Conquerors: How Portugal Seized the Indian Ocean and Forged the First Global Empire

by Roger Crowley

For the first time they met ‘Christians’, ‘who showed them a paper, an object of their adoration, on which was a sketch of the Holy Ghost’. It was to prove one of the deepest, almost comical, early misconceptions of the Portuguese that Hindus, of whom they apparently had no knowledge, with their own images of gods, were Christians of a deviant sect. The Portuguese had come into the Indian Ocean expecting to find estranged Christians; these men with their unfamiliar anthropomorphic images neatly fitted a fixed preconception.

Meanwhile the Portuguese were heartened to hear that four ships of Indian Christians had arrived recently in Malindi, and in due course these ‘Christians’ came aboard. When they were shown a picture of Christ on the cross and his mother, ‘they prostrated themselves, and as long as we were there they came to say their prayers in front of it, bringing offerings of cloves, pepper, and other things’. Their ships evidently possessed cannon and gunpowder; they lit up the night sky with a spectacular display of rockets and bombards in honour of their co-religionists; their shouts of ‘Christ! Christ!’ split the air, and they warned Gama, via an exchange in imperfect Arabic, neither to go ashore nor to trust Muslims. They were unlike any Christians the Portuguese had ever seen. ‘These Indians are tawny men,’ he noted in his diary. ‘They wear but little clothing and have long beards and long hair, which they braid. They told us that they ate no beef.’ In the midst of this cultural confusion it is likely that these long-hoped-for co-religionists were actually shouting ‘Krishna! Krishna!’

The sultan despatched a ‘Christian’ who was willing to steer the expedition across the ocean to their desired destination. He was more likely a Gujarati Muslim, possessed of a chart of the western Indian coast and familiar with quadrants for taking astronomical observations. Five hundred years later Arab dhow captains would still be cursing this Muslim pilot who first let the Franks, the Europeans whom they called the Ferengi, into the secrets of the ocean’s navigation.

This first blurred view of India stands as a significant moment in world history. Gama had ended the isolation of Europe. The Atlantic was no longer a barrier, it had become a highway to link up the hemispheres. This was a signal moment in the long process of global convergence, yet there is no sense of any larger achievement in the resolutely factual anonymous journal, and only muted hints in slightly later Portuguese accounts: Vasco da Gama paid off the pilot handsomely, called the crew to prayers and gave ‘thanks to God, who had safely conducted them to the long-wished-for place of his destination’.

Gama sent one of his convicts ashore with the visitors, a man called João Nunes, a converted Jew, destined to make the most famous landfall in Portuguese history. The crowd on the beach took him for a Muslim and led him to two Tunisian merchants, who spoke some Castilian and Genoese. The encounter was one of mutual astonishment. Nunes found himself addressed in a language of his own continent: ‘The Devil take you! What brought you here?’

The meeting with the friendly Muslims was probably as deeply disorienting as anything that was about to follow. It was as if the Portuguese were looking at their own world down the wrong end of a telescope. It was Europe that was ignorant and isolated, not this sea into which they had stumbled.

When asked to drink from the jug without touching it with their lips, ‘some poured the water into their throats and fell a coughing, while others poured it beside upon their faces and clothes, which much amused the king’.

Same way the Bangladeshis drink today. I tried - not so easy.

It was the end of a long and confusing day of overwhelming impressions: the massed crowds, the lack of breathing space, the unfamiliar rituals, the monsoon rain stirring rich smells.

The Portuguese came to the Indian coast with their visors lowered. Hardened by decades of holy war in North Africa, their default strategies were suspicion, aggressive hostage taking, the half-drawn sword and a simple binary choice between Christian and Muslim which seemed genuinely not to have factored into calculation the existence of Hinduism.

The Venetian’s story became increasingly surprising as the voyage went on. He was a Polish Jew, a victim of the pogroms of central Europe, whose wanderings had led him through successive identities. During the voyage he acquired another: by the time he reached Portugal he had been baptised a Christian in the name of Gaspar da Gama.

The terrible, slow-motion fate of the Miri shocked and puzzled many later Portuguese commentators; by Indian historians, particularly, it has been taken as signalling the start of ship-borne western imperialism. It was the first violent collision between two self-contained worlds whose terms of reference were mutually inexplicable.

According to the laws of the Hindu military caste, the two hundred survivors swore themselves to ritual death. They shaved off all their hair and advanced towards Calicut, killing everyone they met until they had been hacked down to the last man.

Pereira had been one of the cosmographers tasked with hammering out the treaty of Tordesillas in 1494; a man who may have secretly been to Brazil before it was officially discovered; who produced the first written account of the chimpanzee’s ability to use tools; who calculated the degree of the meridian arc to a level of accuracy unrivalled at the time; who recorded the tides of the Indian Ocean and was able to put this knowledge to good use; a man whom the epic poet Camões later came to laud as the Portuguese Achilles – ‘with a pen in one hand, a sword in the other’.

Vasco da Gama’s first voyage had covered the capital investment sixty times over. It was calculated that the crown was making a million cruzados a year after costs – a vast sum – and the smell of spices on the quays of Lisbon attracted avid recruits to the boats. Many had nothing to lose. Portugal was poor in natural resources, peripheral to the political and economic hubs of Europe; the lure of the East was irresistible.

The kings of Portugal were royal merchant capitalists, sucking in large monopolistic profits.

Much of the commercial and technological infrastructure was purchased from abroad. Portuguese sailing skills were unrivalled but the country lacked an entrepreneurial middle class. As well as cannon founders and gunners, it required knowledgeable resident agents in the Indies to buy and sell, and in Lisbon and across Europe it needed distributors, retailers, bankers and investors with business acumen. It attracted an influx of human capital from Florence, Genoa, Bologna, Antwerp, Nuremberg and Bruges.

In the spring of 1504 the Calicut committee decided to renew their secret operations to undermine Portugal’s position. The Venetians commissioned two agents: Leonardo da Ca’Masser was sent to Portugal to investigate further the state of its spice trade. He was to pose as a merchant, to report back in code, and to garner as much information as he could on the whole operation.

The Calicut committee, in conclave within the doge’s palace, entertained wilder schemes. Could the sultan be persuaded to dig a canal at Suez which might lower the transport costs to Europe?

Even a few women smuggled themselves aboard disguised as men; their names appear in the registers soon after: Isabella Pereira, Lianor, Branda and Ines Rodrigues.

India used men up – the climate, the corruption, the distance from home, the hostility of surrounding enemies

Charges were laid against Albuquerque that he was mentally and morally unfit to govern. ‘In my opinion’, one of his enemies testified, ‘India is now in greater peril from Afonso de Albuquerque than ever from the Turks!’ Men threatened to leave India rather than serve under him; an indictment was got up against him for misgovernance. In September Almeida ordered him out of Cochin; the fortress elephant demolished his house and the ship carrying him to Cannanore was so worm-eaten that Albuquerque thought they were trying to kill him.

As for Albuquerque, he would never fully regain the use of his left arm, but he honoured the miracle of his survival. The bullet which had felled him was retrieved by a servant and sent with a sum of money to the shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe in the Algarve; the bullet was laid before her image and the money paid for a lamp that ‘might burn forever’ there.

Albuquerque had innovative ideas for securing this new empire. Aware of how few the Portuguese were, of their high mortality rate and their lack of women, he immediately set about promoting a mixed marriage policy, encouraging the union of the Portuguese rank and file – soldiers, masons, carpenters – with local women. These were generally low-caste Hindus, who were baptised and granted dowries. The married men, known as casados, were also given financial incentives for entering into binding ties. Within two months of the reconquest of Goa he had arranged two hundred such marriages. This policy was pragmatic in its attempt to create a local Christianised population loyal to Portugal, but Albuquerque also showed some enlightened concern for the general welfare of women in Goa, attempting to outlaw suttee and granting them property rights. His marriage policy, in the face of considerable opposition from scandalised clergy and government officials, set in motion the creation of a durable Indo-Portuguese society.

They called it the Eye of the Sun. It was the most cosmopolitan city on earth, where, according to Pires, eighty-four languages could be heard; he listed a whole alphabet of the trading peoples beyond Europe – men from Cairo, Ormuz, Goa, Cambodia, Timor, Ceylon, Java, China, Brunei. Even the parrots were said to be multilingual. It traded the woollen cloth, glass and iron work of Venice, the opium and perfumes of Arabia, the pearls of the Persian Gulf, the porcelain of China, the nutmeg of the Bandas, the cloth of Bengal and the spices of the Moluccas. Larger than Lisbon, it had a population hardly smaller than Venice, somewhere over a hundred thousand people.

The Portuguese were always aware of how few they were; many of their early contests were against vastly unequal numbers. They quickly abandoned the notion of occupying large areas of territory. Instead they evolved as a mantra the concept of flexible sea power tied to the occupation of defendable coastal forts and a network of bases.

He knew exactly what the king wanted: ‘to destroy the trade of Mecca, Jeddah and Cairo’, and that this involved ‘taking the main centres of this trade from the Muslims’.

Yet by pursuing this bumpy road, the Portuguese offered a free ride to other bloodthirsty pretenders who were quick to take advantage of the nee world order.

Machado had a Muslim wife and two children, whom he had secretly baptised as Christians. When the moment came to slip away, he could only take his wife; rather than leave his children in the infidel faith, he drowned them, that they might go directly to heaven.

Along the Malabar coast they named a local fish afonso-de-albuquerque, and used it in magic spells. His Bengali enemies cursed him as the Great Dog of India.

It was probably at the same time that he sent two rare animals to Manuel, one a white elephant, a gift from the king of Cochin, the second an equally rare white rhino from the sultan of Cambay – the first live rhinoceros seen in Europe since the time of the Romans. The animals caused a sensation in Lisbon. The elephant was paraded through the streets and a fight arranged between the two animals in a specially built enclosure, in the presence of the king. The elephant, however, taking the measure of his opponent, fled in terror.

The elephant, led by his mahout, carried a silver castle on his back with rich presents for the pope, who christened him Hanno, after Hannibal’s elephants in Italy.

Even less fortunate was Manuel’s follow-up gift, the rhinoceros, despatched from Lisbon in a green velvet collar. The ship was wrecked off the coast of Genoa in 1515. The chained animal drowned and was washed up on the seashore. Its hide was recovered, returned to Lisbon and stuffed. Albrecht Dürer saw a letter describing the creature, and possibly a sketch. He produced his famous print without ever having set eyes on the animal.

Offshore at the Restelo beach Manuel ordered the construction of a defensive fort, the tower of Belém, a fantasy construction as much as a military bastion, standing alone in the sea and emblazoned with these decorative devices. Among the hemispherical watchtowers, like ribbed pineapples girded by ropes, and battlements bearing the shields of the Order of Christ, the stone carvers modelled the head of the white rhinoceros, lifting its horned snout out to sea – image of marvel and surprise at what the Portuguese had done.

Dias was either a Muslim who had been converted to Christianity or a Portuguese who had been captured and held by the Moroccans on Gibraltar for a long time – the sources are unclear. At any rate he spoke good Arabic and had an excellent knowledge of Islamic rituals, prayers and Koranic verses. He offered to be landed on the desert shores of Arabia and travel by way of Jeddah, Mecca and Suez to Cairo, pick up a Venetian ship at Alexandria, then return to Portugal with information for the king. His alibi was to be that of a runaway slave. To this end a shackle was put on his leg and he was ferried to the mainland in a canoe, with gemstones sewn into his clothing to sell as he went along. He made the journey back unscathed and reported to Manuel. Dias subsequently returned to India and apparently had a long further career spying in the Red Sea. Correia, who knew him, said that ‘he died very poor’.

A curtain was slowly drawn aside to reveal a man seated above them on a rich throne, his face concealed by a blue cloth suspended from invisible cords. And as the bell sounded, the final covering was briefly lowered to allow a tantalising glimpse of the mythic figure that had provided much of the motivation for the Portuguese maritime adventure: the Christian king of Ethiopia, Dawitt II, the man they called Prester John – who they believed would help fulfil Manuel’s crusading dreams.

the Malaysian government has constructed a replica of the Frol de la Mar as an object lesson. At its entrance a notice reads: ‘The ship’s cargo consisted of precious treasures of the country plundered by the colonialists after they had conquered Malacca in 1511. But thanks to God the vessel was shipwrecked on 26 January 1512 in the straits of Malacca on its voyage to Europe.’

The Portuguese with their bronze cannon and capable fleets both ruptured a self-sufficient system and joined up the world. They came as harbingers of globalisation and the scientific age of discovery. Their explorers, missionaries, merchants and soldiers fanned far across the world. They were in Nagasaki and Macau, in the uplands of Ethiopia and the mountains of Bhutan. They trudged across the Tibetan plateau and battled upstream the length of the Amazon. As they went, they mapped, they learned languages and they described, with a ‘pen in one hand, a sword in the other’.

Luís Vaz de Camões, whose epic poem The Lusiads created a founding mythology for the heroism of exploration, exemplified in person the sometimes desperate qualities of their adventure. He was the most widely travelled poet of the Renaissance; a man who lost an eye in Morocco, who was exiled to the East for a sword fight, who was destitute in Goa and shipwrecked in the Mekong Delta – he swam ashore clutching his manuscript above his head while his Chinese lover drowned. ‘Had there been more of the world,’ Camões wrote of the Portuguese explorers, they ‘would have discovered it’.