Calicut’s fate was just a taste of things to come. In the years that followed, similar treatment was revisited on the city and on other Malabar ports, often provoked by local squabbles but all to the strategic end of establishing a royal monopoly over trade in the Indian Ocean. Henceforth traders of all nations would require a permit to sail waters they had sailed freely for centuries. The goal was nothing less than to make the Indian Ocean a Portuguese lake. All competition would be taxed or blown out of the water.
And so, in their clumsy, bloody way, Portugal’s pioneers in the East set about building an Asian empire. It would last, in parts, for nearly five hundred years, the first of all European empires in Asia, and the longest-lived. Unlike its successors, however, this new empire was not based on the occupation of territory, the filling-in of the blank spaces on the map, so much as it was aimed at the acquisition of a network of trading stations and forts. The empire would rapidly diversify, but it is fair to say that spice provided the early impetus. What mattered was control over the centres of trade, above all the spice trade. In its formative years Portugal’s Estado da India was, as one historian has dubbed it, the pepper empire.
It was certainly spice that impressed Lisbon and its rivals. Looking back on the golden epoch of the conquests from an age of imperial retreat, the Jesuit historian Fernão de Queyroz (1617–1688) claimed that da Gama’s legacy and ownership of the spices in particular could not fail ‘to astound the world’. In Europe, it was the Italians who were most astounded, for it was they who stood to lose the most. By the time Asian spices arrived in Mediterranean waters the trade was effectively monopolised by a handful of big Venetian merchants, for whom da Gama’s démarche opened a terrifying prospect. Incredulity and caution on the first reception of the news of da Gama’s voyage turned to dismay when news came of a second and then a third expedition. In 1501 two Portuguese ships laden with spices arrived in Flanders and immediately set about undercutting the Italians who had long dominated the market. Venetian merchants in Alexandria and the Levantine ports and marketplaces soon found prices soaring, and for a few years the spice galleys returned empty. La Serenissima trembled. There was scant consolation in the sneering nickname conferred on Portugal’s King Manuel, the upstart ‘grocer king’.
This Manuel knew full well. In letters to various crowned heads of Europe, penned within days of da Gama’s return, King Manuel crowed his success, styling himself ‘Lord of Guinea, and of the Conquest, the Navigation and Commerce of Ethiopia, Arabia, Persia and India’, and boasting of the vast profits that would now flow through his kingdom – and away from Venice. Among the recipients of these letters were the Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella, his parents-in-law; given the poor returns of their own investments in spices they must have found it particularly galling to learn of Manuel’s successes among the glittering riches of the glorious East, at a time when Spain’s explorers were still scraping around a scattering of heathenish Caribbean islands. This Manuel fully appreciated, so for good measure he had his letters printed into pamphlets for public consumption. One particularly gloating missive invited the Venetians to come and buy their spices at Lisbon, and indeed, in the desperate year of 1515, they had no alternative.
For a time it looked as though events in far-off Malabar had sparked a revolution in the old Mediterranean order. During the summer of da Gama’s return the Florentine Guido di Detti gloated that the Venetians, once deprived of the commerce of the Levant, ‘will have to go back to fishing’. The Venetians feared as much themselves. In July 1501 the Venetian diarist Girolami Priuli estimated that the Portuguese would make a hundred from every ducat they invested; and there was no doubt that Hungarians, Flemish and French, Germans and ‘those beyond the mountains’, formerly wont to come to Venice for spice, would now head for Lisbon. With this gloomy prognosis in mind he predicted that the loss of the spice trade would be as calamitous ‘as the loss of milk to a new-born babe … The worst news the Venetian Republic could ever have had, excepting only the loss of our freedom.’
For all those who envied Venice its riches it was an appealing prospect, but they were to be disappointed. As far as business was concerned, the Venetians were no babes in arms. In the longer run, Portugal’s grasp of the spice trade proved more shaky than it had at first appeared. Historians long accepted Manuel’s boasting at face value, taking it for granted that da Gama’s voyage succeeded in neatly redirecting the spice trade from the Indian into the Atlantic Ocean, but this was far from being the case. After a few disrupted decades, as the shock of early Portuguese conquests reverberated back down the spice routes, Alexandria and Venice staged a comeback. In the 1560s there were so many spices for sale at Alexandria that a Portuguese spy suggested Portugal should abandon the Cape route altogether and ship its spices via the Levant in order to cut costs. So great was the flow of illicit spices through the Portuguese blockade that there was speculation that the Portuguese viceroy was in tacit revolt against the king.
That Portugal failed to monopolise the spice trade is not, in retrospect, so remarkable. Even with their fearsome cannons, the Portuguese effort to lord it over the Indian Ocean, so far from home, was an extraordinary act of hubris, and Manuel’s vainglorious titles little more than a fantasy. With their religious bigotry and cavalier attitude to established networks the Portuguese rapidly accumulated enemies who would in due course cost them dear. Though they were unable to face the Portuguese ships in a shooting match, smaller, swifter Arab vessels enjoyed remarkable success in avoiding the blockade and generally raising costs. For the Portuguese crown every fort, every cannon and every man under arms represented a loss of profits. Violence was bad for business. Beset by enemies on the outside, the Portuguese empire proved remarkably porous from within. Subject to strict rules, compelled to buy and sell at prices set by the crown, and facing the likely prospect of an early death from some foul disease, shipwreck or scurvy, the Portuguese in India, most of whom had gone east to enrich themselves, had few legal means of doing so. Endemic smuggling, corruption and graft were the inevitable result. There were too many temptations to plunder, and little to stop it. The costs of the pepper empire raced ahead of returns. For all the sound and the fury (and the poetry), this was a creaking, leaking empire – ‘There is much here to envy,’ as one of da Gama’s descendants summarised matters.
In May 1498, however, all such future complications were far from the minds of da Gama’s crew. There were more pressing matters to attend to. As they walked dumbfounded through the streets of Calicut, ogling the rich houses of the great merchants, the huge warehouses bursting with spice, the mile-wide palace and the rich traders passing on their silken palanquins, they naturally thought they had hit the big time. Their first priorities were getting rich quick, or simply making it home. Da Gama contrived to make this already daunting task infinitely more difficult by sailing too early, before the monsoon winds had shifted. The crossing to Africa, three weeks’ sailing on the outward leg, now took three months. Thirty crewmembers died of scurvy, leaving a mere seven or eight able-bodied mariners for each vessel. The third caravel was abandoned, ‘for it was an impossible thing to navigate three ships with as few people as we were’. By the time they finally returned to Lisbon, only fifty-five of the 170 or so who had set forth remained. Da Gama himself survived due to the hardiness of his constitution and, in all likelihood, the superior quality of the officers’ rations (the nutrients in the wine and spices reserved for officers may have made the difference). Among the casualties was his brother Paulo, who died in the Azores, only a few days’ sailing from home.
Even in purely financial terms, the initial results were less spectacular than had been hoped. The two ships that returned to Portugal were compact, designed for discovery, not cargo. As a result the expedition came back with a substantial but scarcely earth-shattering haul of spices. The survivors brought little more than curios, in some cases paid for, quite literally, by the shirts off their backs. But in the heady days of da Gama’s return, when the king himself hugged this once obscure nobleman and called him his ‘Almirante