Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power (9 page)

Contrast all these efforts with those of the Portuguese, whose soldiers and mariners occupied Goa on the western coast of India in 1510, Malacca in the Malay Strait in 1511, Hormuz (near Muscat) on the Persian Gulf in 1515, and Colombo in Ceylon in 1518. Only twenty-three years after rounding the Cape of Good Hope, the Portuguese reached Java. The European fort design in Asia was of Portuguese origin. By 1571 there were some forty Portuguese forts and outposts like Jalali and Mirani in the Greater Indian Ocean, challenging and in some cases controlling the trade routes to the Levant, the Persian Gulf, the Arabian Sea, the Bay of Bengal, and East Asia.
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Portuguese carracks and galleons might have been clumsy by the standards of ships that would appear in the seventeenth century in the Mediterranean, but by combining lateen sails and square rigging, and by putting artillery aboard ships, they were vastly superior to the Turkish, Egyptian, and Malayan corsairs in oared galleys and single-masted foists—as well as to the Chinese “junks” and Arab dhows—that they met in the Indian Ocean in the sixteenth century.
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This seaborne world empire was the bounty of obsessed adventurers: men ruthless for wealth, heroic to the point of fanaticism, freighted with the cruel mental baggage of the Middle Ages, and intoxicated with a poignant love for the Virgin Mary. Faith and greed went together. The Portuguese stole, but only from those whom they saw as the corrupt of God. Such an iron faith brought them through many an ocean storm, as well as through months upon months in battering seas; their troops deep in the hull, beset with malaria and scurvy, packed together in the hundreds. Between 1629 and 1634, of 5228 soldiers who left Lisbon, only 2495 reached India alive, most dying of sickness, exposure, or
shipwreck.
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The story of Portuguese travel to and from India is biblical in its record of suffering.

The Indian scholar and statesman K. M. Panikkar describes Portuguese maritime expansion in the Persian Gulf and South Asia as an attempt to “get around the overwhelming land power of Islam in the Middle East,” and thus to break out of the “ ‘prison of the Mediterranean.’ ”
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Along with this dry strategic logic came a hot-blooded Catholic religious fervor. Panikkar reminds us that the spirit of the Crusades lingered much longer in Iberia than it did in Europe proper. In Iberia, Islam was not a mere “distant menace” but a close threat, owing to the existence of Muslim kingdoms that still flourished on Portugal’s doorstep. “Islam was the enemy and had to be fought everywhere.”
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This fact, more than any other, explains both the cruelty and ferocity of so much Portuguese behavior in the Greater Indian Ocean. Indeed, as one Portuguese historian of the era, João de Barros, writes, justifying the awful deaths meted out to local populations:

Arguably, Portugal’s efforts in the Indian Ocean constituted nothing less than an Eighth Crusade. While the previous seven had focused on the Levant (the Muslim lands abutting the eastern Mediterranean), this one sought conquests much farther east, where of the four great empires in the region—Ottoman Turkey, Safavid Iran, Mughal India, and Ming China—three were Muslim.
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These factors came together in the myth of
Infante Henrique
, or Prince Henry the Navigator, who “imbibed early in his life,” writes Panikkar, a spirit of “militant Christian mysticism” combined with a “bitter hatred” of Islam. As a young man in 1415, Prince Henry organized a successful expedition against Ceuta in Morocco—the first ever Portuguese attack on Islam’s African base. This carried deep significance since Ceuta was the place from where Islam had entered Iberia in 711.
From then on, at least according to the myth, Henry lost interest in limited military actions and began to plan a grand strategy to outflank the Islamic world from bases in the Indian Ocean. This strategy carried the added benefit of undermining the middleman role played by the Arabs in the Eastern spice trade. Thus, Prince Henry, this myth continues, developed an obsession with India, which led, in turn, to an interest in sailing and navigation. To his castle and fortified camp on the Cape of Sagres—jutting out on three sides into the windswept Atlantic, on Portugal’s and Europe’s southwestern tip—Henry was said to have invited “mathematicians, cartographers, astronomers, and Moorish prisoners with knowledge of distant islands.”
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Amid the wild tableau of one ocean, plans were laid to conquer another.

In fact, as Oxford scholar Peter Russell writes in
Prince Henry “the Navigator”: A Life
, contradicting Panikkar and others, much of this simply was not true. Henry conceived of India as only what is today the Horn of Africa, and no farther. Though much the crusader, Henry probably did not have a developed concept for outflanking the Muslim world, and he did not retire to Sagres to study cartography and navigation.
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But the myth of Henry that grew after his death is true in the way that myths often are: they reveal the authentic motives and desires of a people, in this case of the Portuguese.

In addition to searching for grains, gold, and spices, the Portuguese truly did have a desire to outflank Islam, made more intense by the Muslim Turkish conquest of Greek Christian Constantinople in 1453.
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So it is ironic that Prince Henry comes down to us through history not as a character in the story of the Crusades—which he actually was—but as a benevolent figure in the age of discovery, whose school of navigation (which might have never existed) laid the groundwork for the pathbreaking global journeys of Portuguese mariners.

Prince Henry died in 1460. Building on Henry’s store of knowledge in organizing expeditions down the Moroccan and Mauritanian coasts, in 1483, Diego Cão was able to sail from Portugal as far south as the Congo River in Africa. Finally, five years later, it was a hitherto obscure mariner, Bartolomeu Dias, who rounded the African continent and brought
Portugal into the Indian Ocean for the first time. According to one story, it was Dias who named the Cape of Good Hope, for he hoped to return there and reach India on a succeeding voyage. But Dias died on another voyage when his ship broke apart in the South Atlantic. It would be Vasco da Gama in 1497 who passed the cape with four square-rigged ships and sailed up the East African coast to Malindi, in present-day Kenya.

In Malindi, hundreds of years of Arab knowledge of the Indian Ocean—its winds and currents and haunts—were gathered into the head of one man: an Omani-born navigator, Ahmad ibn Majid, who agreed to help da Gama. Majid had sailed the Indian Ocean for half a century, and was a veritable Arab cultural repository of the seas.
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He knew the best entry points to the mouths of the Tigris and the Indus, the way to negotiate the shoals off Mozambique, and the best landfalls in India and on both sides of the Red Sea.
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Because the Arab world was so loose and diversified, in East Africa, so far from Iberia and the Middle East, the Portuguese could collaborate with an Arab like Majid, even as they planned to outflank the Arabs elsewhere on the map.

Whether it was Majid himself or another pilot perhaps recommended by him, an Arab pilot helped da Gama cross the Indian Ocean from Kenya to Calicut on India’s Malabar coast in just twenty-three days in the spring of 1498, a spectacularly quick journey made possible by the winds of the southwest monsoon.
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(Compare this to the late sixteenth century, when it took two months just to cross a stretch of the Mediterranean from Venice to the Holy Land.) Rather than “find” India, which the Greeks, Romans, and Arabs had done long before, the Portuguese put Europe back into intimate contact with it, for it was not so much Asia that da Gama had rediscovered for Europe as the wind system that brought him there.

There could not be a clearer case than this “discovery” of one civilization building upon the knowledge and skills of another. After all, it was not only the specific help provided by Majid from which the Portuguese benefited. In a more general sense, it was the Arabs and Jews
who had bequeathed maps and astrolabes (precursors to sextants) to the Portuguese, so medieval mapmaking reached its zenith with these Iberian mariners.
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By opening the sea route from Europe to the East, Portuguese mariners went a significant way toward ending the isolation of the different branches of humankind. Of course, this process was helped along by the Silk Road and other land routes across Asia. But with the general collapse of Mongol power in the fourteenth century, which preceded the more specific decline of the Timurid Empire—not to mention the rise of Safavid Persia at the turn of the sixteenth-century that caused tensions with the Ottoman Empire—these trans-Asian land routes became less secure, and their further weakening was foretold by the ability of the Portuguese to reach the East more easily by sea.
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With the establishment of this maritime route the East was pulled into European rivalries to a degree heretofore unseen. For the first time there was a truly vibrant world history, rather than strictly a European, or Indian, or Chinese one.
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One region could no longer be written about without reference to another.

The more specific effect of da Gama’s rounding the Cape of Good Hope was that it diminished the importance of the Mediterranean in favor of the much vaster Indian Ocean, with its even richer civilizational links.
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As great as da Gama’s accomplishment was, however, it was strictly one of application and endurance: obviously, a level of endurance that is almost inconceivable in our age, when the idea of months and years at a time in the scurvy-ridden hold of a ship is something that belongs to the level of the phantasmagoric. Truly, it was an achievement of character, though the Portuguese empire in the Indian Ocean emerged not as a direct consequence of da Gama’s voyage at all, but as a result of the vision, that is, of the intellect—and of the endurance—of another mariner: Afonso d’Albuquerque.

D’Albuquerque had made the voyage around Africa to India shortly after da Gama, where he made the strategic decision to prop up friendly rulers on the Malabar coast. He saw immediately that an area as vast as the Indian Ocean could not be controlled permanently by a small and distant country like Portugal, unless Portugal established not only bases but
also an overseas civilization there. It was not enough for Portugal to control the principal egress points: the Cape of Good Hope and the Straits of Bab el Mandeb, Hormuz, and Malacca. It needed a capital city of its own in India, which D’Albuquerque established at Goa, south of present-day Mumbai (formerly Bombay) on India’s western Konkan coast, which would grow into a great outpost of cathedrals and fortresses. In order to hold and develop Goa, cemented by his implacable hatred of the Muslims, he formed a strategic alliance with the Hindu empire of Vijayanagar. D’Albuquerque put every Moor in Goa to the sword; though he was a man of great accomplishments, he should not be romanticized.

This viceregal “Caesar of the East” took Hormuz and captured Malacca, from where he sent out expeditions to scout and control the East Indies, to the extent possible. He built a fortress on the island of Socotra to partially block the Strait of Bab el Mandeb and deny Arab traders the capacity to reach India via the Red Sea.
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His desire to deny Muslims use of the entire ocean ended up straining Portuguese resources to their utmost. Operating thousands of miles from any home base, he never had control of more than four thousand sailors and a small fleet of ships, and he did all this while a relatively old man in his fifties and beyond.
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D’Albuquerque wrested a tenuous empire out of the horrid expanse of the seas. It is something that, in strategic terms, a global maritime system, loosely led by the Americans, with help from the Indians, and hopefully the Chinese, now has no choice than to try to achieve.

Yet, despite D’Albuquerque’s accomplishments, much remained as it was. Change around the Indian Ocean seaboard even in the heyday of Portuguese imperialism was gradual. “Indigenous empires and trading states remained dominant and largely unaffected by Europeans scurrying … at their edges,” writes the scholar Felipe Fernández-Armesto.
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There were a few Portuguese forts on the coast of Oman, but none in the desert interior. At the same time, though, the Portuguese were able to block the Red Sea to Muslim shipping, in keeping with their strategy to outflank the forces of Islam. And they defeated the Mamluk (Egyptian) fleet in the Arabian Sea.
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But while the high seas might have been Christian, much of the coastlines and all of the interior were not.

As the first of the modern empires, Portugal’s was not only the weakest, but also the most medieval. Its navigators pried open the doors to the wider world, but at a savage cost. The Portuguese did not so much discover the East as launch a “piratical onslaught” upon it, breaking up,
however slowly, the web of mutually profitable and peaceful maritime commerce that for centuries had bound the Arab and Persian worlds with the distant Orient. Indeed, the process that led China and Japan into hostile isolation was born of their bitter experience with the Portuguese. Yet, it wasn’t really the modern West that the peoples of the East came to know through the Portuguese, but Europe of the late Middle Ages.

Portuguese sensibilities were further brutalized by nearly a century of ferocious fighting for control of Morocco, which had turned their soldiery into a veritable frontier society.
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With the Portuguese, modern-style mission planning went lock and key with a worldview that at times represented the worst of the Inquisition. In the minds of these sailors, because the Orientals were heathens, they felt no shame in recounting their stories of pillage. Writes the late British scholar J. H. Plumb: