After the year 1500 there was no pepper to be had at Calicut that was not dyed red with blood.
Voltaire, Essai sur l’histoire générale et sur les moeurs et l’ésprit des nations, 1756
Outside his native Portugal, where past glories live long in the memory, Vasco da Gama has generally been remembered as Columbus’s less eminent contemporary. It is a somewhat unfair assessment, for in a number of senses da Gama brought about what Columbus left undone. In sailing to India five years after Columbus sailed to America, da Gama found what Columbus had sought in vain: a new route to an old world. The one might be thought of as the complement to the other, as much in terms of the objectives as the achievements of their missions. Between the two of them, however dimly sensed it may have been at the time, they united the continents.
The greatest difficulty of Columbus’s voyage was that it was unprecedented. In navigational terms, the outward crossing was uncomplicated. Barely out of sight of Spanish territory in the Canary Islands, his small flotilla picked up the north-easterly trades that carried it across the Atlantic in little over a month. In comparison, da Gama’s voyage lasted over two years, covering some 24,000 miles of ocean, a distance four times greater than Columbus had travelled. When Columbus sailed to America he had to chivvy his men through thirty-three days without sight of land; da Gama’s crew endured ninety. Their voyage was, in every sense, an epic – literally so, inasmuch as it provided the inspiration and subject matter for Portugal’s national poem, the magnificent, sprawling Lusiads of Luís Vaz de Camões, its 1,102 stanzas an appropriately monumental and meandering tribute.
As tends to be the way with epics, the drama was supplied by a combination of heroism, foolishness and cruelty. After saying their last prayers in the chapel of Lisbon’s Torre do Bélem, the crew bade farewell to wives and families before setting out on their ‘doubtful way’ (caminho duvidoso), directing their three small caravels and one supply vessel down the Tagus on 8 July 1497. Passing the Canaries, they headed south down the African coast, skirting the western bulge of the continent towards the Cape Verde islands. Next they turned their prows south and west into the open ocean, hoping thereby to avoid the calms of the Gulf of Guinea – so much they already knew from the many earlier Portuguese expeditions that had sought African gold and slaves for decades. Dropping below the equator they passed from a northern summer into a southern winter whose gales, now deep in the southern latitudes, slung them back east to Africa. Even now they were still far to the north of the Cape of Good Hope, and they had to fight a tortuous battle against adverse currents and winds before they could finally round the bottom of the continent. When they finally left the Atlantic for the Indian Ocean they were already six months from home.
Thus far their course had been scouted by the exploratory voyage of Bartolomeu Diaz a decade earlier; now they were entering uncharted waters. With scurvy starting to get a grip on his exhausted crew, da Gama cautiously worked his way north along Africa’s east coast in an atmosphere of steadily mounting tension. Stopping for supplies and intelligence at various ports along the way, the Portuguese met with mixed receptions, ranging from wary cooperation to bewilderment and outright hostility. A lucky break came at the port of Malindi, in present-day Kenya, where they had the immense good fortune to pick up an Arab pilot familiar with the crossing of the Indian Ocean. By now it was April, and the first gatherings of the summer monsoon, blowing wet and blustery out of the south-west, propelled them across the ocean in a mere twenty-three days. On 17 May, ten months after leaving Portugal, a lookout smelled vegetation on the sea air. The following day, through steam and sheets of scudding monsoon rain, the mountains of the Indian hinterland at last rose into view. They had reached Malabar, India’s Spice Coast.
Thanks to good fortune and the skill of their pilot they were no more than a day’s sailing from Calicut, the principal port of the coast. Though they naturally had little idea of what to expect, the newcomers were not wholly unprepared. With their long experience of voyages down the west coast of Africa, the Portuguese were accustomed to dealing with unfamiliar places and peoples. On this as on earlier voyages, they followed the unsavoury but prudent custom of bringing along an individual known as a degredado, generally a felon or outcast such as a converted Jew, whose role it was to be sent ashore to handle the first contacts with the local population. In the not unlikely event of a hostile reception the degredado was considered expendable. And so, while the rest of the crew remained safely on board, on 21 May an anonymous criminal from the Algarve was put ashore to take his chances.
A crowd rapidly formed around the exotic, pale-faced stranger. To the bemused Indians little was clear, other than that he was not Chinese or Malay, regular visitors in Calicut’s cosmopolitan marketplace. The most reasonable assumption was that he came from somewhere in the Islamic world, though he showed no signs of comprehending the few words of Arabic addressed to him. For want of a better option he was escorted to the house of two resident Tunisian merchants who were, naturally enough, stunned to see a European march through the door. Fortunately, the Tunisians spoke basic Genoese and Castilian, so some rudimentary communication was possible. A famous dialogue ensued:
Tunisian: ‘What the devil brought you here?’
Degredado: ‘We came in search of Christians and spices.’
The answer would not have pleased the Tunisians, but as summaries go this was an admirably succinct account of the expedition’s aims.
Spices figured no less prominently in da Gama’s motivation than they had in Columbus’s voyage five years earlier. The Christians too were more than a matter of lip service; to some extent commercial and religious interests went together. Yet of the two the spices offered richer pickings, and there could be little doubt which mattered more in the minds of the crew and those who came after them. The anonymous narrator who has left the sole surviving account of the voyage goes straight to the heart of the matter:
In the year 1497, King Manuel, the first of that name in Portugal, sent four ships out, which left on a quest for spices, captained by Vasco da Gama, his brother Paulo da Gama and Nicolau Coelho. We left Restelo on Saturday, 8 July 1497, for a voyage which we hope God allows to end in his service. Amen.
Their prayers were not in vain. Whereas Columbus was an entire hemisphere off track, the Portuguese had hit the motherlode.
When da Gama’s degredado splashed dazedly ashore in May 1498, the Malabar coast was the epicentre of the global spice trade; to some extent, it still is. Located in the extreme south-west of the subcontinent, Malabar takes its name from the mountains that sailors see long before the shore comes into view, a suitably international hybrid of a Dravidian head (mala, ‘hill’) grafted onto an Arabic suffix (barr, ‘continent’), the latter supplied by the Arab traders who dominated the westward trade from ancient times through to the end of the Middle Ages. The mountains are the Western Ghats, whose bluffs and escarpments form the western limit of the Deccan plateau. The coast, a low-lying, fish-shaped band of land squeezed between sea and mountains, was, and is, a centre of both spice production and distribution. Calicut was the largest but not the only entrepôt of the coast. A string of lesser ports received fine spices from further east for resale and reshipment west, onward across the Indian Ocean to Arabia and Europe. From the jungles of the Ghats merchants brought ginger, cardamom and a local variety of cinnamon down from the hills,