Pepper (6 page)

 

Three

Drugs and Souls

EUROPEANS ORIGINALLY SAILED TO ASIA TO BUY PEPPER AND TO SPREAD CHRISTIANITY. THE PORTUGUESE, RULED BY A CATHOLIC MONARCHY, WERE THE FIRST TO SUPPORT THE JESUITS, THE CATHOLIC ORDER MOST OFTEN ASSOCIATED WITH EUROPEAN EXPLORATION.

Boast no more about the subtle Greek

Or the long odyssey of Trojan Aenas;

Enough to the oriental conquests

Of great Alexander and of Trajan;

I sing of the famous Portuguese

To whom both Mars and Neptune bowed.

Abandon all the ancient Muse revered,

A loftier code of honour has appeared.

—
L
UÍS
V
AZ DE
C
AMÕES,
T
HE
L
USIADS
(1572)

Vasco da Gama's small fleet of Portuguese ships sailed around the Cape of Good Hope in early 1498 and then headed north along the coast of East Africa, taking the inner passage between Madagascar and the coast. No other European ships had ever sailed this far around the Cape, and they stopped for provisions in Mozambique, Mombasa, and the nearby town of Malindi before sailing across the Indian Ocean. It was in these port towns that da Gama first encountered thriving settlements that had prospered because of trade with India, and his behavior set the tone for the hundred or so years that the Portuguese attempted to dominate the pepper trade. Along the coast of Africa, the people were Muslims who spoke Arabic. When asked about their religious beliefs by local royalty, da Gama and his crew were evasive, lest they be identified as Christians, and they took hostages to protect themselves against what they perceived as hostile locals. When they reached Malindi, everyone in the town already knew that the Portuguese quickly resorted to force in unfamiliar situations. This pattern of hostage taking and the impulsive use of force would be repeated often in the years ahead.

Finally, da Gama sailed into Calicut, a vibrant pepper port on the southwest coast of India, fulfilling a long-sought dream immortalized in
The Lusiads
, a book-length poem published in 1572 by Luís Vaz de Camões. The effusive poem created the grand legend of da Gama as a hero for the ages, whose courage surpassed even the daring of the ancient Greeks. The Portuguese had been steadily making their way south along the west coast of Africa throughout the fifteenth century, hoping to find sources of African gold. They traded their saffron, copper, and wine for melegueta pepper, cobalt, animal skins, and cotton. In 1488 Bartolomeu Dias at last rounded the Cape, but after brushing the Indian Ocean, he turned back.

After so many decades of Portuguese exploration, da Gama dearly wanted to reach India, but his paranoia overcame his sense of occasion. Fearing for his own life, he sent ashore a convict from his fleet to make the first contact with the subcontinent. To this day, historians don't know the convict's name. The fellow was asked by two men in Calicut why he was there, to which he replied famously, “Christians and Spices.” This oft-told tale is supposed to provide a rationale for Portuguese exploration and exemplify a first encounter between East and West. But it is partly a joke, for two reasons. First, the convict wasn't greeted by Asians. The two men who met him were from Tunisia in North Africa, and they were traders. This was hardly a momentous meeting of East and West. Instead, the encounter reveals the sophisticated existing network of trade in the Indian Ocean during the so-called age of discovery. The Portuguese, it turns out, were rather late to the party. Da Gama didn't even navigate his own ships to India from the east coast of Africa. In Malindi, he brought on board a Muslim from Gujarat, a region in northwestern India, who piloted the ships to India.

Second, the Portuguese weren't looking to convert anyone; these sailors weren't missionaries. Da Gama and his men were seeking the legendary Prester John, the medieval Christian king who supposedly ruled in the East in unimaginable splendor. This widely believed fairy tale resembled the equally preposterous notion that the East harbored the Garden of Eden. Both held sway for hundreds of years, and helped induce Europeans to travel to the East.

Da Gama's behavior in Calicut on his first voyage created quite a stir. He complained about the way he was treated, disregarded court etiquette, and was paranoid and irritable. Calicut was the home of the Zamorins, merchant Hindu rulers who maintained a vast trade in the Indian Ocean, extending west to Africa and east to the islands of Indonesia and beyond. Even the Chinese respected Calicut's importance. This port city boasted a sophisticated court and culture, and was incredibly tolerant.

A glimpse of Calicut's wealth and cosmopolitan atmosphere is provided by a French seaman named François Pyrard, who survived a shipwreck off the Maldive Islands and imprisonment by the Portuguese. Describing Calicut as a kind of paradise on earth, he wrote in his journal: “Between the town and the king's palace there is nothing but houses and there is no place in all India where contentment is more universal than at Calecut, both on account of the beauty and fertility of the country, and of the intercourse with men of all races, who live there in free exercise of their own religions.” The delightful quarters of the city, which include its bazaars or “little towns,” were so full of people all day long, he reported, that they were difficult to pass through. The buildings in the bazaars were “very large and well constructed of stone and wood, and supplied with shops, warehouses, and yards, all securely enclosed…” The houses in the city had gardens and porches, which served to receive passing strangers “both for giving them meat and drink, and also a place to rest and sleep…” Pyrard spent eight months in Calicut until he was kidnapped outside of the city by the Portuguese, who took him to Cochin as a prisoner.

Pyrard's story is among the more colorful adventures to emerge from the time when Europeans began to sail to Asia to procure pepper for commercial companies. He had originally set out in 1601 as part of the crew in two vessels, one of which was named
Croissant
, financed by prosperous French merchants who were inspired by the success of the Dutch and English in the East Indies. It was not an especially well-planned voyage. Almost from the beginning, the ships encountered difficulties, not the least of which was, as Pyrard observed, the “bad order and discipline in the ships; for there was no piety or devotion, but plenty of oaths and blasphemy, disobedience to officers, mutiny and carelessness, and every day quarrelling, assault, thefts, and the like vices.” Carelessness and drunkenness caused the ship carrying Pyrard to be wrecked off the Maldive Islands. Only he and three other men survived. Incredibly, Pyrard quickly endeared himself to the islanders because of his ability to learn their language. He was treated well. He lived on the islands for four years, and his detailed observations of the habits of the people are recorded in his journal. Pyrard didn't return to France until 1611, when he published the first edition of his travels in Asia.

*   *   *

When da Gama arrived in Calicut in 1498, the people remembered stories of sailors who had arrived on their shores more than ninety years earlier. They told the Portuguese that these sailors “wore their hair long and had no beards except around their mouths. They landed wearing cuirass, helmet and vizor, and carrying a certain weapon (sword) attached to a spear. Once every two years they returned with 20 to 25 ships.” These sailors were the Chinese. Unlike Zheng He, the commander of the Treasure Fleet, da Gama wasn't known for his tact or diplomacy, and he had trouble negotiating in this kind of environment. His offensive behavior in India left a mark. According to one anonymous report, “The entire land wished him ill.” His behavior on his first trip to India was mild compared to the debacle on his second expedition, when he held the lofty title “Admiral of the Indies.” On this infamous voyage, he encountered a ship returning to Calicut from Mecca that carried some 380 Muslim men, women, and children. The women offered their jewels in return for their lives and begged the Portuguese to at least save their innocent babies. Da Gama ordered the ship to be burned, and everyone on board perished.

The Portuguese monarchy was enthralled with da Gama's first journey, even though his ships were nearly blown onto the coast of Brazil (in 1500, the Portuguese fleet led by Pedro Álvares Cabral would “discover” Brazil on the way to India), only fifty-five of his crew of 148 men survived, and he had to burn one of his ships. Nonetheless, some twelve thousand pounds of pepper were brought home aboard the two ships that made the round-trip journey, so the trip was profitable. However, the Hindu Zamorin leader made it very clear that the Portuguese would have to bring something of value on the next visit. “And what I want from your land is gold and silver and coral and scarlet [cloth],” he wrote to the Portuguese king.

Da Gama's journey was the first time that pepper had been imported directly from India to Europe via an all-ocean route, a great achievement that received widespread acclaim. Da Gama didn't return to Lisbon with the remnants of his fleet on that first journey because he had to bury his brother Paulo in the Azores. Paulo died on the long voyage and his ship was burned in Mombasa, since there weren't enough men to sail her. Scurvy—which turns the skin into a patchwork of ugly purple dots, painfully distends hands and feet, and makes the gums bloat so massively that eating becomes impossible—had killed nearly two-thirds of da Gama's crew. (Scurvy remained a major cause of death among sailors until well into the mid-nineteenth century. It wasn't until the early twentieth century that Axel Holst and Theodor Frölich proved definitively the cause of scurvy was a lack of ascorbic acid—vitamin C.)

Those who survived da Gama's voyage were well compensated. They received their pay in “drugs,” read spices. Nicolau Coelho, the captain of the first ship of the expedition to reach Lisbon, received a quintal, or some 125 pounds, of all the drugs brought back, and each pilot and sailor was given a half quintal.

The Portuguese monarch, Don Manuel, richly rewarded da Gama and his descendants with a yearly allowance of one-thousand cruzados, a sum of money roughly equal to the annual revenues of a large property. Don Manuel wasted no time in broadening his own domain. After da Gama's first voyage, he was not only “King of Portugal and the Algraves on this side and beyond the sea in Africa, and Lord of Guinea,” but he also became “Lord of the Conquest, Navigation and Commerce of Ethiopia, Arabia, Persia and India.” Even today, da Gama is considered a national hero in Portugal, and his legend lives on as the navigator who “discovered” the sea route to India from Europe.

The pepper route was filled with misery and death for the Europeans. In addition to the hazards of navigating by dead reckoning, men sailing to Asia had to travel thousands of miles in unsafe ships plagued by frequent leaks and loose rigging, and outfitted with anchors that were easily lost because they were too light. A Portuguese writer named Figueiredo Falcão, who had access to official records, wrote in 1612 that some thirty-five Indiamen were wrecked in the years 1580 to 1610. Other observers have estimated that between 1550 and 1650, some 130 Portuguese ships were lost either through shipwrecks or enemy attacks. Likewise, between 1601 and 1620 the English sent out eighty-one Indiamen and only thirty-five of the ships returned to England, a dismal record.