The Last Crusade: The Epic Voyages of Vasco Da Gama (33 page)

By now it was ten o’clock. During the interview the monsoon had crashed with full force on the city, and the rain was coming down in sheets. Gama found his men sheltering on a terrace lit by the flickering flames of a giant iron lamp. There was no time to wait out the storm, and with the factor in the lead they set off for their lodgings.

Shuddering rolls and claps of thunder filled the air, low flashes of lightning tore the sky, and sudden cloudbursts turned the streets into muddy rivers. Even so, large crowds were still milling around outside the palace gates, and once again they attached themselves to the procession.

The captain-major was ushered to his palanquin, and the six porters hoisted him onto their shoulders. The rest of the visitors trudged through the mud. As the storm bore down and the crowds pressed in, they found themselves lost at night in a foreign land, without even a room to call their own.

The city was large and scattered, and the lodgings Gama had asked for were a long way off. He was exhausted after the day’s excitement, and as the journey wound interminably on, he crossly asked the factor if they were going to be out all night.

The factor obligingly ordered a change of direction and took the visitors to his own house.

The Portuguese were shown into a large courtyard enclosed by a broad verandah with an overhanging tiled roof. Carpets were spread everywhere, and more huge lamps illuminated every corner. To sailors used to shipboard living it was a sumptuous and somewhat disconcerting sight.

When the storm died down the factor sent for a horse to take the captain-major the rest of the way to his quarters. It turned out that the Indians rode bareback and there was no saddle. Ambassadorial dignity did not allow for sliding off into the mud, and Gama refused to mount. A day of ceremony was fast turning into a night of farce.

Eventually the Portuguese reached their lodgings and found some of their men already there. Among the items they had carried from the ships was the captain-major’s much-needed bed.

The sailors had also brought with them the gifts earmarked for the ruler of Calicut. In the morning Gama had them laid out, and the Chronicler made an inventory:

Striped cloth, 12 pieces

Scarlet hoods, 4

Hats, 6

Coral, 4 strings

Brass hand basins, 6 in a case

Sugar, 1 case

Oil, 2 barrels

Honey, 2 casks.

Nothing could be presented to the Zamorin without first passing it by the wali and the factor, and Gama dispatched a messenger to notify them of his intention. The two men came to examine the goods and burst out in incredulous laughter.

These were not things to offer a great and rich king, they lectured the stony-faced captain-major. The poorest merchants from Mecca or anywhere in India gave better gifts. Gold was the only thing that would do; these trifles, the king would never accept.

The two men continued to scoff, and Gama’s face fell. He hastily improvised to cover his embarrassment. He had brought no gold, he said; he was an ambassador, not a merchant. His king had not known whether he would reach India, and so he had not given him suitably regal gifts. What he had offered was his own, and it was all he had to give. If King Manuel ordered him to return to India, he would certainly entrust him with a splendid tribute of gold, silver, and much more. Meanwhile, if the Zamorin would not take what he offered, he would send it back to the ships.

The officials were unmoved. It was the custom, they
maintained, for every stranger who was favored with a royal audience to make an appropriate donation.

Gama tried again. It was very proper, he agreed, that their custom should be observed, and he therefore desired to send these gifts, which were more valuable than they seemed for the reasons he had said. Again the two men bluntly refused to forward the insulting items.

In that case, replied the captain-major, he would go and speak with the Zamorin and then return to his ship. He meant, he added icily, to tell him exactly how things stood.

The wali and the factor at least acquiesced in this. If Gama waited a short while, they said, they would conduct him to the palace themselves. Since he was a stranger, the Zamorin would be angry if he went about alone; besides, there were large numbers of Muslims in the city and he needed an escort. With that, they left him to cool his heels.

It was a humiliating moment, and it exposed a flaw in Portugal’s entire plan to infiltrate the East—a flaw so glaring, it seems incredible it was not foreseen.

CHAPTER 11

KIDNAP

B
Y THE TIME
the explorers arrived, India’s civilization was already four millennia old. Age had endowed the subcontinent with three major religions, a complex caste system, countless architectural marvels, and an intellectual culture that had transformed the world. Even the most jaded travelers were apt to gush.

In the 1440s, the Persian ambassador Abd al-Razzaq struck out from Calicut for Vijayanagar, the city that gave its name to the dominant empire of southern India. Along the way he came across an eye-boggling temple cast entirely from solid bronze but for a giant humanoid figure sitting above the entrance, which was made from gold with two prodigious rubies for eyes. It was just a foretaste of what was to come. Vijayanagar was set at the foot of a steep mountain range and was enclosed by triple walls that reached for sixty miles around. Inside the great gates, avenues lined with richly embellished mansions stretched toward the imposing backdrop; Abd al-Razzaq was particularly taken by an enormously long prostitutes’ bazaar that was decorated with outsize animal sculptures and featured a seemingly endless selection of bewitching girls posing outside their chambers on thrones. The simplest artisans sparkled with pearls and precious stones, while the chief eunuch went around accompanied by parasol bearers, trumpeters, and professional panegyrists whose job was to fill their employer’s ears with ever more artful praise. The king, reported the Venetian traveler Niccolò de’ Conti, who reached Vijayanagar at about the same time, “is by far more distinguished than all the others: he takes as
many as twelve thousand wives, of whom four thousand follow him on foot wherever he may go and are employed solely in the service of the kitchen. A like number, more handsomely equipped, ride on horseback. The remainder are carried in litters, of whom two or three thousand are selected as his wives on condition that they will voluntarily burn themselves with him.”

The Vijayanagar Empire had been founded a century earlier, when a Hindu monk had inspired the fractious rulers of southern India to band together against the Islamic powers that were encroaching from the north. It was still the ruling power when the Portuguese arrived. For all its resplendence, though, it was a land empire, and its authority was patchy at best along the coasts. Many of its three hundred ports were independent city-states in all but name, and Muslim merchants were the key to their wealth.

Islam had arrived in India in 712, but mass invasions had begun at the end of the tenth century. Rampaging Turkish and Afghan armies, drawn like the Persians and Greeks before them by the subcontinent’s fabled riches, had smashed Hindu power and had gradually folded their culture into India’s rich skein of civilization. Only southern India had stayed out of reach of the Islamic empires, but even there, Muslim traders had flourished from the early years of Islam. Merchants arriving from Mecca, Cairo, Hormuz, and Aden had settled on the Malabar Coast and had married local women; their children, known as Mappilas, crewed the Arab fleets. Calicut, in particular, had been home to a rich and powerful Muslim community for so long that its beginnings were lost in legend. One Arab story held that it all started when a Hindu ruler named Cheruma Perumal—or Shermanoo Permaloo—converted to Islam and set off on the hajj to Mecca. Before leaving he divided his lands among his relatives, but he left the patch of land from which he embarked to a simple cow herder. The land grew into Calicut and the cowherd became the Zamorin, the first among the coastal kings. More likely it was the city’s open-market tradition that had made it popular with Arab merchants, but either way, they had taken control of the
kingdom’s foreign trade, were ruled by their own emir and judge, and had forged a close alliance with the Zamorins.

The Zamorins had prospered accordingly. By one count they had a hundred thousand armed men—an entire caste of noble warriors called Nairs—at their command, and their lives had become a perpetual round of ceremonies, feasts, and festivals that started at their investiture and continued long after they had been cremated on a fragrant pyre of sandalwood and aloeswood. As a mark of respect for a dead Zamorin, every man in the kingdom shaved his body from head to foot, leaving only his eyebrows and eyelashes unpruned; for a fortnight all public business ceased, and anyone who chewed paan risked having his lips cut off. Since the women of the Zamorin’s caste enjoyed an unusual degree of sexual freedom—and since by custom the Zamorin paid a Brahmin, a priest or scholar from the highest caste, to deflower his wife—inheritance passed through the sister’s line, and the new Zamorin was usually a nephew of the deceased. His induction began with a sprinkling of milk and water and a ceremonial bath. The ancestral ankle bracelet—a heavy gold cylinder encrusted with jewels—was clasped into place, and he was blindfolded and massaged with meadow grasses. His attendants filled nine silver censers representing the nine planets that determined human destiny with sap and water, heated them over a fire into which they threw ghee and rice, and emptied them over his head. As a mantra was whispered into his ear, he proceeded to his private temple to worship his guardian goddess and the golden dynastic sword. He moved on to his private gymnasium, where he bowed before each of the twenty-seven tutelary deities and was presented with his own sword of state by the hereditary instructor-at-arms. After prostrating himself before the high priest and receiving the royal benediction three times—“Protecting cows and Brahmins, reign as king of the hills and the waves”—he returned to his dressing room to put on the rest of the ornaments of state. Finally he sat on a white rug spread on a black carpet, and in the twinkling light of hundreds of gold lamps, the Brahmins threw
rice and flowers over his head. For a year he mourned his predecessor, letting his nails and hair grow wild, never changing his clothes and eating only once a day, until at last he came into his own.

Each day of his reign began with a prayer to the sun and an hour-long massage with perfumed oils. He bathed in the palace pool while his nobles buffed him from the side, and when he emerged, his attendants dried him off and massaged him with more precious oils. His valet daubed him with a paste of sandalwood and aloeswood pounded with saffron and rosewater, sprinkled him with leaves and flowers, and smeared the moistened ashes of his ancestors on his forehead and chest. While the grooming rituals were going on, a dozen of the comeliest teenage girls of the realm mixed fresh cow dung with water in large gold basins and handed them to an army of women cleaners, who disinfected every inch of the palace by rubbing in the diluted dung with their hands. Following a visit to his temple the Zamorin retired to his dining pavilion for three hours, and after briefly seeing to the affairs of state, he installed himself in his audience chamber. If no one came he passed his time with his lords, buffoons, and mountebanks, playing a game of chance with dice, watching his soldiers spar, or simply chewing paan.

Very occasionally he went out in a silk-lined palanquin slung on a bamboo pole studded with jewels; whenever he had to walk, baize was laid beneath his feet. A brass band headed up the procession, followed by archers, spear carriers, and swordsmen staging bravura displays of fencing. Four attendants walked in front of the royal litter holding parasols made of fine cotton and embroidered silk, pairs of servants fanned the royal person on either side, and the paan page was always ready with his golden cup and spittoon. More page boys followed, bearing the golden sword of state, a selection of gold and silver ewers, and piles of towels. “And when the king wishes to put his hand to his nose or eyes or mouth,” one astonished Portuguese onlooker noted, “they pour some water from the ewer on his fingers, and the other hands him the towel, which he carries, to wipe himself.” Bringing up the rear were the royal nephews, governors,
and officers, while all around acrobats tumbled and jesters jested. If the procession took place at night, great iron lamps and wooden torches lit the way.

It was into this ancient, intricate, and rich civilization that the Portuguese had blundered. They had never heard of Hindus, never mind Buddhists or Jains. In Mombasa, Gama’s emissaries had mistaken a picture of a Hindu pigeon god for the Holy Spirit. In Malindi, his crews had misheard chants of “Krishna!” for cries of “Christ!” In Calicut, the landing party had assumed that Hindu temples were Christian churches, they had misconstrued the Brahmins’ invocation of a local deity as veneration of the Virgin Mary, and they had decided the Hindu figures on the temple walls were outlandish Christian saints. The temples were also crammed with animal gods and sacred phalluses, and the Indians’ devotion to cows was deeply puzzling, but the Portuguese merely looked askance at anything that failed to fit their preconceptions. Since it was well known that Muslims abhorred the worship of the human form, it was clear to them that most of the Indians they met could not be Muslims; and since Europe’s with-us-or-against-us world picture allowed for only two religions, Christians they had to be. As far as the Indians were concerned, it was a mark of respect to invite visitors to their temples, and if the visitors felt a kinship with their religion, they were not going to protest. To be called Christians was strange, to be sure, but perhaps the language barrier was to blame. In any case, it was not something to pursue because in Calicut the discussion of religion was frowned on from high. “It is strictly forbidden,” one European visitor reported, “to talk, dispute, or quarrel on that subject; so there never arises any contention on that score, every one living in great liberty of conscience under the favor and authority of the king, who holds that to be a cardinal maxim of government, with a view to making his kingdom very rich and of great intercourse.”