The Last Crusade: The Epic Voyages of Vasco Da Gama (53 page)

Vasco da Gama had been a mere captain-major himself on his first voyage east. This time out, titles hung around him like impenetrable suits of armor. The Admiral of India and Count of Vidigueira
was now Viceroy of India to boot. The new viceroy—only the second man, after Almeida, to bear that title—had received the commission shortly before he left, and he had sworn the solemn oath of fealty three times before the king.

It was in every way a major mission. State-of-the-art ordnance had been procured in Flanders and several large ships had been built to order; Gama’s flagship, the
Santa Catarina do Monte Sinai
, had as its figurehead the Alexandrian martyr who was condemned to die on a Roman torture wheel and was reportedly disinterred half a millennium later, her luxurious locks still growing. Altogether there were fourteen ships and caravels carrying three thousand men—and a few women. Many of the men were old India hands, and an unusual number were knights, gentlemen, and nobles who had been attracted or persuaded into serving with the great Gama. The women had sneaked on board at the last minute. Taking wives, lovers, or “comfort women” on the harrowing voyage was strictly forbidden, more for the morale-sapping quarrels their presence provoked than for the sake of their souls. The prohibition was regularly flouted; on one voyage, a passenger noted, the sailor who hoisted the mainsail was taken prisoner because he “kept a Concubine, which he had brought from Portugal, and she being with Child when she Embark’d, was brought to Bed in our Ship.” Gama, ever the disciplinarian, had vowed to put a stop to the onboard orgies; before leaving Lisbon he had had it proclaimed on ship and shore that any woman found at sea “should be publicly scourged, even though she were a married woman, and her husband should be sent back to Portugal loaded with fetters; and should she be a slave and a captive she should be confiscated for the ransom of captives: and the captain who should find a woman in his ship and not give her up should for that lose his commission.” The warning was also written on signs and nailed to the masts; no one could have missed it, or doubted that the count would carry out his word.

After the familiar trials of the voyage past the Cape, the fleet arrived in Mozambique on August 14. As soon as it anchored, three
women were dragged over to the flagship. A vessel at sea was the least private place in the world, and it had been impossible to keep them hidden for long. Grim-faced at the insubordination that had broken out among the India crews, Gama took the women into custody to be dealt with later.

There was much worse in store. As he prepared to leave Africa, Gama sent a caravel to make his apologies and deliver letters and gifts to the ever-patient sultan of Malindi. The caravel’s crew, master, and pilot had already taken a violent dislike to their Majorcan captain. Once they were on their own they murdered him, then absconded toward the Red Sea to cruise for plunder.

Nature, too, seemed to be conspiring against the returning admiral. One ship ran into a reef off the African coast and had to be abandoned, though the crew was saved. As the southwest monsoon battered the fleet on the crossing to India, a ship and a caravel disappeared in mid-ocean and were never seen again. When the ten remaining ships neared the coast, the fierce wind gave way to a dead calm. Suddenly, during the daybreak watch, the water began to tremble violently, as if the whole sea were boiling. A tidal wave smacked into the hulls with such force that the sailors thought they had hit a huge shoal, and one man threw himself overboard. The rest struck the sails and lowered the boats, shouting out warnings as the vessels pitched and rolled. When they realized the entire fleet was firing off distress signals from its cannon, they cried to God to have mercy on them, certain they had been gripped by a diabolical force. They lowered the leads to sound the depth, and when the lines paid out without reaching the seafloor they crossed themselves even harder.

The tremors died down, then came back as strong as before. Again the ships lurched so violently that men toppled up and down the decks and chests skidded and banged from one end to the other. For an hour the convulsions came and went, “each time during the space of a Credo.”

The admiral stood planted on his deck like an oak. A doctor
who dabbled in astrology had explained to him that the fleet had sailed into the epicenter of a submarine earthquake.

“Courage, my friends!” he shouted to his men. “The sea trembles for fear of you.”

Gama was back.

T
HREE DAYS AFTER
the seaquake subsided, one of the ships captured a dhow on its way home from Aden. On board were sixty thousand gold coins and goods worth more than three times that amount. With no Zamorin to teach a lesson, Gama took the valuables and let the crew go. This time he was determined above all to set an example to his own people, and to avoid any semblance of impropriety, he ordered his clerks to itemize every last cruzado.

The Muslims inadvertently had their revenge. The coast, they had told their captors, was just three days’ sailing away. Six days later there was still no sight of land, and the more credulous crewmen began to whisper that it had been swallowed up in the quake. Panic gripped them when they recalled the forecast by several of Europe’s leading astrologers that a conjunction of all the planets in the house of Pisces was about to unleash a second Great Flood. A number of Portuguese nobles had prepared themselves by building mountaintop shelters stocked with enough barrels of crackers to last until the waters receded, though in the end the year turned out to be drier than usual.

It soon transpired that the ships had taken the wrong heading. Two days later they arrived in Chaul, the port where Lourenço Almeida had met his end. Another Portuguese fort had gone up there three years earlier, and a settlement had already grown around it.

Gama published the king’s commission that installed him as viceroy and set about business.

Vasco da Gama had never been a great dreamer. He was a loyal servant of his lord who unflinchingly carried out his commands, a born leader who set his course and unswervingly stuck to it, and from afar he had watched in disgust as his ocean turned into a
free-for-all at a heavy cost to the crown. If he could, he dutifully declared, he “would make the King rich, as the greatest benefit the people could obtain was to have their King well supplied.” He was determined to clear away the scroungers and deadweights accumulated after a decade of bribery and patronage, and he had brought his own handpicked men to fill many posts. Chaul’s officers were summarily dismissed, and it was announced in the streets that anyone not there on official business was to embark immediately or lose his pay. Before leaving, Gama gave the new captain of the fort his first command: If Dom Duarte de Meneses, the governor whom Gama was replacing, showed up as expected, the captain was to refuse Meneses permission to disembark, disregard his orders, and only supply him with enough food to last four days.

Ignoring the appeals of his cabin-fevered and scurvy-ridden sailors to allow them ashore, Gama moved on to Goa. He was received with a public oration and lavish festivities and was carried in procession to the cathedral and the fort. The next day he relieved its captain, Francisco Pereira, of his command and opened an inquiry into a long list of accusations leveled against him by the townspeople. The charges included the imprisonment of his adversaries—among them the city’s lawyers and judges—without charge or trial, the seizure of their property, and the expulsion of their wives and children from their homes. Crowds arrived to denounce Pereira for more “great evil doings,” and Gama peremptorily sentenced the apoplectic former captain to pay reparations to them all.

Pereira had at least put the property he seized toward a good cause: a palatial hospital for the hundreds of Europeans who fell ill each year in the East. Yet so much money had been lavished on the hospital and the equally grandiose monastery of St. Francis that nothing had been left over for essentials, such as artillery. Gama took one look at the infirmary and its patients, some of whom appeared to be using it as a hotel, and ordered the doctor in charge not to admit anyone unless they could show their sores. Even the wounded were to be banned if they had been involved in a brawl;
trouble with women, the viceroy stiffly pointed out, was invariably the cause, and there was no medicine for that. Meanwhile, the many sick men on board the ships had begun to complain bitterly at their treatment. Gama retorted that he knew exactly how to make them feel better, and he announced that their shares of the booty from the vessel he had seized were ready to be disbursed. The attraction also drew forth large numbers of inmates from the hospital; when they tried to return, they found they had been locked out.

There was still the case of the three women stowaways to be dealt with. The town crier proclaimed the sentence:

“The justice of the King our sovereign! It orders these women to be flogged, because they had no fear of his justice, and crossed over to India in spite of his prohibition.” It was, of course, Gama’s justice that was sovereign in the East, and it was his punishment that had to be meted out.

Portuguese women were a rarity in Goa, whatever the state of their souls, and their plight immediately became a cause célèbre. Franciscan friars, Brothers of Mercy, and even the bishop of Goa protested to the viceroy’s officials, and the gentlemen of the town offered a ransom for their release.

Gama paid no heed, and the flogging was fixed for the following day. Shortly before the appointed hour, the Franciscans and the Brothers of Mercy paraded to the viceroy’s residence waving a crucifix and announced that they had come to make a last plea for a pardon. Gama ordered them to return the crucifix to its altar, and when they came back he launched into a long harangue. Marching on his house under the sign of the cross, he said in icy tones, “was a kind of conspiracy, and done to show the people that he was cruel and pitiless,” and it must never happen again. When the brothers tried to explain the value of mercy, he brusquely retorted that mercy was for God, not men, and he vowed that if a single man dared commit a crime during his tenure, he would have him cut down inside the city gates.

The women were duly flogged, and the example had the
intended effect. “The people were much scandalized at what happened to these women,” reported Gaspar Correia, a self-appointed chronicler who was in India at the time, “and judged the Viceroy to be a cruel man; but seeing such great firmness in carrying out his will, they felt great fear, and were wary, and reformed many evils which existed in India, especially among the gentlemen who were very dissolute and evil-doers.”

For all his dictatorial ways, the new viceroy was undoubtedly a man of much greater probity than his immediate predecessors. The members of Goa’s Municipal Council wrote a long report to King John III extolling Gama’s determination to serve the crown, to rectify abuses, and to redress injuries. They were particularly astonished that he refused to accept the gifts—a polite word for bribes—that were offered as a matter of course to new governors. Gama, though, was in a hurry to continue his work, and to the council’s dismay he moved on from Goa while petitioners were still lining up at his door. Leaving instructions that Dom Duarte de Meneses was not to be welcomed or obeyed there, either, he boarded a galliot and sailed down the coast, closely followed by his fleet.

In the long interval since Gama’s last visit, the river mouths and harbors on the way to Cochin had become infested with nests of militant Muslim pirates. Many were merchants who had been driven out of business and who nursed a deep hatred of the Portuguese. Every summer they fortified themselves with paan and opium and sailed out to make war on the occupiers; the threat of being put to forced labor for life in the king’s galleys made them more reckless, not less, and any Portuguese they captured who were not quickly ransomed were summarily killed. Gama had heard a great deal about the menace, and he insisted on nosing into the rivers to take a look for himself. The pirates spotted the intruders from their lookout towers, and to the viceroy’s indignation the extravagantly mustachioed men in their light, fast boats darted brazenly around the lumbering Portuguese ships, even when the eight-strong squadron that was intended to police the coast sailed into
view. Gama immediately dispatched his son Estêvão with a flotilla of armed boats to teach them a lesson, and he stationed six ships in the bars of the rivers. When he had put his own house in order, he vowed, he would return to deal with the scourge.

The former governor was still at large, but Gama finally ran into his brother off the coast. Dom Luís de Meneses was sailing north from Cochin to meet Dom Duarte, who was due to return south from Hormuz. The flags went up and the drums and trumpets sounded, but Gama insisted that Luís turn back and accompany him to Cochin.

The fleet briefly stopped at Cannanore, where Gama replaced another captain and threatened to punish the new Kolattiri for allowing Muslims to do business in his city and for failing to root out the pirate lairs. The alarmed king handed over a leading Muslim, and the sacrificial victim was imprisoned and later hanged.

Steering clear of Calicut, which was still a thorn in Portugal’s side after twenty-six years, Gama arrived in Cochin in early November.

T
HE FLEET ANCHORED
after dark, its guns firing a salute and inadvertently killing two men on a caravel. The flashes from the bombards also lit up a ship that had gone missing the night before and was sneaking into the harbor. It belonged to a merchant who had slipped away to steal a march on his competitors, and Gama clapped him in irons.

The next day Dom Luís sailed up on a richly decorated galley rowed by slaves, with the gentlemen of Cochin lining the poop deck and a lavish breakfast laid on a table, and offered to conduct Gama to land. He refused and set out for the city in his own boat.

Twenty-one years had passed since he had last been in Cochin, and much had changed. A new Portuguese town had grown up along the shore, and its leaders welcomed the new viceroy with an effusive oration. Clergymen with crucifixes conducted him to the main Portuguese church, and after the service the king stopped by
on his elephant. Gama installed himself in the fortress, dismissed its captain, and set about refashioning the corrupt, bloated empire into a well-oiled machine run with martial efficiency from his office. Nominees for even the lowliest positions were ordered to report to the viceroy for a personal grilling. The clerks, some of whom were barely literate, were summoned to produce a writing sample in his presence. He insisted on personally licensing every captain, on pain of death if they tried to avoid his audit. He threatened to seize merchants’ vessels and property and banish them from the East if they carried on embezzling from the royal weighing houses. He revoked the pay and rations of married men, unless they were called up to fight or to serve on the ships. He investigated allegations that officials had been pocketing tax revenues, and he had several arrested. He forbade his captains to load barrels of wine without his express permission, and he banned men from fighting if they had not proved themselves in war. He would give the honors of the battle, he pointedly declared, to soldiers who won them with their sword arm, whether or not they were gentlemen.