The Last Crusade: The Epic Voyages of Vasco Da Gama (30 page)

The next morning, Gama had his men row the elderly Muslim to a sandbank in front of the city. They left him there, and he stood quietly until a canoe approached from the shore and picked him up. The foreigners were still holding his young wife hostage, and he went straight to the palace and passed on the captain-major’s message. The newcomers, he related, were the subjects of a great and powerful king whom the sultan would rejoice to have as an ally;
they were headed for India, and would be glad of pilots. For once the diplomatic patter found a receptive ear; the sultan was at war with neighboring Mombasa and was eager for new allies, especially belligerent ones with fearsome-looking ships.

After dinner the old man reappeared with one of the sultan’s men-at-arms, a sharif, and three sheep. The human callers relayed the ruler’s eagerness to enter into friendly relations with the strangers and his readiness to give them pilots or anything else in his power. Gama sent them back with a surtout, two strings of coral, three hand basins, a hat, some small bells, two striped cotton scarves, and word that he would enter the port the next day.

The fleet edged nearer to the shore, and a boat arrived from the sultan with six more sheep and a gift of cloves, cumin, ginger, nutmeg, and pepper. Once again the expensive waft of spices quickened the sailors’ pulses.

With the gifts came a new message: If the strangers’ leader wished to talk with the sultan, he would come out in his dhow and meet him halfway. Gama agreed, and after dinner the next day the royal dhow pushed off from the shore. At the sultan’s side was a band of trumpeters, two of whom played huge horns made from intricately carved ivory tusks, as tall as a man and blown through a hole in the side. Together the deep blasts and sweet peals made a harmonious, hypnotic sound.

The sultan wore a robe of crimson damask trimmed with green satin and a lavish turban. He was seated on a double chair made of bronze and piled with silk cushions. Over his head was a crimson satin parasol, and by his side stood an old retainer holding a sword in a silver sheath. His men were naked above the waist, but below they were wrapped in silk or fine cotton. On their heads they wore cloths embroidered with silk and gold, and they carried fancy daggers and swords decorated with silk tassels in a rainbow of colors. The Europeans were much taken with the pageantry and the dignified comportment of the royal party.

Gama was dressed in his best knightly gear and was
accompanied by twelve of his principal officers. His boat had been decked out with flags and streamers, and as the sultan drew near, his sailors rowed him out. The two boats stopped side by side. In signs and through the translators, the two men exchanged cordial greetings, and Gama was flattered to find himself addressed with the deference due a king.

The sultan invited the captain-major to visit the city and stay in his palace, where he could refresh himself after the fatigues of his long voyage. Afterward, he suggested, he would pay a reciprocal visit to the ships. Despite the soft comforts on offer, Gama demurred. He had come to the fixed conclusion that it was too dangerous to set foot in what were clearly strongly armed Muslim cities, however friendly the people seemed. He was forbidden from complying, he replied, by the orders of his king; if he disobeyed them, a bad report would be made of him.

What would his people say of
him
, the sultan responded, if he were to visit the ships without a sign of goodwill from the strangers? At the least, he would like to know the name of their king.

The Portuguese translator wrote down the name Manuel.

If the strangers called on him on their way back from India, the sultan declared, he would send letters to this Manuel, or even an ambassador in person.

Gama thanked him for his politeness, promised to return, and answered a string of questions about the mission. The sultan expounded at length on spices, the Red Sea, and other matters of vital interest to the explorers, and he promised to provide them with a pilot.

The meeting went so well that Gama sent for his prisoners and handed them all over. The sultan vowed that he could not have been happier if he had been presented with a city. In great good humor he made a lap of honor around the fleet, admiring each ship in turn and doubtless estimating the damage it could inflict on his neighbors. The captain-major, who had followed in his own boat, ordered the bombards to fire off a salute. The alarmed Muslims
lunged for their oars, and Gama quickly signaled for the guns to cease. The sultan, when he had recomposed himself, proclaimed that he had never been so pleased with any men and would be very glad to have some of them to help him in his wars. He had seen nothing yet, Gama intimated; if God permitted them to discover India and return home, his king would surely send a whole fleet of warships to his new ally’s aid.

After a visit of three hours the sultan headed home, leaving his son and a sharif on board the fleet as a surety. He was still keen to show off his palace, and he took two sailors with him. Since the captain-major would not go ashore, he said as he left, he would return the following day to the beach.

The next morning Vasco da Gama and Nicolau Coelho took charge of two armed boats and rowed along the town front. Crowds had gathered on the shore, where two cavalrymen were acting out a duel. Behind were handsome streets and plashing fountains. The explorers learned that only Arabs—perhaps four thousand in number—lived inside the city walls, while the Africans, many of them slaves who worked the plantations, lived outside in mud-and-wattle huts. As all along the coast, after centuries of intermarriage there was little to tell physically between the two groups, but whatever their ethnicity the Muslim elite called themselves Arabs and labeled the non-Islamic population
kaffirs
, the Arabic word for infidels.

The sultan emerged from his seafront palace. He climbed into his palanquin—a covered litter mounted on poles—and was carried down a flight of stone steps to the water’s edge. Gama’s boat bobbed alongside, but it was hard to have a proper conversation, and again the sultan begged the captain-major to step ashore. He asked it as a personal favor, he added; his elderly, infirm father was keen to meet the man who had come so far and survived such dangers for his king. If need be, both he and his sons would wait as hostages on the ships. Even that was not enough to lower Gama’s guard, and he stayed firmly seated in his boat to watch the entertainments that his hosts had laid on.

Of all the Indian Ocean cities ruled by Arabs, the Portuguese had hit upon the one most likely to give them help. The information about the four ships from India turned out to be accurate, too, and soon a party of Indians rowed up to the
São Rafael
and asked to come aboard. Vasco was there talking to his brother, and he told the crew to show the Indians an altarpiece that represented “Our Lady at the foot of the cross, with Jesus Christ in her arms and the apostles around her.” Since these were the first Indians they had seen, the sailors examined them with unabashed curiosity and decided they looked nothing like any Christians they knew. They wore white cotton shifts, full beards, and their hair long and plaited up under turbans; on top of that, they explained that they were vegetarians, which sounded deeply suspicious to men who were ravenous for fresh meat. But the moment they saw the altar they prostrated themselves on the deck, and throughout the fleet’s stay in the harbor they came daily to say their prayers before the shrine, bringing little offerings of cloves or pepper.

This was final confirmation, surely, that India was teeming with Christians. The Portuguese were even more stirred when the captain-major rowed past the Indians’ ships and they fired off a salvo in his honor.

“Christ! Christ!” they shouted joyfully, raising their hands above their head; at least, so their chant sounded to European ears.

That night the Indians applied to the sultan for permission to throw a party in the strangers’ honor. As darkness fell the sky blazed with rockets. The Indians fired round after round from their small bombards, and they sang strange hymns at the top of their voices.

After a week of fetes, sham fights, and musical interludes Gama was growing impatient. On April 22 the royal dhow arrived bringing one of the sultan’s counselors, the first caller in two days. Gama had him seized, and he sent a message to the palace demanding the promised pilot. The sultan had hoped to keep the Portuguese diverted until they could join his war, but he immediately sent a man and Gama released his hostage.

To the Europeans’ great joy, the pilot appeared to be another Christian from India. He unrolled a detailed map of the Indian coast, talked the officers through its features, and explained the winds and currents of the ocean. He was clearly an experienced navigator, and he was equally knowledgeable about the science of sailing. The ships’ instruments failed to impress him in the slightest; the pilots of the Red Sea, he remarked, had long used similar contraptions to take the altitude of the sun and the stars, though he and his fellow Indians preferred another device. He showed it to them, and Gama’s pilots decided to let him take the lead.

On Tuesday, April 24 the trumpets sounded, the sails were set, and the fleet left Malindi with all flags flying. According to one report, the sultan was heartbroken to see his new friends go and assured them that the name of the Portuguese “would never leave his heart where he preserved it, except when he died.”

The weather was fair, and they made good progress. Directly north, their pilot told them, was a huge bay that ended in a strait: the Gulf of Aden and the Bab el Mandeb, the gate to the Red Sea and the Kaaba of Mecca. Nearby, he added, were many large cities, both Christian and Muslim, and six hundred islands, counting only those that were known. The Europeans still had a great deal to learn.

After two days the African coast disappeared from view. Three nights later the North Star reappeared on the horizon. The explorers had once again crossed the equator, but this time they were sailing in an ocean where no European ship had ever been. They held their course to the northeast, and India.

Behind them they had left more enemies than friends. Their picture of Africa was muddled at best, and they still had only the shadiest notion of where they were headed.

CHAPTER 10

RIDING THE MONSOON

F
OR MORE THAN
two millennia, the passage across the Indian Ocean depended on the simple fact that land heats and cools more quickly than water.

Every September, as the earth’s tilt inclines the Northern Hemisphere away from the sun, the vast Tibetan Plateau loses heat fast. The air above the landmass cools in its turn and sinks, creating a huge pool of high pressure. The Indian Ocean retains its heat much longer, and since warm air rises and leaves a void, the colder air pours down over the plains of North India and across the water. By the end of the year, sailing ships departing from India are blown southwest to Arabia and Africa by a regular, dependable northeast wind.

As summer approaches and the sun climbs in the sky, the deserts, plains, and plateaus of north and central India quickly reach scorching temperatures. The heat forms a low-pressure area that sucks in the cooler, moisture-rich ocean air. The southwesterly winds pick up by May and race across the subcontinent in June, dragging with them banked storm clouds that glower low in the sky. As the air mass roars into the high wall of the Western Ghats in southern India and then the towering Himalayas to the northeast, the clouds are forced upward, the moisture condenses, and the rainfall turns parched sand and soil into fields of fertile coffee-colored foam. After three months the winds reverse direction and the pattern begins all over again.

The winter monsoon—the word comes from the Arabic
mawsim
, or “season”—dictated the trading calendar of much of the world, from the markets of Alexandria to the annual fairs of northern Europe. Getting to India in the first place, though, required a finer calculation. An Egyptian or Arabian merchant who wanted to bring his goods to market in the shortest possible time would sail with the tail end of the southwest monsoon and return three or four months later. Yet the late-summer monsoon could be a deadly ally. In the 1440s, a Persian ambassador named Abd al-Razzaq was held up at Hormuz until the monsoon was more than halfway through and was paralyzed by the thought of the tempests that tore apart Arab ships and made them easy pickings for pirates:

As soon as I caught the smell of the vessel, and all the terrors of the sea presented themselves before me, I fell into so deep a swoon, that for three days respiration alone indicated that life remained within me. When I came a little to myself, the merchants, who were my intimate friends, cried with one voice that the time for navigation had passed, and that everyone who put to sea at this season was alone responsible for his death, since he voluntarily placed himself in peril. . . . In consequence of the severity of pitiless weather and the adverse manifestations of a treacherous fate, my heart was crushed like glass and my soul became weary of life.