The Last Crusade: The Epic Voyages of Vasco Da Gama (70 page)

275
“This is more important to the Venetian State”:
Quoted in Weinstein,
Ambassador from Venice
, 29–30.

277
“returning many thanks to Our Lord”:
Letter of Manuel I to the Cardinal Protector, dated August 28, 1499, quoted in
Journal
, 115.

277
“Most high and excellent Prince and Princess”:
Ibid., 113–114.

279
the old prophecies:
Columbus staked his place in the eschatological scheme that would lead to the end of the world in his
Book of Prophecies
; he started work on it in 1501 and was still revising it in the year before his death.

279
the settlers he had promised untold riches:
Columbus turned their argument back on them: the colonists, he complained, had come “in the belief that the gold and spices could be gathered in by the shovelful, and they did not reflect that, though there was gold, it would be buried in mines, and the spices would be on the treetops, and that the gold would have to be mined and the spices harvested and cured.” Quoted in Felipe Fernández-Armesto,
Columbus
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 134.

279
rub his in-laws’ noses in it:
At the time Manuel was in fact briefly unmarried to one of the Catholic Monarchs’ daughters. Isabella had died in 1498; in 1501 Manuel married her younger sister Maria, who bore him his son and heir, John III.

280
“very fully the sovereignty and dominion”:
Quoted in
Journal
, 115–16. Manuel also wrote to the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I.

280
“from the damage to the Infidels that is expected”:
Grant letter of January 1500 (?), quoted in Subrahmanyam,
Career and Legend
, 171.

280
“for the king has decreed the death penalty”:
Angelo Trevisan, secretary to Domenico Pisani, to the chronicler Domenico Malipiero; quoted in Henry H. Hart,
Sea Road to the Indies
(London: William Hodge, 1952), 28. Guido Detti made a similar point: Manuel, he said, had ordered Gama and his men to hand over their navigational charts on pain of death and the confiscation of their goods, from fear that their route and intelligence would be leaked to
foreign powers. “But I believe that, whatever they do, everyone will know, and other ships will start to go there,” he added. See Teyssier and Valentin,
Voyages de Vasco de Gama
, 188.

280
“a barbarous orchestra of trumpets”:
Quoted in Hart,
Sea Road to the Indies
, 203.

281
“bigger than Lisbon”:
Letter of Girolamo Sernigi, n.d. [July 1499], quoted in
Journal
, 125, 134–35. Guido Detti echoed the news; the people of Calicut, he explained, “are not strictly speaking Christians, because they baptize themselves once every three years as a means of confession and purifying their sins. But they recognize the existence of Christ and Our Lady. They have churches equipped with bells, where there are only two basins, one for holy water and the other for balm, without any other sacrament, without priests or monks of any kind.” The notion that Hinduism was a variant of Christianity, or at least had some kinship with it, proved hard to shake. “The whole of Malabar believes, as we do, in the Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Ghost, three in one, the only true God. From Cambay to Bengal all the people hold this,” wrote Tomé Pires, an apothecary to the Portuguese royal family who was posted to India as “factor of drugs” and wrote a comprensive survey of Asia between 1512 and 1515. By 1552, João de Barros was still referring to the Hindu threefold god of Brahma with Vishnu and Siva as a Brahman trinity, though he noted that it was quite different from the Christian trinity. See Teyssier and Valentin,
Voyages de Vasco de Gama
, 183;
The Suma Oriental of Tomé Pires
, trans. and ed. Armando Cortesão (London: Hakluyt Society, 1944), 1:66.

282
“are in reality temples of idolaters”:
Second letter of Sernigi, n.d. [1499], quoted in
Journal
, 138.

282
Gaspar had been Jewish:
Ibid., 137. Sernigi says Gaspar was born in Alexandria, as does Manuel in his letter to the Cardinal Protector. Barros adds that his parents had fled from Poznan in Poland when the Jews were banished in 1450. Castanheda says he had a Jewish wife; he also had a son, who was later christened Balthasar.

282
a fantastical picture of India’s religions:
Separate statistics for each region of India and other “kingdoms on the coast to the south of Calecut,” some of which are in fact in Southeast Asia, are appended to the
Journal
, 96–102.

283
“Before he attacked the Moors”:
Barros’s summary is cited in Henry E. J. Stanley, trans. and ed.,
The Three Voyages of Vasco da Gama, and His Viceroyalty
(London: Hakluyt Society, 1869), 186–87.

283
“For one should truly believe that God”:
Castanheda, quoted in Subrahmanyam,
Career and Legend
, 162.

286
“So great was the consternation”:
Castanheda, in Robert Kerr,
A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels
(Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1811–1824), 2:418.

288
headed into the North Atlantic:
The commander was Gaspar Corte-Real. In 1500 he reportedly reached Greenland and Newfoundland, where John Cabot, an Italian sailing under an English flag, may have already landed in 1497. The next year Corte-Real set out again and may have seen Chesapeake Bay and Nova Scotia, but he and his ship were lost; so, when he sailed to find him the following year, was his brother Miguel.

289
There was only one man for the job:
In fact, the command was first offered to Cabral, who still had his supporters at court. Cabral’s detractors, notably Gama’s maternal uncle Vicente Sodré, denounced Cabral as incompetent and successfully maneuvered against him. The problem was solved when Gama was given the right for life to assume command of any India-bound fleet.

289
the late summer of 1499:
The sources disagree over the date of Gama’s return. Barros, Goís, and Resende give the date as August 29, Castanheda as September 8, and other sources as September 18. Possibly, as Barros suggests, Gama spent his first days on home soil in seclusion before he publicly entered the city.

289
“the king honored him”:
Castanheda, in Kerr,
General History
, 2:394.

289
an elaborate grant letter:
Quoted in
Journal
, 230–32. The letter has traditionally been dated to January 10, 1502, but was likely issued in January 1500; see Subrahmanyam,
Career and Legend
, 169–70.

290
“with all the honors, prerogatives, liberties”:
Subrahmanyam,
Career and Legend
, 172.

291
“First, every one attended a sumptuous Mass”:
Ibid., 194–95.

292
the shiny black gondola:
The impressively gaudy vessel can still be seen in Lisbon’s Museu da Marinha.

293
“to find rapid and secret remedies”:
Quoted in Weinstein,
Ambassador from Venice
, 77–78.

Chapter 14: The Admiral of India

297
Vasco da Gama sailed out of Lisbon:
Several eyewitness accounts of Gama’s second voyage have survived. Much the fullest is by Tomé Lopes, a Portuguese clerk who sailed on a ship, financed by Rui Mendes de Brito and captained by Giovanni Buonagrazia, which left Lisbon in April 1502 as part of the fleet under the command of Estêvão da Gama. Lopes’s narrative is known only in an Italian translation that was sent to Florence and was published in the 1550s by Giovanni Battista Ramusio; see “Navigazione verso le Indie orientali scritta per Tomé Lopez,” in Ramusio,
Navigazioni e viaggi
, ed. Marica Milanesi (Turin: Einaudi, 1978–1988), 1:687–738. A second account was written in Portuguese by a sailor with Gama’s main fleet; it is particularly informative on the first leg of that fleet’s voyage, but then becomes more piecemeal. The manuscript is in the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek in Vienna and is reprinted in Leonor Freire Costa, ed., “Relação anónima da segunda viagem de Vasco da Gama à Índia,” in
Cidadania e história: Em homenagem a Jaime Cortesão
(Lisbon: Livraria Sá da Costa Editora, 1985), 141–99. A third source is a pair of letters written by an Italian factor named Matteo da Bergamo, whose ship was part of Estevão da Gama’s fleet; though they vary in length and detail, both are dated Mozambique, April 18, 1503, and were sent, by different ships for safety, to his employer, a Cremonese named Gianfranco Affaitadi, who ran a merchant business in Lisbon. Two copies are in the Biblioteca Marciana in Venice; both versions, in French translation, are in Paul Teyssier and Paul Valentin, trans. and eds.,
Voyages de Vasco de Gama: Relations des expeditions de 1497–1499 et 1502–3
, 2nd ed. (Paris: Chandeigne, 1998), 319–40. The other surviving accounts are shorter but are valuable for recounting the experiences of ordinary seamen, especially those who were wide-eyed newcomers to the ways of Africa and India. The first, which was already known by 1504, is by a Fleming who sailed with the main fleet on the
Leitoa Nova
. A facsimile of the original with English translation was published as
Calcoen: A Dutch Narrative of the Second Voyage of Vasco da Gama to Calicut
, trans. J. P. Berjeau (London: B. M. Pickering, 1874). The second, which follows the Portuguese account in the Vienna manuscript, is in German; the writer was also with Gama’s fleet, but the surviving text is incomplete and often confused and is likely a copy of a report put together from notes or a diary on the fleet’s return. It was first published along with the Portuguese manuscript in Christine von Rohr, ed.,
Neue quellen zur zweiten Indienfahrt Vasco da Gamas
(Leipzig: K. F. Koehler, 1939). A variant, generally abridged version of this account, which probably belonged to a commercial agent named Lazarus Nuremberger, who was active in Lisbon and Seville, was found in the 1960s in the Lyceum Library, Bratislava (now in the Central Library of the Slovak Academy of Sciences), and is published, with English translation, together with other manuscript fragments on the early voyages of discovery, in Miloslav Krása, Josef Poli[š]enskyâ, and Peter Ratko[š], eds.,
European Expansion (1494–1519): The Voyages of Discovery in the Bratislava Manuscript Lyc. 515/8 (Codex Bratislavensis)
(Prague: Charles University, 1986). The different accounts are inconsistent or contradictory in many details, but as before I have steered clear of long-winded explanations of my deductions. Except where English versions are noted above, translations are my own.

298
“The people there were stark naked”:
Calcoen
, 22.

299
“rain, hail, snow, thunder and lightning”:
Ibid., 23.

299
“a chill such as in Germany cannot occur”:
Krása, Poli[š]enskyâ, and Ratko[š],
European Expansion
, 78.

300
the famed gold-trading town of Sofala:
Though the Christian beliefs about Sofala were mere fantasies, Muslim writers described it as an important source of gold as early as the tenth century. The sands have shifted dramatically since Gama’s arrival, and the once-thriving port is long lost to the sea. The author of
Calcoen
dramatically claims that its inhabitants refused to trade with the Portuguese out of fear that they might sail up the river and find their way into the realm of Prester John, which was located inland and was otherwise entirely enclosed by walls. The sultan of Sofala, he adds, was at war with Prester John’s people; from some who had been taken as slaves, the Portuguese learned that their land was awash with silver,
gold, and precious stones. Shipboard gossip was no doubt behind the rumors.

302
the most powerful sultans in East Africa:
Kilwa’s ruins are still impressive, though the island can now only be reached by wading through the shallows. For its fascinating history, see H. Neville Chittick,
Kilwa: An Islamic Trading City on the East African Coast
(Nairobi: British Institute in Eastern Africa, 1974). For a near-contemporary view, see Hans Mayr, “Account of the Voyage of D. Francisco de Almeida, Viceroy of India, along the East Coast of Africa,” in Malyn Newitt, ed.,
East Africa
(Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2002).

303
“Their bodies are well shaped”:
Hans Mayr, in Newitt,
East Africa
, 14.

304
The emir handed over three dignitaries:
According to Castanheda and Correia, who for once more or less agree, the emir handed over his archenemy as a hostage and refused to pay the tribute, in the hope that Gama would kill him; in the end the hostage came up with the money himself. When the deal was done, Gama graciously asked his new vassal if he had any enemies he could help him with; the emir, trying to salvage something from the situation, told him they greatly feared Christians in Mombasa—his main rival—and would no doubt shell out a handsome tribute if asked.

305
“on account of which I armed myself”:
Letter dated Quiloa [Kilwa], July 20, 1502, Biblioteca Nacional de Lisboa, Reservados, Mss. 244, No. 2, quoted in Sanjay Subrahmanyam,
The Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 202.

305
Gama had warned in his letter:
“If before you enter this port, this letter is handed to you outside, do not enter it, because this port is difficult to exit from, but instead go on ahead, and follow everything that has been said above,” he wrote.