Ch 11 - Western EncroachmentA Majestic IronyBartholomeu Dias blazed a trail around the southern tip of Africa that opened the way for Vasco da Gama to discover a sea route to India. The Portuguese greatly underestimated the culture of the lands they visited and failed in their initial attempt to break into India's complex, well-established, Arab-dominated markets. Prince Henry's monopoly rights in West Africa passed to the Portuguese Crown following his death in 1460. The opening of the African coast was well underway when Prince Henry's nephew, King Alfonso V, committed himself to turn the business of discovery into a wealth-building enterprise. Finding himself in financial difficulty, King Alfonso entered into an unusual agreement in 1469, with one of his wealthy vassals in Lisbon, a man named Fernão Gomes. Alfonso gave Gomes a government sanctioned trade monopoly for a share of the resulting trade with the Guinea coast of Africa. In exchange, Gomes committed himself to expand exploration of the African coast by about three hundred miles per year for five years. The outcome of this unique arrangement meant that it was no longer a matter of whether the west African coast would be opened, but when. When the agreement with Gomes expired, Portugal's knowledge of Africa extended south to the mouth of the Congo River. King Alfonso passed the monopoly trading rights to his own son, who took the crown in 1481 as King John II. The Portugeuse treasury was bulging with wealth brought back from West Africa. The rich cargoes had become so substantial, that for centuries those parts of the African continent that faced the Gulf of Guinea would be known by the bounty they yielded: the Grain Coast, the Ivory Coast, the Gold Coast, and the Slave Coast. King John II continued the work of Prince Henry by pushing voyages of discovery further down the African coast, and with each advance came new rumors about the legendary Prester John. If there really were a sea route to India, then a strong Christian ally would be a valuable asset, not just in fighting the Moors, but as a way station and supply base for future trading expeditions. In 1487, King John II launched two grand expeditions to reach the elusive Prester John; one by land and one by sea. The first expedition, a dangerous secret enterprise to assess the potential for European trade with India, consisted of only two men: Pero da Covilhã, a bold and versatile man in his late twenties, and Affonso de Paiva, a court gentleman. Covilhã and Paiva departed on May 7, 1487, sailed from Barcelona to Naples and on to Rhodes. Dressed as Muslim merchants, the two men sailed to Alexandria, Egypt, and traveled southeastward through Cairo to Aden at the mouth of the Red Sea. Covilhã and Paiva, both fluent multi-linguists, easily blended in with the Muslim traders and merchants in the Arab ports. The pair separated after reaching Aden. Paiva set off directly for Ethiopia to seek out Prester John, while Covilhã traveled on to India. Affonso de Paiva was never seen again. Pero da Covilhã eventually reached Calicut (modern Kozhikode) and Goa on the Mlabar coast of southwestern India, where he witnessed a prosperous trade in Arabian horses, spices, fine cottons, and precious stones. After completing his assessent of the European trade with India, Covilhã sailed for home in February 1489. He passed through Ormuz at the entrance to the Persian Gulf and the port of Sofala opposite Madagascar before traveling north to Cairo in 1490. While in Cairo, two Jewish emissaries from King John II gave Covilhã a letter instructing him, if he had not already done so, to travel to the kingdom of Prester John to gather intelligence and promote an alliance. Before he left, Covilhã induced a messenger to carry a letter to King John II that described all he had learned of Arab seafaring and the Indian markets. Covilhã's momentous letter reputedly informed the king of reports he had heard along the African coast that, "his [the king's] caravels,. . .seeking the coast of this island [Madagascar] and of Sofala, could easily penetrate into these Eastern seas and come to make the coast of Calicut, for there was sea everywhere." Six years after leaving his home in Portugal, Pero da Covilhã reached Ethiopia in 1493, where he discovered a land ruled by Alexander, "Lion of the Tribe of Judah, and King of Kings." Covilhã so impressed the Ethiopian monarch that Alexander considered him a "Portuguese Marco Polo" and refused to let him leave. Covilhã married and settled down to live the rest of his life in the once mythical land of Prester John. King John II's second grand expedition of discovery set sail in August 1487, when Bartholomeu Dias commanded a long-planned and carefully organized undertaking to explore the southern African coast. With two Portuguese caravels and a stores ship, Dias spent months sailing southward, conducting minor trade activities along the African coast. Well south of the equator, the three ships ran into a violent storm that dogged them for nearly two weeks. Driven far from shore and further southward into unknown waters, Dias finally steered his three ships east for an entire week. Concerned that they had not sighted land in all this time, Dias then turned north for a distance of 150 leagues. After weeks of being ravaged by violent Atlantic storms, the battered Dias expedition finally spotted high mountains on the far horizon. His three ships dropped anchor in Mossel Bay on February 3, 1488, a point some two hundred thirty miles east of what is now Cape Town, South Africa. That fateful storm achieved what no amount of previous planning could have accomplished. It pushed Portugal around the southern tip of Africa. Dias left his supply ship at Mossel Bay with a crew of nine men and sailed his two caravels three hundred miles along the African coast, reaching as far as the mouth of the Great Fish River, some eighty miles beyond Algoa Bay. Dias wanted to sail on to the Indian Ocean, but his travel-weary crews refused. Already dangerously low on supplies and far from their supply ship, Dias reconciled himself to the fact that his great mission had reached its end. After returning to Mossel Bay, Dias ordered the worm-eaten supply ship unloaded and burned and its two surviving crewmen taken aboard for the journey home. In May 1476, eleven years before Dias set sail for the southern tip of Africa, twenty-four-year-old Christopher Columbus was sailing to England aboard a Flemish vessel in an armed Genoese convoy, when a French armada attacked the convoy off Cape St Vincent near Lagos, Portugal. After his ship went down during the fight, Columbus managed to escape by swimming nearly six miles to shore, using a floating long oar as a raft. After recuperating, Columbus rejoined his brother in Lisbon, where the two men went into the rapidly growing business of making and selling mariner's charts. In late 1481 or early 1482, Christopher Columbus learned of the existence of a letter to King Alfonso V from the great Florentine scholar Paolo dal Pozzo Toscannelli, one of Europe's more advanced cartographers. The letter, dated June 25, 1474, argued that there was a shorter route to China and "the noble island of Cipangu" (Japan) than that being pursued by the Portugeuse along the African coast. Basing his argument mainly on Marco Polo's report of the vast eastward extent of Asia, Toscannelli sent the king a detailed map of the Atlantic Ocean and confidently urged him to try a westward passage. Columbus excitedly wrote Toscanelli to get more information and received an encouraging letter. Toscanelli included another chart with his reply, a chart that claimed Marco Polo's estimate of Asia's extent was correct and that it was only 3000 miles from Lisbon westward to Japan and 5000 miles to Hangzhou, China. For the next few years, Columbus collected evidence and "expert witnesses" to bolster his case for a westward voyage to the Indies. His entire plan rested on two simple propositions. First, orthodox Christian dogma dictated that only one-seventh of the earth's surface was covered by water. If that were true and, as all educated people believed, the earth was round, then the Western Ocean between Spain and the East Indies could not be that extensive. The second proposition, which had to do with the size of the earth itself, was a bit more problematical. Everyone agreed that the earth encompassed 360° of longitude, but Europe's most respected authorities disagreed as to just how many degrees of longitude separated Portugal's Cape St. Vincent and the east coast of China. Estimates ranged from 116° in the Catalan Atlas of 1375, to 125° by Fra Mauro in 1459, to Ptolemy's estimate of 177° in 150 AD, to the higher estimates of 225° by Marinus of Tyre in 100 AD, and 234° by the German cartographer Martin Behaim in 1492. The correct figure is 131° Columbus read and made extensive notes in the margins of a number of books on geography that dealt with the question of Asia's size, the width of the Western Ocean, and the size of the earth. He obtained one of the first Latin editions of Ptolemy's Geographia (a 1475 edition without the maps) and began using Ptolemy's distance data to create his own maps. Columbus believed that his voyage west from Spain to China, though difficult, would be short. Using maps and information based on the calculations of Ptolemy and Martin Behaim, he believed he could reach China after sailing no more than 4000 miles. His most extensive notes appear in the influential treatise, Imago Mundi, completed around 1410 by Europe's last great scholastic geographer, Cardinal Pierre d'Ailly. D'Ailly adopted the lengthy 225° stretch postulated by Marinus of Tyre for the eastward extent of Eurasia, which made the width of the Western Ocean conveniently narrow. It is evident, claimed Pierre d'Ailly, "that this sea is navigable in a very few days if the wind is fair." The book not only confirmed Columbus' beliefs, it documented the crucial questions of the eastward extent of Asia and the width of the Western Ocean. Christopher Columbus was granted a hearing with Portugal's King John II in 1484. Armed with his "facts" and a passionate belief in his cause, he presented his Enterprise of the Indies, a daring plan "to go and discover the Isle Cypango [Japan] by this Western Ocean," to sail west across the Atlantic to the islands of Japan and onward to China, India and the Indies. He asked the king to equip and man three caravels for the expedition. King John found the boastful, yet engaging young Genoese "a big talker," and referred him to experts in the royal maritime advisory committee. The committee turned him down; not because they disagreed on the shape of the earth, but because they believed he had grossly underestimated the sailing distance westward to Asia. Columbus left Portugal in 1485, to seek sponsorship for his proposals from King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain. A year later, when the Queen finally granted Columbus an audience, she too referred his proposal to a committee. Queen Isabella's learned Spanish professors debated the matter for years, neither approving nor rejecting the plan. Out of frustration, Columbus wrote to King John II in early 1488, asking for another hearing on his planned expedition. The king graciously replied and cordially extended an invitation to Portugal. Christopher and Bartholomew Columbus could not have picked a worse time to return to Lisbon. They arrived on the Lisbon docks in December 1488, sixteen months and seventeen days after Bartholomeu Dias had sailed on his historic voyage around the southern tip of Africa. In one of history's strange quirks of fate, the two men stood on that crowded Lisbon dock watching intently as Dias slowly sailed his two surviving caravels up the Tagus River into the Lisbon harbor. The triumphant winter parade of ships brought the world-shattering news that Dias had actually rounded the southern tip of Africa and confirmed the promise of a sea route to India. The success of Bartholomeu Dias made Columbus' Enterprise of the Indies superfluous and ended Portugal's interest in speculating on a westward passage to the Indies. Columbus returned to Seville and the Spanish court of Queen Isabella. In April 1492, eight years after Columbus made his first proposal to the king of Portugal, Queen Isabella agreed to finance his planned expedition. Christopher Columbus thus discovered his New World under the flag of Spain, not Portugal. Nearly a decade passed before Portugal launched a sequel to the discoveries of Bartholomeu Dias. Almost immediately after coming to the throne in 1495, the twenty-six-year-old King Manuel I set out to follow-up the Dias expedition with an even more ambitious voyage. Pero da Covilhã's letter to King John II described Calicut as a vital commercial center for the Orient, branching out through a complex network of routes that linked the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea to the Gulf of Cambay, Bengal, and the Malaccas. King Manuel I decided to intrude into this complex market and take control of its future direction. Portugal and Spain had the motives, the opportunity, the ships, the sailors, the instruments, and the weapons for oceanic exploration. Most of Europe's major voyages of discovery sailed from Spanish and Portuguese harbors and were manned mostly by Spanish and Portuguese sailors. Fifteenth century mariners possessed a wealth of experience in ocean sailing, but they were no bolder, no luckier and no more knowledgeable than their predecessors. In fact, most of their information came from accounts written in the thirteenth and early fourteenth century, accounts that were misleading and out of date. What made them successful, particularly the Portuguese, was consistent royal backing, encouragement and support, and much better equipment. Encouraging exploration was one thing. Paying for it was another matter. Exploration and discovery were both hazardous and expensive. It cost a great deal to hire the ships, recruit competent crews and provide the cargos for trade. The vast majority of financing for these trips came not from the royal treasury, but from European bankers and merchants. Neither the Spanish nor the Portuguese governments had the commercial experience or the financial organization to mount frequent, large expeditions and exploit the resulting discoveries. Furthermore, neither government had the money. In the latter half of the fifteenth century, the rapidly growing international money market provided most of the financing that, for the first time, made it possible to take a systematic, step-by-step approach to the whole business of exploration After securing investors from the Florentine house of Marchionni in Lisbon, King Manuel I appointed Vasco da Gama to lead Portugal's most ambitious voyage of exploration to date, a voyage to discover a sea route to India. Vasco da Gama's flagship, the shallow-draft, 100-ton, square-rigged man-of-war the San Gabriel and its sister ship, the San Rafael, under Captain Paulo da Gama, were fitted with 20 cannon each. Captain Nicolau Coelho commanded the 50-ton, lateen-rigged caravel Berrio. The 200-ton supply ship San Marin, purchased from a Lisbon merchant and outfitted with provisions for a three year voyage, sailed under the watchful eye of Goncalo Nunes. On July 8, 1497, white sails emblazened with the blood-red crucifix of the Order of Christ unfurled to catch the wind. Vasco da Gama's four ships and their 170 man crew sailed from Lisbon harbor toward a new era in East Asian history. In addition to maps, astronomical instruments, and tables of declination to determine latitude, the expedition carried an ominous new cargo, carved stone pillars to mark Portuguese territorial claims. Vasco da Gama took his four ships around the tip of South Africa, sailed past the Great Fish River, the furthest point reached by Dias, and continued northeastward up the African coast. The Portugeuse anchored in the mouth of the Quelimane River (18° S Lat) on January 25, 1498, where Vasco da Gama met with two local chiefs dressed in fine silk and satin. During their one month stay at the Quelimane River, the Portuguese learned that ships even larger than da Gama's had visited before; exciting news that gave da Gama hope India had to be near. The Portuguese and their successors displayed a marked propensity to underestimate the culture of the lands they visited. Sailing north to Mozambique, they discovered a united and developed society whose cutural and trade contacts with Arabia, Persia, and India made it equal to Portugal in many respects. Vasco da Gama and one of his captains managed to embarass themselves and insult their hosts by offering the local sheik what amounted to trash as gifts. The sheik was so irritated he actually asked for something better. Worse, when the locals realized the Portuguese were Christians, whom they despised, they refused to offer them water for their ships. Vasco da Gama needed to secure the services of an Arab pilot to guide him across the wide expanse of the Arabian Sea. The Sultan of Mozambique provided two pilots to guide the Portugeuse, but one deserted when he found out that his new employers were Christians and the other could be kept on board only by force. Leaving Mozambique, the Portuguese again sailed north, anchoring off Mombasa in early April. Fearing a repeat of the previous stopover, the crews remained aboard ship. Although local Arabs greeted them well, they tried to entice the Portuguese closer to shore and ambush the entire group. After spending a few nights defending against raiders who attempted to cut the anchor cables and rigging, the Portuguese finally attacked the Arabs and drove them off. On the morning of April 15, 1498, the residents of Malindi, a small seaport and Shi'a stronghold located four miles south of the Sabaki River, awoke to discover foreign ships anchored in the harbor alongside the familiar dhows that regularly criss-crossed the Indian Ocean. Stories about the fights in Mombasa delighted the local shiek, who considered Mombasa his enemy. The Portugeuse were warmly received, entertained and reprovisioned at Malindi, even though Vasco da Gama once again made the mistake of offering cheap trinkets to the shiek. Instead of taking offense, the shiek thought the Portugeuse might prove to be an effective ally against Mombasa. As a favor, he sent Vasco da Gama on his way across the Indian Ocean with an elderly Shi'a Arab named Ahmad Ibn Majid. The Portugeuse gave him the nickname Malema Canaua or "Captain Astrologer." In another of history's mysterious quirks, Vasco da Gama had acquired the services of the most experienced pilot-navigator that ever sailed the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. Neither man could have appreciated his place in this fateful meeting, nor could they have known that they were playing out one of the most majestic ironies in world history. The son and grandson of eminent Arab pilot-navigators, Majid was a sailor's sailor, an arrogant man with a fondness for wine who regarded himself as the supreme authority on the science of navigation and astronomy. The Portuguese expedition successfully crossed the Indian Ocean in twenty-three days and dropped anchor off Calicut, India, (modern Kozhikode) on May 22, 1498, unwittingly led by "The Lion of the Sea in Fury," Ahmad Ibn Majid, master navigator of the Arabs. When Vasco da Gama arrived off India's Malabar coast, he discovered a sizeable, flourishing, well-entrenched Arab community in Calicut. Arab merchants and ship owners dominated foreign commerce and the Arabs operated warehouses and shops throughout the city. The well-entrenched interests of Malabar Muslims and Arab traders, both in East Africa and in India, did not welcome Portuguese intrusions. Vasco da Gama's ground-breaking voyage to India was hardly a mission of discovery, since India's geographical location and commercial importance were already known from reports by Pero da Covilhã and other explorers. This was an armed commercial reconnaissance mission. Unfortunately, Vasco da Gama's great courage, skill and determination as a sea captain did not equip him with the skills of a commercial ambassador or diplomat. He spent three months unsuccessfully trying to secure cordial relations and negotiate a trade agreement with the Samuri (king) of Calicut. He tried to explain they had come "merely to make discoveries" and to search for Christian kings said to rule in the area, "not because they sought gold or silver." The Samuri found the explanations insulting and wondered why the Portugeuse had not brought costly goods as gifts. Armed with scant information about suitable trade goods, the Portuguese carried bolts of striped cloth, washbasins, olive oil, strings of beads, and lumps of sugar, items which may have been good enough for the Guinea coast, but not India. In contrast to China's high-quality trade goods, the Portugeuse cargos brought a good deal of contemptuous laughter from the Samuri. Vasco da Gama's low-quality goods coupled with Portuguese ignorance, arrogance, and suspicion left a decidedly unfavorable impression. Frustrated and disappointed, the Portuguese left Calicut in late August 1498, convinced that Portugal's only hope of breaking into the Indian market would be by force of arms. The hardships of the thirteen-month-long return voyage to Portugal took a terrible toll on the expedition. Vasco da Gama's flagship, the San Gabriel, and the caravel Berrio, along with 55 of the original 170 men returned to Lisbon in mid-September 1499. Despite its commercial failures, Vasco da Gama's expedition ranked as an unprecedented seafaring accomplishment. King Manuel I honored the daring captain by appointing him Admiral of the Indian Ocean. Once they opened the sea route to the India and gained entry to the Indies, neither the Portuguese nor the Europeans who followed them ever relinquished their foothold in East Asia.
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