The Last Crusade: The Epic Voyages of Vasco Da Gama (54 page)

The old explorer had always ruled his ships with steely discipline, and now he was adopting a zero-tolerance approach to running his empire. “He had it proclaimed,” reported Gaspar Correia, “that no seafaring man should wear a cloak except on a Sunday or Saint’s day on going to church, and if they did, that it should be taken away by the constables, and they should be put at the pump-break for a day in disgrace; and that every man who drew pay as a matchlock man should wear his match fastened to his arm. He upbraided the men-at-arms very much for wearing cloaks, because with them they did not look like soldiers. He ordered that the slaves they might have should be men who could assist in any labor, for they were not going to be allowed to embark pages dressed out like dolls on board the King’s ships.” Anyone who disliked the new austerity, the viceroy announced, was free to go back to Portugal, as long as he had no debts and was not under investigation. So as not entirely to depopulate the empire, he declared a three-month
amnesty during which crimes that predated his arrival would be pardoned. The period was reduced to one month for those who had purloined artillery; some of the captains and officers, it turned out, had been selling their guns to merchants, who had sold them to Portugal’s enemies, and they responded to requests for their record books by burning them.

Gama had set himself a punishing program, and he refused to slow down even as the heat mounted. Mornings and evenings he visited the beach and the warehouses to hurry up the unloading of the fleet. He dispatched two ships to Ceylon to buy cinnamon, and four to the Maldives to attack a nest of Muslim pirates who preyed on supply convoys crossing the Indian Ocean. He readied a squadron to head to the Red Sea under the command of his son Estêvão, and he summoned a Genoese master builder to design a fleet of new vessels that could outpace the pirate craft of the Malabar Coast. “Sir, I will build you brigantines which would catch a mosquito,” the shipwright answered.

There were more threats on the horizon. The Spanish had to be confronted; treaties or no treaties, Gama vowed, if he had his way Spain’s ships would mysteriously vanish, along with their crews. The Ottomans were massing to the north, and with every passing year it seemed increasingly likely that they would go all out to challenge Portugal’s control of the oceans. Meanwhile, a bishop had written to the Portuguese king to complain that the Zamorin and his Muslim subjects had been persecuting India’s Christians; many, he said, had been robbed and killed, and their houses and churches had been burned down. Once again, Gama planned to launch a massive attack against his old foe, and the old hatred came flooding back. As soon as the merchant fleet had left, he declared, “he would go and destroy Calicut and all the coast of India, so that there should not remain one Moor on land nor at sea.” Even in an empire troubled with internal strife and threatened by its Iberian neighbor, the fires of holy war still burned bright and true.

Many of the five thousand Portuguese in Cochin had had a
much easier life before the Count of Vidigueira had shown up, and his iron-jawed rigor earned him plenty of enemies. Public meetings took on a menacing edge, and Christians as well as Muslims began to quit Cochin to conduct their business away from the viceregal gaze. The sidelined Dom Luís de Meneses was behind much of the dissent; half of Cochin, noted Gaspar Correia, seemed to eat at his table, and over dinner, plots began to be hatched. Matters came to a head when Luís’s brother Duarte finally reached Cochin after being cold-shouldered in Chaul and Goa. Gama had brought to India a long list of complaints against his predecessor, and he had begun, in secret, to call witnesses. Meneses, it was variously alleged, had used the king’s money for his own trade and had broken the royal spice monopoly. He had stolen the estates of Europeans who had died in India, and he had handed out slaves to soldiers and sailors in lieu of salaries. He had slept with the wives of European settlers, not to mention Hindu and Muslim women, and he had even taken bribes from Muslim rulers to go easy on them. As soon as the former governor sailed into the port, Gama sent a delegation to ban him from coming ashore and arranged to transfer him to a ship that would take him home as a prisoner.

Meneses was the son of a count, a powerful nobleman in his own right, a major figure in the Order of Santiago, and a renowned war leader. He had nothing but contempt for the new Count of Vidigueira, and he had taken his time in coming. Along the way he had stopped off to stock up his chests for the voyage home, and he had also brought with him a vast haul of booty, tributes, and bribes from Hormuz. He refused to hand it over, and he treated the viceroy’s emissaries with lordly disdain. Meneses had, though, reckoned without the loyalty that Gama inspired in men who admired his determination to serve his lord. When he reminded one member of the delegation that his father had personally made him a knight, the messenger retorted that he would cut off his own father’s head if the king commanded it.

The ousted governor had still not officially handed over power,
and he waited in the harbor, hoping that events would somehow conspire to rid him of the self-righteous viceroy. His supporters kept him well informed about events on land, and they soon gave him startling grounds for hope.

Vasco da Gama had been suffering for days from severe and inexplicable pains. Hard boils had broken out at the base of his neck, and it became sheer agony to turn his head. He took to his room in the fortress and issued orders from his bed. His forced confinement, Gaspar Correia reported, brought on “great fits of irritation, with the heavy cares which he felt on account of the many things which he had to do, so that his illness was doubled.” Soon the pain became so excruciating that he was only able to croak out commands in a hoarse whisper.

Secretly, at night, Gama called his confessor to his side. He was moved to the house of a Portuguese grandee, and he summoned his officials to join him. He made each man sign an oath to press on with his plans until another governor replaced him. Then he confessed and took the sacraments.

As he drew sharp breaths and murmured his last wishes, his clerk wrote down his will. He told his sons to go back to Portugal with the spice fleet and take with them any of his servants who so desired. He directed them to give his clothes and best furniture to the churches and hospital; the rest of his belongings they were to take home, not selling anything. He asked for his bones to be returned to Portugal, and he charged one of the witnesses to write to the king, begging him to look after his wife and sons and to take on his attendants. Finally, or so it was later rumored, he ordered a large sum of money to be sent to each of the three women he had flogged at Goa, so they could find good husbands and marry.

He died at three o’clock in the morning. It was Christmas Eve, 1524.

N
O ONE CRIED
, no one wept. The house was silent. The doors stayed shut all day. After dark his sons and his servants announced
his death, and many of his friends and relatives came to mourn. Soon the entire city had gathered in the nearby courtyard of the Portuguese church.

The mood was solemn, but for some relief outweighed their grief. “The captains, factors, scriveners and other officials would be very satisfied at the death of the viceroy,” one of Gama’s admirers wrote to the king four days after his death, “for they do not wish to have the justice in their own house that he brought.”

The great explorer’s body was dressed in silks. His gilded belt was buckled around his waist, and his sword was placed in its scabbard. His spurs were fastened on his buskins, and his square cap was placed on his head. Finally, the mantle of the Order of Christ was draped over the old Crusader’s back.

The uncovered bier was moved into the hall of the house. The coffin bearers, each wearing the cloak of a military brotherhood, raised it on their shoulders. Gama’s loyal men walked alongside holding lit tapers, and the towns people followed. For good or ill, none of them would have been in India were it not for Vasco da Gama.

The Count of Vidigueira, Admiral and Viceroy of India, was buried in the simple Franciscan church of St. Anthony. The next day the friars said a dignified funeral mass, with Gama’s sons sitting in their midst. At night the two young men came back to the church to grieve in private, “as was reasonable,” said Gaspar Correia, “on losing so honored a father, and of such great deserts in the kingdom of Portugal.

“For it pleased the Lord,” he continued, “to give this man so strong a spirit, that without any human fear he passed through so many perils of death during the discovery of India . . . all for the love of the Lord, for the great increase of his Catholic faith, and for the great honor and glory and ennobling of Portugal, which God increased by His holy mercy to the state in which it now is.”

G
AMA HAD BROUGHT
to India a letter of succession sealed with the king’s insignia. It was ripped open in church and was read aloud.
To his indignation, Duarte de Meneses discovered that he and his brother were out of a job.

The spice fleet sailed for home with Gama’s sons and the Meneses brothers on board. The disgruntled brothers made life as difficult as possible for the two young mourners, but in the end they got more than they gave. Luís de Meneses’s ship was lost in a storm after rounding the Cape; a French pirate later revealed that his brother had seized it and had killed Luís and his crew before setting it on fire. Dom Duarte was nearly shipwrecked, too, but he finally made it to Portugal. It was rumored that he stopped off on the coast to bury his treasure while his ship sailed on to Lisbon. The ship sank before it reached the port; some said it was sabotage to cover up the theft of riches that should have been the crown’s. Whether for that reason or for his other nefarious activities, the king slung Dom Duarte in prison for seven years. The buried treasure, of course, was never found.

CHAPTER 19

THE CRAZY SEA

T
HE YOUNG KING
who had sent Vasco da Gama to fix his Indian problem soon succumbed to his dynasty’s delusions of grandeur. Like his father he, too, began to fantasize about wringing the Indian Ocean drop by drop until it was purified into a Christian lake. More brutal campaigns were waged against Muslims, more forts went up, and Gama’s drive to rein in the unwieldy empire was quickly forgotten. As its outposts were flung still farther across the map and the annual spice shipments that reached Lisbon barely covered the cost of maintaining the garrisons, Portugal steadily evolved into a territorial power, its income dependent on taxing peasants.

With spices still a royal monopoly, Portuguese ships backed by European merchants began to crisscross the Indian Ocean carrying Persian horses to India, Indian textiles to Indonesia and East Africa, and Chinese silks and porcelains to Japan. The so-called country trade proved more profitable than the long Cape route, and the Portuguese soon outstripped Muslim merchants in Asia; by the mid-sixteenth century pidgin Portuguese had replaced Arabic as the language of commerce in ports across the East. Yet as regular links with Portugal were increasingly severed, large swaths of the empire became all but impossible to control.

Only the hardiest and most desperate men were eager to serve in the remotest corners of the earth, and like their Crusader forebears, many who went east had small horizons at home. They were determined to live like lords, and they were not overly fussy about how they made their fortunes. As dropouts, jailbirds, criminal gangs,
kidnapped youths, and penniless younger sons poured out of Portugal, shocking tales of depravity began to filter back to Europe.

The French traveler Jean Mocquet penned the most devastating of many exposés. As apothecary royal to the king of France, Mocquet was responsible for concocting the king’s drugs from a global range of resins, minerals, and aromatics. Perhaps because of his daily exposure to the exotica of the East, he developed a bad case of wanderlust. The king granted him permission to roam the globe on condition that he brought back weird and wonderful souvenirs for the royal cabinet of curiosities, and Mocquet set out on a ten-year odyssey. After he had visited Africa, South America, and Morocco, his fourth voyage took him to Goa. Like many of the era’s adventurers, he kept an exhaustive account of his travels, and he sat down and dashed off page after page devoted to trashing the Portuguese.

By the mid-sixteenth century Goa had grown into a colonial city grand enough to earn the sobriquet “Rome of the East.” Its streets and squares were lined with fifty churches and numerous convents, hospices, and colleges staffed by thousands of ecclesiastics. Its lofty white cathedral was the seat of an archbishop whose dominion stretched from the Cape of Good Hope to China. The governor’s palace, public buildings, and potentates’ mansions were magnificent examples of Renaissance and early Baroque architecture sprouting among the lush Indian foliage, and pomp and pageantry filled the streets to celebrate festivals and victories. Barely hidden behind the stately facade, though, was a frontier town of bars, brothels, and brawls where gangs of soldiers roamed the streets and a self-appointed Portuguese aristocracy wielded power at the point of a sword.