvings and calligraphic inscriptions that covered every surface. At nightfall, the minarets from which the muezzin, reported Baumgarten, “night and day, at certain hours, make a strange, loud and barbarous noise,” were illuminated with burning torches and lamps. The German’s informant also explained that the city boasted ten thousand cooks, most of whom seemed to ply their trade in the labyrinths of rush-covered alleys, carrying their pots on their heads and dressing their dishes as they went. He added another outsize if less impressive statistic: there were more homeless on the streets of Cairo than there were inhabitants in Venice.

Cairo had grown into the busiest and most advanced city in the Islamic world. Turks, Arabs, Africans, and Indians gathered there. Italian merchants had their own colony, as did Greeks, Ethiopians, and Nubians. Copts, the native Christians of Egypt, worshipped in ancient churches, and thousands of Jews gathered in synagogues. Muslim potentates grazed on banquets spread on rich carpets, while their numerous wives waited upstairs in rooms dripping with silk, fragrant ointments, and perfumes, peeping out through latticework screens at the street life below. The historian Ibn Khaldun lavished accolades on his beloved city: Cairo, he wrote, was the “metropolis of the world, garden of the universe, meeting-place of nations, anthill of peoples, high place of Islam, seat of power.” What we see in dreams, he rhapsodized, “surpasses reality, but all that one could dream of Cairo would not come close to the truth.”

The spies approached on donkeys—only high officials could enter on horseback—and passed under the minaret-topped towers of Bab Zuweila, the soaring main gate. Important visitors were announced with a tattoo beaten by drummers who sat in the loggia above, but the Portuguese pair were given the more common welcome: a shower of dirt, brickbats, and moldy lemons from the boys of Cairo.

The two men followed the jostling crowds down Muizz Street, the congested central artery of the city. Halfway along, amid ornate
tomb-mosques built by rich eternity seekers, were the sources of much of Cairo’s wealth: the teeming state spice and perfume markets. The perfume emporia were lined with flasks in which lumps of resin and rock were distilled into deep yellow-brown colognes and balms. The spice shops were heaped with sacks and barrels that stretched back to dark recesses where merchants weighed out the precious substances on finely calibrated scales; in the heat the smell of aromatic leaves, seeds, and roots was almost suffocating.

The visitors struck out into the dusty side streets, dodging the droves of donkeys standing around grazing or being driven to and from the souks. They found modest lodgings—no doubt with the help of the ubiquitous touts—and set out to plan the next leg of their journey. Before long they fell in with a group of merchants from Fez and Tlemcen, the very North African cities where Covilhã had been posted. The merchants were headed to Arabia and India itself, and the wily spy coaxed them in their own dialect into taking him and his companion along for the ride.

It was now the spring of 1488, and almost a year had passed since the pair had left Portugal. The camels were saddled and loaded and the long caravan set out, after a pelting from the boys at the gate, for the Red Sea port of Tor. Tossed and shaken by their noisy, smelly mounts, the Portuguese crossed the flat, stony Sinai Desert, then a range of barren granite mountains that shone in the sun as if they were oiled, and next a coastal path so narrow that in places they had to ride in the sea. For food they had tough twice-baked bread, dry cheese, and salted ox tongue, and they were forced to pay handsomely for water that wriggled with red worms. Robbers ambushed them in date plantations, stole their provisions, and had to be paid off with silver. The mule and camel drivers kept raising their prices, and if anyone complained, they drove off their animals with the baggage still on their backs. The two men barely slept; by the end of the trek they were sliding off their mounts from exhaustion and hallucinating that hands were grabbing at their last few crumbs of food.

It was becoming clear why spices cost so much in Europe, and the journey had only just begun.

As the caravan finally reached the Red Sea, the guides spun another favorite yarn. It was here, they explained, that the waters had parted for Moses and the children of Israel and had crashed over the pharaoh’s pursuing host. Martin Baumgarten dutifully reported that the tracks of the pharaoh’s chariots and the prints of his horses’ hooves were clearly visible, “and tho’ one should deface them this minute, they shall plainly appear the next.”

T
HE
1,400-
MILE
-
LONG
R
ED
S
EA
, which European travelers were surprised to find was not red at all, is shaped like an elongated slug crawling north toward the Mediterranean. Two feelers protrude from the slug’s head: on the left is the Gulf of Suez, which separates Egypt from the Sinai Peninsula, and on the right is the Gulf of Aqaba, which divides Sinai from the Arabian Peninsula. At its southern end the slug’s tail swishes into the Gulf of Aden and the Arabian Sea, the part of the Indian Ocean that lies between Africa and India. There, where the two bodies of water meet, the coast of Africa curves east in a sharp hook, cradling the southwestern corner of Arabia.

The tight channel between the two continents is known as the Strait of Bab-el-Mandeb; the name means “Gate of Tears.” Strong currents and scattered islands make the passage precarious, and for much of its length the Red Sea itself is strewn with treacherous islets and sunken reefs. Gusting winds and choppy waves regularly drove heavily laden sailing vessels onto the rocks, and while a few oceangoing ships braved the strait and continued halfway up the east coast of the sea to Jeddah, the port of Mecca, small vessels skippered by experienced navigators mostly had the traffic to themselves. The two dhows—traditional Arab sailing ships—that the Portuguese spies boarded in the little port of Tor were typical of the craft that had plied the route for centuries. The hulls were made of planks sewn together with coconut fiber, and the sails were mats
of woven coconut fronds. Lightly built for maneuverability—and because timber was in short supply—they were also leaky and unstable even in light swells. The pilots could only navigate by day, and since pirates infested the coasts, they had to stay well out to sea at night. By the time the merchants’ party sailed through the Gate of Tears and headed for the southern Arabian coast, two excruciating months had passed since they had left Cairo.

The spies were about to discover the fabulously rich triangle at the heart of the spice trade. The first of its three points was the port they had just arrived at, and it was a forbidding sight.

The famed harbor of Aden lay in the crater of an extinct volcano that stood proud of the mainland of Yemen. The city nestled on the crater floor, and jagged black crags surmounted by a cordon of castles almost encircled it down to the sea. Behind the shore, strong fortifications completed the defensive bowl, which the Arab geographer al-Muqaddasi thought looked uncannily like a giant sheep pen. With its fine anchorage, natural defenses, and position commanding the entrance to the Red Sea, Aden had been a commercial center of the first order since ancient times, and as the main terminus for oceangoing vessels laden with Eastern spices and silks, precious stones, and porcelain, it was among the richest trading cities of the medieval world.

When the party from Cairo arrived, the monsoon winds that drove Arab ships southeast to India were already gusting fiercely. Crossing the Arabian Sea in high summer meant one of two things: death, or a quick journey of as little as eighteen days. Delaying too long would mean waiting another year, and the two men decided to split up. Afonso was to sail the short distance from Aden to Ethiopia, where he was to seek out Prester John, while Pêro was to continue to India. They arranged to meet back in Cairo at the end of their adventures.

The dhow that Covilhã boarded for India was much larger than the Red Sea boats, but it had the same single mast, raked forward and crossed by a long yard to which was bent the head of a lateen
sail, and it was made of the same sewn planks. There was no deck; the cargo was covered with thick cane mats, and the passengers had to squeeze themselves in wherever they could. It was almost impossible to find shade from the burning sun, the only barriers to waves washing over the side were strips of matting or cloth smeared with pitch, and for food there was nothing but half-cooked dried rice sprinkled with sugar and chopped dates. The dhows were fast runners and their Arab captains were skilled navigators, but the few weeks it took to reach India passed slowly.