The Last Crusade: The Epic Voyages of Vasco Da Gama (20 page)

As the year neared its end, Covilhã headed along the Indian coast to a city whose marvels he had heard a great deal about on his journey. Calicut was the second point of the trade triangle, the gathering place of the spices and jewels of the East, and the spy stayed on for several months to investigate the sources and prices of the mysterious goods that sold in Europe for staggering sums. His report would have far-reaching consequences for his hosts: within a few years, Vasco da Gama would sail for India with orders to head straight for Calicut.

In February Covilhã made his way back up the coast, stopping to record the location and trade of more ports along the way. By now the Arab fleets were heading back home, and he secured passage on a ship bound for Hormuz, the third point of the fabled triangle.

The ship sailed into the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea’s twin inlet on the eastern side of Arabia, and headed for a small island that commanded a narrow strait. As it approached, Covilhã made out a sizable city through the thicket of masts that filled the port. When he landed, he found it packed with merchants from every corner of Asia. Situated at the point where the Arabian Peninsula juts sharply out and seems to make a dent in the coast of Iran, Hormuz had no greenery and no fresh water, which had to be brought in flagons from the mainland, but it sat astride the junction of the sea routes from India and the Far East with the land routes that led through Iraq to Syria, Turkey, and Istanbul. Its markets were heaped with
pearls, silks, jewels, tapestries, spices, perfumes, and drugs, and for sheer luxury it had few equals. Carpets covered the streets for the comfort of shoppers, and linen awnings draped between the rooftops kept off the scorching sun. Merchants’ tables boasted fine wines and expensive porcelain, and gifted musicians played while they ate. A later Portuguese visitor reported that the food was better than in France, while an English adventurer marveled at the beauty of the women, though he found them “very strangely attyred, wearing on their noses, eares, neckes, armes and legges many rings set with jewels, and lockes of silver and golde in their eares, and a long bar of golde upon the side of their noses. Their eares with the weight of their jewels be worne so wide,” he added, “that a man may thrust three of his fingers into them.” Cultural chasms aside, there was no gainsaying the importance of the island city. If all the world were a golden ring, went an Arab adage, Hormuz would be the jewel on it.

Covilhã now had a vivid picture of the dazzlingly rich trade of the Arabian Sea—and of the dangers and exorbitant dues that dogged its merchants at every step. The sea route from Europe might take longer, but the oceans were gloriously untroubled by robbers and customs officials, and there was undoubtedly a killing to be made. One thing remained: to find out whether ships really could sail directly from Europe into the Indian Ocean.

The Portuguese spy left Hormuz on a ship bound for Africa and disembarked at Zeila, a busy Muslim port that exported gold, ivory, and slaves from Ethiopia. The great Moroccan traveler Ibn Battuta had found Zeila “the dirtiest, most disagreeable, and most stinking town in the world,” and though the sea was rough, the reek of fish and camels slaughtered in the streets was so revolting that he spent the night aboard his ship. Covilhã did not stay much longer. He set out to see how far down the coast he could sail, and he soon had his answer. The Arabs had settled the shores of East Africa for centuries, but their dhows could not withstand the heavy seas to the south. Besides, even if they had had the technology, they saw no need for such a voyage and had probably never attempted it. Their
caravans had long funneled the goods of the African interior north and east to the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean, and it made no sense to switch that trade to the west and the apparently empty Atlantic. They had certainly not tried to sail all the way around Africa to reach wild Western Europe: why bother when they already controlled half the Mediterranean, including many of its leading ports, and the goods of Europe, along with much of its gold, came to them?

The riddle of Africa would take a while longer to solve. Covilhã returned north, and by early 1491 he reached Cairo. It had been an exhausting if exhilarating journey, and he had been away from home for nearly four years. He must have been looking forward to meeting up with his fellow spy and going back to his wife, his family, and his richly deserved rewards.

He never found his companion. While he was waiting in Cairo, Afonso had fallen ill and had died.

The indefatigable Pêro prepared to make the return trip alone, and he was about to leave when two Portuguese Jews turned up on his doorstep. King John had sent them, they explained, and they had tracked him down, with some difficulty, in the cosmopolitan confusion of Cairo.

One of the two was a shoemaker from northern Portugal named Joseph; the other was a rabbi named Abraham from the south. A few years earlier Joseph had traveled overland to Baghdad, perhaps to investigate the market for shoes, and there he had heard fabulous things about Hormuz. On his return he had sought out the king, who was always accessible to messengers from faraway lands. The rabbi had also been east, perhaps to Cairo. When the two spies had failed to reappear, John had decided to send the two Jews to search for them.

The newcomers had with them a letter from the king, which Pêro lost no time in reading.

Its contents could hardly have been welcome. If their mission was complete, John wrote, the two men should return to
Portugal, where they would receive great honors. If not, they should send word of their progress by the shoemaker Joseph and not rest until they had fulfilled their quest. In particular, they were not to come home unless they had personally established the whereabouts of Prester John. Before they did anything, though, they were to conduct the rabbi to Hormuz. The king no doubt thought a rabbi was a more reliable informant than a shoemaker, and Abraham had sworn that he would not turn back without seeing Hormuz with his own eyes.

King John had no way of knowing that his spy had already been to Hormuz himself and was ready to give a full report of its operations. Pêro had his royal orders, and as usual he was determined to carry them out to the full. He wrote a long dispatch to the king, handed it to Joseph, and set off with his new companion. The shoemaker made for home, the bearer of news that would be of vital importance to Vasco da Gama’s impending mission.

Once again Covilhã crossed the desert to Tor; once again he made the slow, perilous journey down the Red Sea. By now the spy was an habitué of the Arabian ports, and in Aden the pair easily found passage to Hormuz. When Abraham was satisfied that he had seen all he needed, the two men went their separate ways: the rabbi back to Portugal, probably via a caravan headed to Syria, and Pêro back to the Red Sea.

From there Covilhã made for Jeddah, the port of Mecca. He was about to deviate utterly from his instructions. By now he had developed a taste for the hard glamour of adventure—and the inveterate explorer’s hunger to spice up life with a dose of danger.

Jeddah was rich, busy, and completely forbidden to Christians and Jews. Pêro, though, was bronzed from long voyages in uncovered ships and bearded from the usual sailor’s distaste for shaving. Besides, he had spent the past four years living and traveling with Muslims. He had adopted their dress, he was fluent in their language, and he was utterly conversant with their customs. He went undetected in Jeddah, and he decided to go farther—to Mecca
itself. At the least sign that he was a Christian, he knew he would have been executed on the spot.

Perhaps, with his head shaved and uncovered and his body wrapped in the two white cloths of the pilgrim, the Portuguese spy entered the sacred precinct of the Kaaba and circled the stone cube seven times, tracing the path worn in the granite slabs by millions of worshippers’ feet. Perhaps, if he had arrived at the time of the hajj, he followed the press of pilgrims to Mount Arafat, where Muhammad was said to have preached his last sermon, then threw pebbles at the devil at Mina and watched the mass slaughter of animals that commemorated Abraham’s sacrifice of a ram in place of his son. Having seen his fill, he journeyed on to Medina and visited the great mosque that was rising, after a lightning strike had destroyed much of the previous building, over Muhammad’s burial place.

His initiation complete, Covilhã left Medina for the Sinai Desert and dropped in on the ancient monastery of St. Catherine. The skeletal Greek monks bundled him off, as they did all pilgrims, to attend a service and to marvel at the Burning Bush that Moses himself had seen, or at least that the emperor Constantine’s mother Helena had miraculously unearthed on a relic-hunting trip to the Holy Land. Having squared everything with his faith, Covilhã continued to Tor and took for the fifth time to the Red Sea. It was now 1493. More than a year had passed since he had left Cairo with the rabbi, and Prester John still needed to be found.

The spy landed in East Africa near the mountains of High Ethiopia, a formidable bulwark that for centuries had protected the interior from attack. After a perilous journey across deserts, plateaus, and plains, he reached the court of Alexander, Lion of the Tribe of Judah and King of Kings, the descendant, so he and his dynasty claimed, of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. Ethiopia had once been a great power, and in its remote fastness it had preserved its ancient traditions. The king, who presided over a vast and intricate hierarchy of nobles, had numerous wives and dozens of
daughters, some of whom virtually ran the country. Yet he was Christian, and so were his people.

Alexander warmly received the visitor, and Covilhã presented him with an address written in Arabic and a brass medal engraved in multiple languages that he had kept for this moment since leaving Portugal. Both were addressed to Prester John, but by now the Ethiopians were accustomed to the Europeans’ baffling but harmless habit of calling all their kings John.

The monarch received the communication, Covilhã later reported, “with much pleasure and joy, and said that he would send him to his country with much honor.” He never did. A few months later Alexander marched off to put down a rebellion, and unrecognized at night, he was cut down by arrow fire. His infant son succeeded him until he succumbed to a childhood disease, and after much confusion Alexander’s brother Naod replaced him on the throne. Covilhã immediately petitioned the new king to fulfill his brother’s pledge and was politely turned down. Covilhã outlasted Naod, too, but Naod’s son and successor David was no more inclined to let the traveler go. Since his forebears had not given him permission to leave, he explained, “he was not in a position to grant it, and so the matter stood.”

After years away from Portugal, no doubt long mourned by his family, Covilhã had become a dyed-in-the-wool expatriate. With his vast experience of the world and his fluency in several languages, he was a valued adviser to the court. He was rewarded with titles and estates, and eventually he was made governor of a district. After demurring as long as he could, he caved in to the king’s wishes and took a wife. He was clearly able to choose well, because there, in the middle of Ethiopia, thirty-three years after the former spy had left home, a Portuguese embassy arrived and found him fat, rich, happy, and surrounded by his children.

W
HILE
K
ING
J
OHN
was waiting for his spies to return, he had forged ahead with the second prong of his master plan. To head up
the next expedition by sea he chose Bartolomeu Dias, a cavalier of the royal household and an experienced captain. His mission was to answer once and for all the burning question of whether ships could sail around Africa, and if possible to press on to the lands of Prester John.

Dias quietly left Lisbon in August 1487, three months after Pêro da Covilhã and Afonso de Paiva had set out. The fleet consisted of two caravels together with a supply vessel captained by Dias’s brother Pêro, an innovation that was designed to prevent the increasingly long voyages from coming to a premature end for lack of food, water, and spares. Though the ships were unnervingly small for such a venture, the preparations had been unusually thorough, and the crews were highly experienced. Also on board were two African men and four African women who had been seized on earlier voyages and who were to be set ashore to ask after India and Prester John. The royal planners thought the inclusion of the women was a masterstroke on the grounds that they were less likely than men to be attacked, though as it turned out, one of the women died en route to Africa while the other five envoys disappeared inland and were never heard from again.

The fleet sailed past the wide mouth of the Congo River, stopped in Whale Bay, and struggled south against a heavy coastal current. To make better progress Dias put out to sea, only to be swept up in a storm. For thirteen days the caravels were driven west and south before the gusting wind, with their sails at half-mast to prevent the prows from plunging into the rough seas. The temperature had dropped markedly by the time Dias was able to steer back east, and when the coast failed to appear after several days he instead turned north.

Soon mountains came into view on the horizon, and as the ships drew closer the men made out a sandy beach curving from east to west, backed by sloping green fields where herders were tending their cattle. The herdsmen took one look at the mystifying ships and drove their flocks inland. With no one in sight,
several sailors set out to search for fresh water and found themselves the target of a shower of stones from the hills above. Dias shot one of the assailants with a crossbow, and the fleet hurriedly resumed its journey.

By now the frightened and exhausted crews had had enough. There was hardly any food left, they protested in chorus. The storeship had been left far behind, and if they went any farther they would die of starvation. They had discovered fourteen hundred miles of coastline that had never been seen by Europeans; surely that was plenty for one voyage?

Dias eventually gave in, though not before landing onshore with his officers and extracting a signed statement that they were determined to turn back. It was only as they headed home that he finally sighted the unmistakable rocky point of a great cape, backed by a dramatic series of high peaks that framed a mountain with a top as flat as a table. He ruefully named it the Cape of Storms, though on his return the king decided on the more optimistic Cape of Good Hope.