The Last Crusade: The Epic Voyages of Vasco Da Gama (68 page)

189
“Look what I have been given!”:
Journal
, 17.

189
a much larger river:
The Qua Qua River, in Mozambique. About ten miles upstream was the Muslim trading settlement of Quelimane, which was doubtless where the two distinguished visitors came from. The rest of the people, as before, were Bantu.

190
“These tokens”:
Journal
, 20.

191
“a man of such unprepossessing appearance”:
Wilfrid Blunt,
Pietro’s Pilgrimage: A Journey to India and Back at the Beginning of the Seventeenth Century
(London: James Barrie, 1953), 10.

192
the local sultan:
The sultans of the Swahili Coast were sole governors of their lands; they controlled trade, exacted a levy on imports and exports, and provided warehouses, pilots, and facilities for repairing ships. With extensive links to inland trading networks, often forged through polygamous marriages, they were also the coast’s dominant merchants in their own right. They were powerful men, and they were not used to being ordered around by foreigners. See Malyn Newitt,
A History of Mozambique
(London: Hurst, 1995), 4.

193
“a jar of bruised dates”:
Journal
, 28. The details of the street life are from 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), 215.

194
“gold, silver, cloves, pepper”:
Journal
, 23.

194
“great merchants and owned big ships”:
Ibid., 24.

195
“This information”:
Ibid., 25.

196
“But when they learned”:
Ibid., 28.

198
warring tribes of naked tattooed men:
The Dutch traveler Jan Huygen van Linschoten was unusually perceptive about the cultural norms that made white people caricature black people as figures out of hell—and vice versa. Some of the Bantu, he noted, seared their faces and bodies with irons until their skin looked like raised satin or damask, “wherein they take great pride, thinking there are no fairer people than them in all the world, so that when they see any white people, that wear apparell on their bodies, they laugh and mocke at them, thinking us to be monsters and ugly people: and when they will make any devilish forme and picture, then they invent one after the forme of a white man in his apparel, so that to conclude, they thinke and verily perswade themselves, that they are the right colour of men, and that we have a false and counterfeit colour.”
The Voyage of J. H. van Linschoten to the East Indies
, ed. Arthur Coke Burnell and P. A. Tiele (London: Hakluyt Society, 1885), 1:271.

198
The pilot whom Gama had hired from the sultan:
Most likely the pilot who was so keen to get away was the local man, not the Meccan pilot who had asked for passage, though the sources do not specify one or the other.

199
“When we were weary with this work”:
Journal
, 30. Estimates of the islanders’ strength range from a hundred to Barros’s two thousand; the lower estimate, as usual, is probably nearer the mark.

200
“
Pisce Mulier,
which is to say Women Fish”:
Mocquet,
Travels and Voyages
, 233–35. The fishermen, Mocquet reports, were also said to cut the throats of humans and drink their blood while it was still hot. The king was the ruler of Matapa, a state of the Karanga (now Shona) people that stretched between the Limpopo and Zambezi rivers and flourished from around 1200 to 1500 CE on the back of its trade in gold and ivory. Great Zimbabwe, a monumental stone
city on the Zimbabwe plateau, was the royal palace and trading center. The Portuguese called the kingdom Monomotapa, which they derived from the Karanga royal title
Mwene Matapa
, or “Ravager of the Lands,” and which they initially thought was the personal name of the ruler. Though Matapa had declined by the time the Portuguese arrived, the latter long believed it was a great power and went to great lengths to infiltrate it.

201
“Chaine of mens members”:
Linschoten,
Voyage
, 1:275.

201
a large archipelago of tropical islands:
The Quirimbas Archipelago, which stretches for sixty miles along the northern coast of Mozambique. The low-lying mainland is virtually hidden from view when coasting outside the reefs.

202
a large island ahead:
Probably Mafia Island, which was likewise perfectly free of Christians. By standing out to sea Gama missed Zanzibar, a hundred miles to the north.

204
the Holy Ghost painted as a white dove:
Castanheda says the merchants were Indian; Sir Richard Burton suggested the drawing was of a Hindu pigeon-god.
Journal
, 36.

205
“These and other wicked tricks”:
Ibid., 37–38. According to Castanheda, the Mombasans tried further attempts at sabotage during the two following nights.

208
huge horns:
The Siwa, or Royal Trumpet, was imported to East Africa by Persians from Shiraz, who settled along the coast in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Siwas were made of copper and wood as well as ivory.

211
“Our Lady at the foot of the cross”:
Journal
, 44.

212
the pilot appeared to be another Christian from India:
The pilot has often been romantically misidentified as the great Arab navigator Ahmad ibn Majid. The only plausible evidence is a short passage in a mid-sixteenth-century Arabic chronicle that calls the arrival in India of the “accursed Portuguese” one of the “astounding and extraordinary occurrences of the age” and in passing claims that the Portuguese—“may they be cursed!”—only made it across the Indian Ocean by getting Ibn Majid drunk. Castanheda, Barros, and Goís all say the pilot was from Gujarat. Barros and Goís say he was a Muslim, but given the explorers’ ongoing confusion about India’s religions, the
Journal’s
line—“We were much pleased
with the Christian pilot whom the king had sent us” (46)—can be taken to imply that he was a Hindu. For the Arabic chronicle, see Sanjay Subrahmanyam,
The Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 124.

212
Indians preferred another device:
The kamal, an Arab invention that the Portuguese developed in the early sixteenth century into the cross-staff.

212
“would never leave his heart”:
Gaspar Correia, in Henry E. J. Stanley, trans. and ed.,
The Three Voyages of Vasco da Gama, and His Viceroyalty
(London: Hakluyt Society, 1869), 143. Colorful as always, Correia paints a picture of “true friendship and sincere love” developing between Gama and the sultan of Malindi, so much that on their departure he “could not endure it, and embarked in his boat and went with them, saying very affectionate things” (141, 144).

Chapter 10: Riding the Monsoon

213
scorching temperatures:
The Great Indian Desert, or Thar Desert, reaches 50 degrees Celsius during summer; the sea temperature remains in the low 20s Celsius. The dates and intensity of the monsoon vary widely from year to year, but the Malabar Coast is always the first area to receive heavy rain. The rest of the air mass flows over the Bay of Bengal, where it picks up more moisture and roars into the eastern Himalayas at speeds of up to twenty-five miles an hour before turning west and drenching the Indo-Gangetic Plain.

214
“As soon as I caught the smell of the vessel”:
“Narrative of the Journey of Abd-er-Razzak,” in R. H. Major, ed.,
India in the Fifteenth Century: Being a Collection of Narratives of Voyages to India in the Century Preceding the Portuguese Discovery of the Cape of Good Hope
(London: Hakluyt Society, 1857), 7–8.

215
Mount Eli:
Also known as Mount Dely and now as Ezhimala; the hill, which stands out prominently into the ocean, is now the construction site of a naval academy and is inaccessible to the public.

215
“saying the
salve
”:
Castanheda, in Robert Kerr,
A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels
(Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1811–1824), 2:344.

215
the Promised Land:
On a recent visit, paradise was tainted with a
liberal scattering of discarded sandals, ointment tubes, and medicine bottles. The surf rolls heavily on the sand, whipped up by treacherous-looking rocks in the shallows. Just behind the coast is an unprepossessing concrete post bearing the inscription:

V
ASCO
-
DA
-G
AMA

LANDED

H
ERE

K
APPKADAVU

IN THE YEAR

1498

Kappad, which the Portuguese called Capua or Capocate, is ten miles north-northwest of Calicut, which is now known as Kozhikode. Strictly speaking, Gama did not land there; he first set foot on Indian soil at Pantalayini Kollam, the Portuguese Pandarani, four miles farther up the coast. Pantalayini Kollam was later supplanted by the nearby town of Quilandy, now known as Koyilandy.

216
“Why,” he and his colleague had asked:
Journal
, 48–49.

216
“They all then joined in humble and hearty thanks”:
Castanheda, in Kerr,
General History
, 2:357.

217
“all the spices, drugs, nutmegs”:
Ibid., 346–47. In the 1330s, when Ibn Battuta arrived in Calicut, it was already a busy port thronged with international merchants. In 1421 and 1431 the Chinese traveler Ma Huan visited Calicut and Cochin with Zheng He’s fleets and described the hubbub of trade in his widely read
Ying-yai Sheng-lan
(“The Overall Survey of the Ocean’s Shores”); an English translation by J. V. G. Mills was published by the Hakluyt Society in 1970.

218
“The officers of the custom-house”:
“Narrative of the Journey of Abd-er-Razzak,” 14.

218
“You mistook one thing for another”:
K. V. Krishna Ayyar,
The Zamorins of Calicut
(Calicut: University of Calicut, 1999), 86.

219
“The city of Calicut is inhabited by Christians”:
Journal
, 49–50.

219
elegant, pagoda-like mosques:
The striking mosques still stand around the Kuttichira pool in central Kozhikode, although the Mishkal mosque, which was built by a Yemeni trader and ship
owner in the fourteenth century, was reconstructed after the Portuguese torched it in 1510. With louvers painted in fresh turquoises and blues, carved floral designs, and multitiered tiled roofs, they bear more than a passing resemblance to the city’s ancient Hindu temples.

219
“commonly very hayrie”:
The Voyage of J. H. van Linschoten to the East Indies
, ed. Arthur Coke Burnell and P. A. Tiele (London: Hakluyt Society, 1885), 1:278. The Indians, Linschoten pruriently added, were “the most leacherous and unchast nation in all the Orient, so that there are verie few women children among them of seven or eight yeares old, that have their maiden-heades.”

220
“We did not”:
Journal
, 51.

222
“This reception was friendly”:
Ibid., 51.

222
“They can keep nothing free”:
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), 241–41v.

224
“the Christians of this country”:
Journal
, 54.

224
“teeth protruding an inch from the mouth”:
Ibid., 55.

224
another ancient church:
Though it would have meant taking a circular route to the palace, this may have been the Tali Temple, the most important Hindu shrine in Calicut and the focal point from which the city grid was laid out in the fourteenth century. A large porch opens into a courtyard that leads to a hall lined with burnished copper; in the inner shrine is a two-foot-high
shivalinga,
the phallic symbol of Shiva, made of gold and encrusted with gems.

224
five thousand people:
See the letter of the Florentine merchant Girolamo Sernigi, quoted in
Journal
, 126. Sernigi also passed on the news, brought home by Gama’s sailors, that eighty years earlier huge fleets of four-masted vessels crewed by “white Christians, who wore their hair long like Germans, and had no beards except around the mouth,” had regularly visited Calicut. “If they were Germans,” he reasoned, “it seems to me that we should have had some notice about them” (131). They were, in fact, Chinese. Memories of Zheng He’s treasure fleets, which had paid their last visit sixty-seven years before Gama arrived, were clearly still alive in Calicut; the Indians who gave the Portuguese such a rapturous welcome may at first have thought the Chinese had returned.

225
“more than is shown in Spain to a king”:
Journal
, 55.

225
“They little think in Portugal”:
Castanheda, in Kerr,
General History
, 2:364.

225
Inside was a vast, leafy courtyard:
As well as the
Journal
and the chronicles, my description of the palace and of Calicut in general draws on the accounts of earlier and later travelers including Abd al-Razzaq, Duarte Barbosa, François Pyrard, Ludovico de Varthema, and Pietro della Valle; the last gives a particularly full picture of the palace, complete with diagrams. The site of the palace is now a public park called Mananchira Square; the Zamorins’ vast bathing tanks can still be seen.