The Last Crusade: The Epic Voyages of Vasco Da Gama (67 page)

161
sea biscuit:
Also known as ship’s biscuit or hardtack.
Biscuit
comes from the Medieval Latin
bis coctus
, or “twice baked,” though the ship’s version, a kind of dense wholemeal bread, was baked up to four times to give it a longer shelf life. It was the inescapable sailor’s staple, and during John I’s reign a Royal Biscuit Office had been established to ensure a sufficient supply.

161
“coarse, poor, lacking in good manners and ignorant”:
Nicholas of Popelau, quoted in Henry H. Hart,
Sea Road to the Indies
(London: William Hodge, 1952), 44. Nicholas’s opinion of
Portugal’s women was based on keen observation. “They allow one to look upon their faces without hindrance,” he noted, “and also upon much of their bosoms, for which purpose their shifts and outer dresses are cut generously low. Below their waist they wear many skirts so that their posteriors are broad and beautiful, so full that I say it in all truth in the whole world nothing finer is to be seen.” They were, though, he warned prospective suitors, lewd, greedy, fickle, mean, and dissolute.

162
a gentleman of the king’s household:
Fidalgo
literally meant “the son of somebody.” It was originally applied to anyone of noble lineage, then to the new nobility created by John I. By Vasco da Gama’s time it distinguished those families from the new wave of parvenus, knights appointed from among the bourgeoisie.

162
the best man Manuel could find:
Gama’s most recent (and best) scholarly biographer closely argues the case that Gama was not the king’s choice but that of a group of nobles opposed to the king; Manuel accepted him, he ingeniously suggests, so that if the underpowered fleet met with disaster, he could pin the failure on the opposition. A fleet of four ships, though, was not unusually small for a voyage of exploration; Dias and Columbus had only three. It would have been small for a voyage of trade or colonization, a fact that belies the notion that Portugal was already on the brink of reaching India. See Sanjay Subrahmanyam,
The Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 67.

162
He was most likely born in 1469:
Fourteen sixty is the alternative year sometimes given for Gama’s birth. The primary piece of evidence is a pass issued in 1478, in the name of Isabella of Castile, to a Vasco da Gama who must have been older than nine; Gama’s name, though, was not uncommon. Other sources, scant as they are, speak for 1469, which is now the consensus.

163
the Order of Santiago:
The Portuguese chapter split from those in the rest of Iberia when Portugal became independent. Its power base was in southwest Portugal, where Gama was born; the extent of its lands made it virtually a state within a state.

163
the novice Crusader:
Sanjay Subrahmanyam gives a comprehensive survey of the handful of documents bearing on Gama’s family and early life: see
Career and Legend
, 58–68.

165
the full company:
Of the chroniclers, Castanheda and Goís say 148; Barros says 170. There are other, unlikelier, estimates, ranging from the Florentine merchant Girolamo Sernigi’s 118 to the Portuguese historian Gaspar Correia’s 260. Correia and the later Portuguese historian Manuel de Faria e Sousa each have a (different) priest aboard, though Correia’s was likely a clerk and no contemporary mention is made of either.

166
the Chronicler:
A remarkable quantity of ink has been spilled since the journal was discovered in 1834 on theories about the author’s identity. By a process of elimination, two candidates emerged as front-runners: João de Sá, the clerk of the
São Rafael
and later treasurer of the Casa da Índia, and Alvaro Velho, a soldier. A minor conflict between the author’s credulity that India was full of Christians and the more skeptical viewpoint later ascribed to Sá has gone against the clerk, and most Portuguese historians have definitively named Velho as the diarist. The evidence is circumstantial at best, and the attribution remains speculative. A standard Portuguese edition is
Diário da viagem de Vasco da Gama
, ed. António Baião, A. de Magalhães Basto, and Damião Peres (Porto: Livraria Civilização, 1945); an English translation by E. G. Ravenstein was published as
A Journal of the First Voyage of Vasco da Gama, 1497–1499
(London: Hakluyt Society, 1898) and is hereafter cited as
Journal
. Any other diaries, logbooks, or reports that once existed were lost, perhaps, along with countless other documents, in the devastating Lisbon earthquake of 1755, and the
Journal
remains the only eyewitness source for the voyage. To complete the picture I have drawn selectively on the early Portuguese chronicles, especially those of João de Barros and Fernão Lopes de Castanheda, and on the accounts of near-contemporary travelers. As usual the literature disagrees on virtually everything, including the types and names of the ships; the dates of the mission’s preparation, departure, and return; the numbers, names, and survival statistics of the crews; and the route the fleet followed. I have only noted discrepancies from my account where they add interest to the story.

166
“Praised be God”:
Barros gives the fullest report of the royal audience; see
Ásia de João de Barros, Dos feitos que os Portuguezes fizeram no descobrimento e conquista dos mares e terras do Oriente
, ed. Hernani
Cidade and Manuel Múrias, 6th ed. (Lisbon: Divisão de publicações e biblioteca, Agência geral das colónias, 1945–1946), 1:131.

167
the Order of Christ:
Manuel had been grand master of the order since 1484, and though John II’s will stipulated that on his coronation he should hand over to John’s illegitimate son Jorge, he refused to let go.

167
Belém:
The village was formerly known as Restello; it was renamed Belém by Manuel I, who commissioned the great monastery that was built there to commemorate Vasco da Gama’s voyage.

169
The seamen wore loose shirts:
For the sailors’ garb, see A. H. de Oliveira Marques, “Travelling with the Fifteenth-Century Discoverers: Their Daily Life,” in Anthony Disney and Emily Booth, eds.,
Vasco da Gama and the Linking of Europe and Asia
(Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000), 34.

169
“weeping and deploring”:
Fernão Lopes de Castanheda, in Robert Kerr,
A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels
(Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1811–1824), 2:303. Castanheda’s account of Gama’s first voyage is based on a version of the
Journal
but adds much valuable detail. His
História do descobrimento e conquista da Índia pelos Portugueses
was translated into English by Nicholas Lichfield and was published in 1582 as
The First Booke of the Historie of the Discoverie and Conquest of the East Indias, Enterprised by the Portingales, in their Daungerous Navigations, in the Time of King Dom John, the Second of that Name: Which Historie Conteineth Much Varietie of Matter, Very Profitable for all Navigators, and Not Unpleasaunt to the Readers
. A revised version of this text was reprinted in Kerr’s collection.

170
the fleet edged forward:
A fifth ship left Lisbon with Gama’s fleet; commanded by Bartolomeu Dias, it was headed to the Gold Coast, where Dias was to take up an appointment as captain of the fort of São Jorge da Mina.

170
“May God our Lord”:
Journal
, 1.

Chapter 8: Learning the Ropes

171
the first of the islands:
The Ilha do Sal, or Salt Island, named by the Portuguese after the mines they had dug there.

172
off the known face of the earth:
Gama’s bold move is a main
plank in the argument advanced by the Portuguese historian Armando Cortesão and others that a series of exploratory fleets set out in the years following Bartolomeu Dias’s voyage. The author of the
Journal
tacitly adds to the speculation by showing scant interest in the course Gama followed. The complete silence of the record has been ingeniously adduced as evidence that something important enough to demand strict secrecy was afoot, but a sudden obsession with investigating the sailing conditions of the southern Atlantic does not fit in with the pattern of the discoveries. It seems likeliest that Gama’s course was determined by the lessons learned from Dias’s voyage, the limitations of his ships, and the vagaries of the weather. Whatever the level of premeditation, the execution by a fleet equipped with rudimentary navigational devices of a three-month sweep around the Atlantic that ended a mere hundred miles north of the Cape of Good Hope was a historic feat of navigation by any yardstick.

173
on another voyage:
The Voyage of François Pyrard of Laval to the East Indies, the Maldives, the Moluccas and Brazil
, trans. and ed. Albert Gray and H. C. P. Bell (London: Hakluyt Society, 1887–1890), 1:325.

173
“The watch is changed”:
Quoted in John Villiers, “Ships, Seafaring and the Iconography of Voyages,” in Anthony Disney and Emily Booth, eds.,
Vasco da Gama and the Linking of Europe and Asia
(Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000), 76.

173
“And while this Prince”:
Quoted in Peter Padfield,
Tide of Empires: Decisive Naval Campaigns in the Rise of the West
, vol. 1,
1481–1654
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), 33. Padfield gives a useful summary of the few known facts about the munitions carried by the fleet.

174
the same basic daily rations:
The quantities varied between voyages; the biscuit ration ranged from less than a pound to nearly two pounds. See Oliveira Marques, “Travelling with the Fifteenth-Century Discoverers,” 32. Also among the foodstuffs commonly carried were salted or smoked fish, flour, lentils, onions, garlic, salt, mustard, sugar, almonds, and honey.

177
“Amongst us was the greatest Disorder and Confusion”:
Jean Mocquet,
Travels and Voyages into Africa, Asia, and America, the East and West Indies; Syria, Jerusalem, and the Holy Land
, trans. Nathaniel Pullen (London, 1696), 203–4.

178
thirty leagues north of the Cape of Good Hope:
St. Helena Bay is thirty-three leagues north of the Cape, or about one hundred miles: Pêro de Alenquer, who made the estimate, was less than ten miles out.

178
ninety-three restless days:
The time Gama and his crews went without seeing land was unprecedented as far as we know; it was certainly much longer than the five weeks endured by Columbus’s mutinous crews.

179
a group of locals:
The Bushmen or San people, hunter-gatherers and pastoralists who had lived in southern Africa since the late Stone Age.

179
“The inhabitants of this country”:
Journal
, 6.

180
“one of the sheaths”:
Ibid., 7.

182
a paste of urine:
A common remedy; the Portuguese had dealt with poisons made from snake venom or deadly sap from their first encounters with hostile forces in sub-Saharan Africa.

182
“All this happened”:
Journal
, 8.

183
ninety or so men emerged from the hills:
The people were the Khoikhoi, pastoralists who had migrated to southern Africa by the fifth century CE and had intermixed with the San; the name for both is the Khoisan. Hottentot, the old name for the Khoikhoi, is now considered pejorative.

184
“We found him very fat”:
Journal
, 11.

184
“but to prove that we were able”:
Ibid., 12.

185
“as big as ducks”:
Ibid., 13. After several months of punishing conditions at sea, sailors invariably took out their pent-up aggression on defenseless animals.

186
a terrifying storm:
At this point the sixteenth-century chronicler Gaspar Correia confronts Gama with a full-scale mutiny that dramatically ends when he summons the ringleaders to the flagship on pretense of charting the course home, claps them in irons, and flings their navigational equipment overboard. God will be their master and pilot, he vows; as for himself, he will never give up until he finds what he has come to seek. Correia’s account of Gama’s first two voyages is peppered with flights of fancy and no other source has the story, though Osorius briefly mentions a mutiny near the Cape of Good Hope. See Henry E. J. Stanley, trans. and ed.,
The Three Voyages of Vasco da Gama, and His Viceroyalty
(London: Hakluyt Society, 1869), 56–64.

187
the last pillar:
Gama had bypassed a bay that Dias christened Bahia da Roca (Bay of Rocks; later renamed Algoa Bay) and the largest of those rocks, where Dias celebrated mass and which he named Cross Island. The low islands—Dias’s Flat Islands—were five leagues past Cross Island and 125 leagues from the Cape. The headland where Dias erected his pillar was formerly known as False Inlet and is now called Kwaiihoek; the river that marked the point where Dias turned home is either the Great Fish River or the Keiskamma River.

187
“Henceforth,” noted the Chronicler:
Journal
, 16.

Chapter 9: The Swahili Coast

188
All were remarkably tall:
The Bantu, a large family of African peoples who moved into southern Africa from around the fourth century CE and displaced many of the indigenous population; they were farmers, herders, and metalworkers. The river was probably the Inharrime, in southern Mozambique; Gama named it the Rio do Cobre, or Copper River.