The Last Crusade: The Epic Voyages of Vasco Da Gama (55 page)

The social pressure on new arrivals was intense. As soon as they stumbled half dead off the ships in their home-style clothes, they were jeered at with such venom—“licehead” was a favorite insult—that they hid in their lodgings, under a boat, or at the back of a church until they worked out how to pawn their cloak or sword and dress like old hands. Within weeks, Jean Mocquet acerbically
noted, they began calling themselves gentlemen, “tho they be but Peasants and Tradesmen.” One gallant named Fernando, he reported, had caught the eye of a rich woman and was parading around decked out in gold chains and attended by a retinue of slaves when he was recognized by the son of his old employer in Portugal. Fernando pretended not to know him and asked who he was, “to which the other made answer, Was he not the same who formerly kept Hogs for my Father; This Gallant hearing this, drawing him aside, told him, he was, and was here called
Don
, and was looked upon as a great Gentleman, praying him to hold his peace, and gave him Money; yet this hindered not his being known by several, who made their own profit thereof.” Other newcomers were less fortunate: if they breathed the truth, they were quickly roughed up. Even lowly soldiers equipped themselves with a boy to carry their parasol or cloak and assumed an air of majestic gravity, and if they quarreled—as they often did—any of their gang who refused to back them to the hilt was cast out and was fair game, too.

At its high point Goa was home to more than two hundred thousand inhabitants—as many as lived in Paris, more than in London or Lisbon itself. Only a few thousand, though, were Portuguese, and most of those were
mestiços
, or the mixed-race offspring of colonists and indigenous women. The rest were Hindus, Indian Christians, and slaves, who were kept in large numbers by every Portuguese household and by every seminary, monastery, and nunnery. None were well treated. Indians who failed to bow down to the new rulers or doff their caps were slashed with swords, cudgeled with bamboo poles, or beaten with long sandbags. One cabal of captains set out at night to steal a golden idol from a Hindu temple, pausing to torch the nearby houses to cause a diversion. Inside they found five hundred temple women dancing an all-night vigil. At the sight of the intruders the dancers linked their arms and legs together, and before the Portuguese could prize them apart the fires they had lit began licking at the walls. They snatched the jewelry from the women’s ears, hacked off their fingers to get their rings,
and beat a hasty retreat without the idol. The women, it was reported, “made such a lamentable noise, that ’twas a great pity to hear them: The Portugals flying away from the Fire, let all these Religious young Women to be Burnt, none being able to succor them; and thus cruelly do the Portugals treat their best Friends and Confederates.”

No doubt the dancers had feared for their honor, because women were rarely safe in Portuguese India. Especially vulnerable were mestiços who retained their ties to the Indian community and unmarried daughters with any portable property. The latter’s slaves were bribed to gain access to them, they were swept off on a whirlwind elopement, and when their lovers had gambled their way through their jewelry they were regularly strangled and buried, in at least one case under the floorboards of their own lodgings. Portuguese husbands, meanwhile, were paranoid that their mestiço wives were drugging them while they cavorted with lovers before their insensate eyes; they were so suspicious, warned Mocquet, that it was courting disaster to look their womenfolk in the face, while if they saw them speaking to another man,

they presently Strangle or Poison them; and when they have Strangled them, they call their Neighbours to their Succour, saying, that a Swooning Fit has taken their Wife upon the Chair; But they never come again to themselves: Sometimes they send for a Barber to Blood them, saying, that they are not well; When the Barber is gone away, they undo the Fillet, and let the Blood run out until the poor miserable Creature dies; and then also they call in the Neighbours, to see as they say, what a sad Disaster has happened to their Wife in Sleeping.

Others took their wives for a dip in a brook or pond, “and there make them Drink their Belly full; and a little while after, send their Slaves to look for their Mistress, whom they find Drown’d, which the husband knowing before, seems to be mightily astonished and grieved at.” He knew of some, the Frenchman added, who had
done away with three or four wives, though women, too, reportedly rid themselves of adulterous husbands, usually with the help of poison. Many blamed it on the climate: it was, said Mocquet, “so hot, that where any Man can only have the means to speak with a Woman or Maid, he is sure to obtain of them what he desires.”

Most egregious of all was the colonists’ treatment of slaves. Hundreds at a time, seized across Asia and Africa, were stripped and displayed on the auction block in Goa, where they went for less than a tenth the cost of an Arabian horse. Girls sold as virgins were examined to make sure their hymens were intact; some were kept as concubines, others were doused in perfumes and sent out to prostitute themselves. Whatever their task, Mocquet claimed, slaves who dissatisfied their master or mistress were beaten to the point of death. “For they run them through with double Irons, then give them with a Cudgel, 500 blows at a time, and make them lie along the ground on their Belly, and then come two, who by turns strike the poor Body as a Log of Wood.” If an owner was particularly religious, Mocquet sharply noted, he kept a count of the blows on his rosary. “And if by chance they who thus strike are not strong enough to his mind, or have an inclination to spare their Companion, he causes them to be put in the place of the Patient, and to be soundly banged without any Mercy.”

Of Mocquet’s long litany of accusations, it was this vicious mistreatment that shocked even a violent age. The Frenchman piled example on example to make his point. At night at his lodgings, he wrote, he was kept awake by the noise of blows “and some weak Voice, which Breathed a little, for they stop their Mouth with a Linnen Cloth, to hinder them from crying out. After they have been well beaten, they cause their Bodies to be sliced with a Razor, then rub it with Salt and Vinegar for fear it should Fester.” Sometimes, he claimed, owners made their slaves lie on their bellies, heated a shovel until it was red hot, and dripped lard from it on their naked flesh. One Indian girl came running to his lodgings, “crying out for help, and praying me to be a means to obtain Mercy; but I could not save her, to my great Sorrow; For she was taken and laid all along on the Ground and Bastinadoed
without pity.” A mestiço woman had killed five or six slaves and had buried them in her garden; while she was punishing her latest victim, the slave administering the blows left off and told his mistress she was dead. “ ‘No, no,’ she answered, ‘she counterfeits . . .
Lay on, lay on, ’tis an old Fox
.’ ” One slave who was slow to answer her owner’s summons had a horseshoe nailed on her back and died soon after of gangrene; another had her eyelids sewn to her eyebrows. A male slave was hung up by his hands for two or three days for spilling some milk, and afterward he was “well Bang’d.” When Mocquet heard a young woman being beaten in his own lodgings, his host’s brother explained that it was nothing to what others had endured:

He told me also, how his Brother, who was Master of the Lodging, having one day bought a Japan Slave, a beautiful Girl, and how in Dineing with his Wife, he happened to say in Jesting, that this Slave had exceeding White Teeth, his Wife said nothing at present, but having watched her opportunity when her Husband was abroad, she caused this poor Slave to be taken and bound, and pluck’d all her Teeth out without Compassion; And another’s Privy-Parts, whom she conceited her husband entertained, she ordered a red-hot Iron to be run up, of which the miserable Creature Died.

“Such,” Mocquet concluded, “is the cruel and Barbarous treatment, which the Portugals and others use to their slaves of Goa, whose condition is worse than that of Beasts.” Years later, the experience still made him shudder with horror.

Justice was rarely done. Posses of Portuguese pulled on masks, barged into houses at dinnertime, and swept the plate off the tables into their swag bags; then they demanded a bribe to return it, and another not to kill the master of the house. In case they were caught they had bags of gunpowder at the ready, with matches tied around them, and they threatened to blow up anyone who approached. Murderers ran away to the mainland and waited for an amnesty to be
declared: with desertions rife, soldiers were always in demand. Successive governors, meanwhile, lined their pockets and tyrannized the poor. Vast quantities of spices, gold, and ivory vanished without ever showing up in the royal ledgers. Captains pocketed half the money they were allowed for provisions and left their men on half rations, adding starvation to the toll from scurvy, cholera, dysentery, and malaria. In desperation the crown cut back the royal cargo fleets and sold the captaincies of the forts to the highest bidders for three-year terms. That only encouraged the debt-laden officials to pump the system all the harder before their time was up. One captain of Sofala murdered one Muslim merchant to whom he was deeply in debt, went on a killing spree to shore up the position of another Muslim merchant with whom he was in cahoots, and tried to stab to death the king’s factor when he complained. The Portuguese East had become a forerunner of the Wild West, with soldiers paid in gold dust by the carat and captains shooting up each other’s ships.

The forces of lawlessness that had been the camp followers of every previous Crusade had been exported east. Violence bred violence. When the king of Siam captured some miscreant Westerners, reported Mocquet, he showed little self-restraint:

For some of them he causes to be put stark-naked in Frying Pans of Copper, upon the Fire and thus to be roasted by little and little: Others he causes to be put betwixt two great Fires and set down, and thus to Die in Torments; others, he exposes in the Park of his Elephants to be crushed and knocked down by them, and a thousand sorts of barbarous Cruelties, which he exercises upon these poor Portugals.

Southeast Asia had hardly been an enlightened place before the Portuguese had appeared. The same Siamese ruler, when he heard that his commanders had failed to turn up for battle because their wives could not bear their absence, “sent for these Women, and having caused their Privy Parts to be cut off, and to be fastened
upon their Husbands Foreheads, he caused them thus to walk about all the City, and then to have their Heads choped of.” Sorcerers reportedly so inflamed one Burmese king against his people that he resolved to exterminate them all: for three years he forbade anyone, on pain of death, to plow or sow the land, and the country resorted to cannibalism. Yet the Portuguese were foreign devils, and as their aggressions mounted, their former friends turned on them one by one. “The Portuguese are much detested in almost all the parts of the Indies,” a Venetian ambassador to Spain reported with no little satisfaction, “as the countrymen have seen that they go about fortifying themselves little by little, and making themselves the lords of those lands. . . . I think that the difficulties will increase every day.”

Amid all the troubles the original purpose of the Portuguese explorations was virtually forgotten. Portugal’s Crusading kings had planned to siphon vast wealth out of the Islamic East and into Christian Europe, then conquer and convert the Infidels and heathens of the world. The first part of the plan had met with some success, even though much of the money ended up in pockets other than their own. Yet if faith had led the charge to the East, to the majority of the empire builders who followed it came a distant second to the scramble for filthy lucre.

The Portuguese were fond of claiming that their arrival in the East had stopped all of India from succumbing to Islam. They had certainly pummeled the Muslims of the Malabar Coast, who responded to their loss of power by seeking martyrdom in a jihad that intermittently lasted into the twentieth century. Even so, their policies were hardly designed to win converts to the Christian way of life, let alone to usher in the universal Christendom of which their kings had dreamed. Eventually they resorted to the old stratagem of forced conversions, and the dark figures of the Inquisition arrived to stalk the streets of Goa.

A
S EARLY AS
1515, Manuel I had petitioned the pope to establish the Inquisition in Portugal.

Manuel’s request was yet another consequence of his marriage to the daughter of the Catholic Monarchs. Early in their reign Ferdinand and Isabella had pressured Rome into authorizing the revival of religious tribunals to torture, try, and execute heretics, a practice that had been dormant since the early thirteenth century. By the time Manuel made his request, the Inquisition had already wreaked such havoc that the papacy delayed its debut in Portugal by twenty-one years. Four years later, in 1540, the first batch of marranos was publicly sentenced at the first Portuguese auto da fé, and the burnings began.

By then John III had become as evangelical as his father, and he was increasingly embarrassed by his colonists’ unchristian lifestyle. Violence, naturally, was not the problem; what was really worrying was that so many settlers had succumbed to the earthy pleasures of India and had gone native. The king turned to the newly formed Society of Jesus, all but one of whose founders, including Ignatius Loyola himself, were Spanish or Portuguese. In 1541, a year after John had ordered the destruction of every Hindu temple in Goa, the Jesuits sent Francis Xavier, a Basque from Navarre, to the East.

Xavier’s labors to improve the colonists’ morals evaporated in a sultry haze of indifference. After four years he gave up the struggle and wrote to King John, recommending that the Inquisition be installed at Goa as the only way to cleanse his colony. Xavier left for Indonesia, where his evangelism found a much more receptive audience, and died while trying to reach China several years before the Inquisition finally arrived.