Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power (10 page)

Da Gama sought “Christians and spices.” Thus, he filled his ship with pepper for the voyage home, while sinking a merchant ship off the Indian coast filled with seven hundred Muslim pilgrims from Mecca.
²⁶
Muscat was sacked and burned by D’Albuquerque in 1507. Portuguese freebooters occupied parts of Ceylon and Burma, and sold tens of thousands of the inhabitants into slavery. Such deeds, coupled with conquest on the scale that the Portuguese managed to achieve, required a narrow certainty of belief. If “doubt,” as T. E. Lawrence writes in
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
, is “our modern crown of thorns,” then the Portuguese were just short of being modern.
²⁷
C. R. Boxer, the late British scholar, notes that despite their momentary misgivings, “The certainty that God was on their side, and that He would and did intervene directly on their behalf” was a pivotal factor not only, as he writes, in the capture of Ceuta in Morocco in
1415, but also throughout the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as the Portuguese groped their way down the western coast of Africa and beyond.
*

Believing themselves a chosen people destined to be the sword of the faith, the Portuguese show us a religious nationalism as doughty and often extreme as any in history.
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Portugal’s spectacular and sweeping conquest of the Indian Ocean littoral falls into a category similar to that of the Arab conquest of North Africa nine centuries earlier. In the post-national West, we would do well to remember that morale is still the key to military victory: in particular, a morale fortified by a narrow, unshakable conviction, which often has been the product of religion and nationalism. What the medieval Arabs and the late-medieval Portuguese once embodied challenges us to this day. To a significant extent, American power will depend on how it confronts fanatical enemies who believe more firmly than it does.

Portugal’s was both a slaving empire and a military one. Unlike the Spanish in the New World who, following the conquest of Mexico and Peru, ran their holdings through civilian administrators (at least in the beginning), the great majority of male Portuguese who sailed from Lisbon to India’s western coast went out as soldiers. “This is a frontier land of conquest,” wrote a Franciscan missionary friar from the vantage point of late-sixteenth-century Goa.
²⁹

That frontier—everything beyond the Cape of Good Hope, from the Swahili coast of East Africa to Timor in archipelagic Indonesia—was called India by the Portuguese, or the Estado da India (State of India). Indeed, the entire sprawling East was also referred to as the Indies or the lands of India for, as we have seen, Arab, Persian, Hindu, and other traders had turned it into a recognizable cultural system, unified and in a very palpable sense made smaller by the predictable monsoon winds.

To understand further how the Portuguese were able to establish themselves so quickly throughout this quarter of the earth, one needs to realize that while a climatic, cultural, and trading system did unite the shores
of the Indian Ocean, in political terms this vast region was in a state of incoherence and semi-chaos even, with congeries of small and weak states, susceptible to conquest or influence by an enterprising outsider. As we have seen in the case of Oman, while the sea united, the hinterlands often brought chaos.

No map during any point in history could surpass that of the early-sixteenth-century Indian Ocean in its cultural and political variety. It was a map of controlled anarchy. Going from west to east, there were the Swahili city-states of the East African coast; most importantly Kilwa, Mombasa, Malindi, and Pate. Arabic was, so to speak, their cultural lingua franca, mixed with a veneer of Persian. Moving north up the coast and swerving along Arabia, the Portuguese encountered Oman and a number of other states and tribes, some independent, but most under the sway of the Mamluks (converted Muslim slaves who ruled in Egypt, Syria, and the Hejaz from the thirteenth through fifteenth century). Heading east over to the Persian Gulf, the new Shia Safavid dynasty in Iran was expanding inland, and on the verge of a collision with the Sunni Ottoman Turks that would soon exhaust both powers. India proper was on the eve of the Mughal conquest from Turkic Central Asia, and was thus still divided between Hindus and Muslims. In northern India, there were the Muslim principalities of Gujarat, Delhi, and Bengal. Other Muslim sultanates in the southern Deccan plateau region warred with one another and with the Hindu empire of Vijayanagar (with which D’Albuquerque formed his alliance for the establishment of Goa). Arab and Persian traders were spread throughout India’s coastal regions and Ceylon, which, in turn, was divided between the Buddhist Sinhalese and Hindu Tamils.

As for the region corresponding to present-day Southeast Asia, it was, in Boxer’s words, “occupied by a number of warring states whose kaleidoscopic shifts of fortune cannot be followed even in outline.” Going down the Malay Peninsula in the direction of Indonesia were the kingdoms of Patani, Singora, and Ligor under Siamese (Thai) political influence, “but also affected by Chinese cultural and commercial contacts.” Malacca was the peninsula’s wealthiest sultanate, its rulers having converted to Islam in the fourteenth century, though Hindu traders were welcome in the port. The main islands of the Indonesian archipelago were themselves divided among warring, petty states. As for China, under pressure from Japanese pirates and Mongol nomads, it had
effectively retreated from the Indian Ocean in which it once had a great presence, owing to the eunuch admiral Zheng He.
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If the reader is confused, that is the whole point. Just as the Islamic conquest had occurred against a vacuum of power in seventh-century Arabia and North Africa—back then a stretch of weak Byzantine and Berber holdings—the Portuguese onslaught throughout the Indian Ocean took place during a period of weak principalities and distracted empires such as Ming China, Safavid Persia, and Ottoman Turkey. Furthermore, during the age of sail, political hegemony over the Indian Ocean was rendered impractical because of the monsoon, which made one-way communications fast but round-trip ones exceedingly slow, as the winds did not shift for months at a time.
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Ergo, the Portuguese did not so much conquer the East as fill a vast gap of authority within it, especially that of the retreating Chinese, thus moving the ocean into a new phase of history.

As bigoted and illiberal as they were in some important ways, the Portuguese could also be broad-minded, and it was this aspect of their collective personality that accounts for their most successful techniques of empire.
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Eventually, diplomats, merchants, naturalists, and artisans joined the ranks of soldiers toing-and-froing between Lisbon, the Persian Gulf, and India. Many of the travelers were educated, inquisitive people who did not make the journey as a last resort. “The depth, breadth, and richness of intelligence-gathering by the Portuguese was a notable characteristic of their world,” writes the Johns Hopkins University historian A.J.R. Russell-Wood. As the case with Majid shows, they relied on Arab pilots to cross the wider stretches of the Indian Ocean, and Arab, Gujarati, Javanese, and Malay pilots for voyages from India’s Malabar coast eastward to Ceylon, Siam (Thailand), and the Southeast Asian archipelago. They employed indigenous troops, and gave great recognition to local skills and lore. They became connoisseurs of Indian objects, particularly furniture. “Seemingly there was no facet of the human experience which escaped the lynx eyes and keen ears of the Portuguese in their peregrinations,” writes Russell-Wood.
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And for as brutal as they could be, there were other times, particularly in Africa, when the Portuguese used force as a last resort, establishing their forts and trading stations
only after much negotiation.
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Indeed, there is much the United States can learn from the positive sides of the Portuguese imperial character, which left a deep cultural imprint in Monsoon Asia, with many Catholic converts and the persistence of the Portuguese language in places like Sri Lanka and the Moluccas.

Intoxicated with their newfound wealth, the Portuguese let the gold slip through their fingers. The imperial booty was not directed toward modernization back home. Portugal remained an antiquated and crumbling little jewel, lacking a real bourgeoisie until the twentieth century. Think of the poverty of old age that may follow a youth of dissipated luxury and far-flung adventures. Think of Lisbon in “ragged majesty” in winter, in the words of its early-twentieth-century philosopher and poet Fernando Pessoa.
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The Renaissance had only a brief flowering in Portugal, owing to the natural conservatism of the people, the Counter-Reformation in Europe, and the rise of the Jesuits and the Inquisition, all of which worked to snuff out the Enlightenment in this land far beyond the Pyrenees. In the Portuguese Indian Ocean empire, the only institutions of higher learning were the Society of Jesus and other religious orders, which were part of the Counter-Reformation. Meanwhile, the Muslims held on, secure in their far-flung diasporas that reached around the tropical seas from the Levant to the Far East. They simply outlasted the Portuguese, whose empire would later be “whittled away” by the Dutch and the English.
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The Eighth Crusade ultimately failed: the result of an indigenous reality in Estado da India and the religious wars back in Europe, which divided Christendom against itself.

What the Greeks and Romans accomplished for the Mediterranean, the Portuguese did for the Indian Ocean: they gave it a literary and historical unity, at least in the mind of the West. Indeed, whereas Homer’s
Odyssey
and Virgil’s
Aeneid
constitute myths based on the memories of a vague long ago,
The Lusíads
, the epic poem of Portuguese naval conquest in the Indian Ocean by Luiz Vaz de Camões, relies on a specific historical event—Vasco da Gama’s voyage to India—which occurred only a few decades before Camões wrote.

Camões’s Vasco da Gama, unlike Odysseus or Aeneas, is more of a real man than a representational composite. Hence he is not romantic, or tragic, or even that interesting. As stated, da Gama’s greatest trait is his sheer endurance: his ability to abide years of uncertainty, loneliness, and
physical hardship—rotten food and “loathsome” scurvy on a churning ocean, cannonballs tearing at limbs in offshore battles—while his equals back in Lisbon enjoyed the convivial luxuries of home.
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“Fearing all,” as the poem says, “he was prepared for all.”
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In the midst of a storm, with the “seas gaping to hell,” da Gama, “tormented by doubts and fears,” has no one but God to turn to. He declares:

They survive the storm to reach India. Because the adventures Camões relates are quite literally true, this story of the sons of Lusus (the mythical founder of Portugal) on the vast and uncharted oceanic wastes is in the final analysis more extraordinary than the “shore-hugging” epics of Greek and Roman antiquity.
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As Camões himself asks in his poem, did Odysseus or Aeneas “dare to embark on Actual Oceans … did they see a fraction” of what da Gama saw?
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It is hard to think of many other odysseys where the hardships seem to last as many months and years as was the case with the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean. Not until men journey to other planets are they likely to have such a painful, palpable sense of great and lonely distance over the revolving earth as did these Portuguese mariners.

In the poem, the giant ogre Adamastor, who stands watch over the Cape of Good Hope (the “Cape of Storms”), awakens in these sailors the fear and doubt over whether they have ventured too far. Yet they do not turn back. To be sure,
The Lusíads
encapsulates the essence of the Portuguese achievement of the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries: to drag the West from a “limited Mediterranean outlook,” in the words of the late Oxford scholar Maurice Bowra, “to a vision which embraced half the globe.”
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Camões was the first great European artist to cross the equator and
visit the tropics and the Orient. On “routes never charted” he was protected only by “frail timbers on treacherous seas.”
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His intense and intricate descriptions of the Indian Ocean and its fearful effects on men indicate just how well he knew it: