The Last Crusade: The Epic Voyages of Vasco Da Gama (46 page)

T
HAT EVENING
,
A
S
UNDAY
, the Europeans set their foresails and lined up fifteen ships with their prows jutting at the shore; only the four largest stayed a little back. The Zamorin, they could see, had been expecting them. He had improvised a stockade, by transplanting rows of palm trees near the water’s edge, to obstruct their landings and deflect their fire.

As the gunners shifted the large pieces of artillery to the foredecks, they saw hundreds of lanterns flicker to life like fallen stars on the shore. By their light, men began to crawl around, digging hollows in the beach. Then they hauled over iron cannon and installed them in the sandy emplacements, with the barrels poking out over the top.

When morning came, Gama ordered the front line of ships to anchor as close as possible to the waterfront. As the men took to their battle stations, ranks of defenders emerged from the cover of the palms. There were far more of them than anyone had imagined at night.

Noon on November 1, the appointed day, passed with no reply.

The admiral made his move. On his command, boats went around the fleet distributing the Muslim captives who had been seized over the previous days. Two or three were dropped off at each ship, along with a message to look out for a signal flag on the topmast of the
Leitoa
.

One hour after midday the flag was run up. On each ship the prisoners’ necks were placed in nooses and the ends of the ropes were thrown over the yards. The struggling men were hoisted to the top and were hung in full sight of the city. Tomé Lopes saw thirty-four bodies jerking amid the rigging; Matteo da Bergamo counted thirty-eight.

On the shore the swelling crowd watched in horror. Gama’s flagship and a caravel each fired a cannonball into their midst, sending them diving for the ground. The rest of the ships opened fire and the Indians fled, throwing themselves into hollows as the stone balls thudded around them and crawling off the beach on their stomachs. The Europeans shouted mocking taunts as they ran away. The men in the sand bunkers fired back, but they only had a few old bombards, their aim was wide of the mark, and they took precious minutes to reload. The ships turned their fire on them, and one by one they surfaced and ran to the town. Replacements inched forward on all fours, but within an hour the beach was deserted.

The bombardment of the city started in earnest. Cannonballs thundered overhead and smashed into the earth walls and thatch roofs of the houses near the shore. Decapitated palm trees splintered, groaned, and toppled. Many men, women, and children were killed, and thousands fled.

With dusk gathering, Gama ratcheted up the terror. As his orders were shouted from ship to ship, the corpses were cut down from the rigging. Their heads, hands, and feet were hacked off, and the body parts were sent to the flagship. Gama had them piled in one of the captured boats. The boat was tied to a ship’s skiff, and a solitary sailor towed it out and left it to float on the tide to the shore.

An arrow stuck out from the bloody heap, and tied to its shaft was a letter from the admiral. In Malayalam, Gama advised the Zamorin to take a good look at the punishment he had meted out to men who had not even been party to the attack on the Portuguese factory—men who were not even residents of the city but merely their cousins. A far more cruel death, he avowed, awaited the murderers. The price of the Christians’ friendship, he added, had risen: now the Zamorin would have to reimburse them not only for the goods he had plundered, but also for the powder and ammunition they had expended in bombarding him to his senses.

The Portuguese tossed the dismembered trunks of the hung men overboard to wash up on the shore with the incoming tide.

As the boat touched the seafront, a few towns people approached and gaped at its ghastly cargo. The Europeans could clearly see the scene in the bright moonlight, and Gama ordered his men not to shoot. It was late at night, but soon large crowds came down to the shore. They turned away in disgust, bewildered and frightened, and trudged back to their homes, some with their relatives’ heads cradled in their arms. The bereaved held a vigil, with no candles or lanterns to light their grief in case the Portuguese tried to set their houses on fire. Until the early hours the dirges and lamentations
carried on the breeze to the Portuguese fleet, waking the sailors and plaguing their dreams.

Having given the Zamorin the night to ponder, Vasco da Gama woke early to deliver the coup de grâce. As the new day dawned, he ordered the gunners to prime the biggest artillery. The simple houses near the shore had already been pulverized, and now the cannonballs smashed into the grand mansions on the higher ground behind. Then, no doubt with particular relish, Gama told his men to aim for the Zamorin’s palace. As the hours passed, Tomé Lopes counted more than four hundred cannonballs exploding from the bombards on eighteen ships.

At noon Gama ordered a cease-fire and waited for the Zamorin to surrender. The front line of ships pulled back, but there was no answer from the shore.

The admiral emptied a captured sambuk of its barrels of honey and nuts and distributed the delicacies among the ships. Then he had it anchored near the shore and set on fire. As the Europeans began eating dinner and the warning beacon blazed away, a dozen boats put out from the beach to cut the sambuk’s cable and tow it off. Gama’s men pushed aside their trenchers, climbed into their boats, and rowed over at high speed, chasing the Indians as they headed back to the shore. As they drew near a menacing crowd gathered at the water’s edge. They thought better of getting any closer and retreated to the fleet.

By now darkness had fallen. The sambuk was still smoldering away, and Gama decided he had done enough. Realistically, there was little else he could do. As long as he kept to the water, he had the advantage of massively superior firepower and unseasoned enemies. The famously fierce Nair soldiers were forbidden on religious grounds from eating at sea, and they rarely set foot on board a ship. Their Muslim counterparts labored under no such proscription, but they were traders and sailors, not warriors. In hand-to-hand combat on land, though, the Nairs would have vastly outmatched Gama’s men. The Admiral of India had escalated the standoff with
the Zamorin of Calicut into a full-blown war, but like any attacking force that balks at putting boots on the ground, he could only hope that he had applied enough pressure to make the enemy collapse from within.

On November 3, Gama gave the order to depart the half-ruined city. He left Vicente Sodré in command of six ships and a caravel to blockade the harbor and sailed on down the coast to Cochin.

C
OCHIN WAS AN
upstart among the port cities of the Malabar Coast. It was only a century and a half old, and it had been created not by man but by monsoon. Locals still talked of the violent monsoon season of 1341, when the backwaters near the ancient port of Muchiri—a prosperous place well known to the Romans, and to Jews fleeing the Roman destruction of Jerusalem—radically shifted and re-formed into a watery new riddle of islands and lakes. The old harbor had silted up, and a nearby prince had taken advantage of the new landscape to redirect its traffic to his capital.

The city of Cochin was built on a thumb of land at the end of a straggling seaboard peninsula. The thumb was opposed to the north by three heavily wooded fingers; a fourth curled toward the mainland. Vypeen Island, the westernmost finger, nearly brushed the tip of the city, leaving a narrow opening into a skein of calm lagoons and waterways fed by seven major rivers. The harbor was by far the finest on the Malabar Coast, and it had quickly begun to thrive. Cochin’s signature sight—great spidery fishing nets, raised and lowered from the shore on huge wooden pivots—was a legacy of decades of Chinese visitors, and a large community of Jewish merchants had their own quarter and their own prince.

The royal family nursed grand ambitions to outdo its richer and older neighbors, and it was particularly keen on trumping the supercilious Zamorin of Calicut. As the paramount rulers on the coast, the Zamorins had long reserved the right to turn up in Cochin and imperiously pass judgment on whether its kings were fit
to serve. The sudden arrival of the Portuguese was too good an opportunity to miss, and Unni Goda Varma, the Cochin raja, had greeted the strangers with open arms. If the Admiral of India was welcome anywhere, it should have been in Cochin.

The fleet sailed into sight on November 7 and a welcoming committee, including the two factors whom Cabral had left behind, immediately hailed the admiral. The city’s Muslim merchants had also been expecting the Europeans. Letters had already reached them from their cousins in Calicut, detailing the death and destruction inflicted on them and appealing for help to lift the blockade. The Christians, they bitterly complained, had even stopped them from fishing and they were on the verge of starvation. The factors told Gama to count on a hostile reception.

There was more news, both good and bad. The factors had also caught wind of a massive armada that had been gathering to make war on the Christians. The Zamorin had reportedly rented and requisitioned more than two hundred ships, and they had sailed out in search of the Portuguese. One of the biggest vessels had crashed into the coast at Cochin, and its crew had revealed that the rest of the vast fleet had been lost in a terrible storm. The king, the factors reported with satisfaction, had seized all the men and had not returned a bean to the Zamorin. As always when the weather was on their side and against their enemies, the Portuguese deduced that the hand of God had worked another miracle and gave thanks for their deliverance.

The same day one of the king’s sons arrived and saluted the admiral. He had come, he explained, especially to thank him for leaving ships belonging to Cochin unharmed as he burned and pillaged his way along the coast. He passed on his royal father’s appreciation for the favor that had been shown to his people out of respect for him; in return, he promised, his father would personally make the most advantageous arrangements to load their ships with spices.

Gama slowly began to unbend. His men set about repairing the ships and clearing space for the bumper cargo they expected. Three
days after their arrival the king sent word that it was an auspicious day to start loading, and hillocks of pepper began to pile up on the docks. The prices, though, had yet to be fixed, and the merchants soon went on strike. After four days Gama was forced to ask the king for a meeting. His holds were still empty, and he was running out of places to do business.

The meeting was arranged for the fourteenth, a week after the fleet’s arrival. The admiral set out in a caravel with the usual trumpets, bombards, and standards, and he and his captains sailed into the mouth of the harbor. The king came down to the shore in his palanquin, accompanied by six war elephants and—so claimed a Portuguese sailor—ten thousand men. With his servants fanning him and his ushers holding back the crowds with maces, he drew to a halt. The royal trumpeters lifted their instruments and tooted a tune, and a few cannon fired a salute. The Portuguese responded with their own fanfare and a great blast of their guns. Envoys shuttled back and forth to finalize the diplomatic niceties, but just as the meeting was about to go ahead, the wind whipped up, rumbles of thunder burst the air, and the inky heavens opened. The king sent word that it was a bad omen, and the meeting was rescheduled for two days later.

When Gama returned, the raja was already out in the harbor, seated on a large raft made from four sambuks lashed together and covered with planks. Tomé Lopes noted that the crowds had lost interest, or had not been summoned, and there were only four or five guards with him.

As soon as the admiral’s caravel drew alongside, the king came beamingly on board. In a replay of the scene at Cannanore, Gama gave him—again, with his own hands—more silver basins, jugs, and saltcellars gilded to look like solid gold, together with a throne embellished with silver, a hundred cruzados, a piece of velvet, and two rich brocade cushions. The raja presented the admiral and his officers with more jewels. After a long, cheerful conversation, he agreed to Gama’s conditions and signed off on his schedule of
prices, and the admiral accompanied his floating platform back to the palace jetty.

The merchants grumbled about the prices, but sellers clustered on the shore. The Portuguese began to fill their holds day and night with the exotica of the East: pepper, ginger, cardamom, myrobalans, canafistula, zerumba, zedoary, wild cinnamon, cloves, benzoin, and alum.

Soon Vicente Sodré sailed into view with three of the ships that had stayed at Calicut. It turned out they had had a narrow escape. The Zamorin had secretly prepared another armed fleet of twenty large sambuks to attack them. When it was ready, a flotilla of fishing boats had lured the Christians into the mouth of the river that Gama had crossed in great state on his first visit. The fleet was lying in wait among the palm trees, and the Indians quickly surrounded the European boats on every side, unloosing volleys of arrows. The trapped and wounded men panicked, and they were saved only when a gunner tried to shoot one of the fishing boats, aimed too high, and sent a cannonball smashing down onto the sambuk carrying the captain of the fleet. As it capsized, the Indians went to the rescue, and the Portuguese had enough time to extricate themselves.

With Sodré was an envoy from Cannanore who had arrived in Calicut and had asked to be taken to the admiral. His king, he told Gama, had sent him to say that he would match the prices the Europeans had been given anywhere else, if necessary by making up the difference out of his own pocket; moreover, he would buy any goods they had for sale at the price they set.

Gama dispatched Sodré to check out the story and load the king’s ships. His high-stakes gamble had paid off in the nick of time: instead of letting the European merchants compete to buy spices, he had made the Malabar kings compete for their business. Still, Matteo da Bergamo and his fellow traders continued to grumble about conditions in Cochin. The consignments of pepper had begun to run out, and the European merchandise was as impossible as ever
to shift. The city’s merchants were always asking for more money or finding another reason to stop loading, and more than once they rebelled against the king’s orders and refused to trade at all. Several times Gama was forced to pull out his factors and rant to the raja about the dastardly behavior of the Muslims: one day he crept up to his palace and fired off his bombards, in the guise of a fete, while the king pretended to be entertained on his terrace. Nothing was enough for Matteo da Bergamo and his profit-hungry colleagues. “We kept asking ourselves,” the Italian noted, “whether we would be able to load our ships even half full on this voyage.” They were no more enthused by the offer from Cannanore. “The admiral sent three royal ships,” he added, “because no one among us wanted to go there, since from what we had learned they had too little pepper and the cinnamon was of bad quality.”