A world lit only by fire_ the medieval m - William Manchester [120]
Off the Genoese seaman went, navigating by dead reckoning and, legend has it, crying to his men, “Adelante! Adelante!” (“Forward! Forward!”). Returning early in 1493, he electrified Christendom by reporting complete success. In Barcelona Isabella and Ferdinand held a grand reception for him. Honoring him with the titles Viceroy of the Indies and Admiral of the Ocean Sea (Almirante del Mar Océano), they told him to organize more expeditions to the Orient. Actually he couldn’t. He had found, not Asia, but the Bahama island of San Salvador. He refused to abandon his claim to the discovery of Cathay, however, and although he returned to the New World three times, he never changed his mind. He called the natives he encountered Indians, which is why the Caribbean Islands have been known as the West Indies ever since. In 1496, he was unable to sail around Cuba. His officers explained that they were thwarted by bad weather, but Columbus rejected the explanation. The real reason, he said, was that they were lying off an Oriental peninsula. He thought it was probably Malaya.
His claims continued to be accepted. In Lisbon King Manuel, ascending the throne in 1495, assumed that the Spaniards had stolen a march on him. Jealous, and aware of the pleas of Bartolomeu Dias, he gave Vasco da Gama four vessels and instructions to reach India via the Cape of Good Hope. Da Gama is not among the attractive figures of the age, although in many ways he was typical of it. Brawny, brutal, cruel, and vindictive, he sought to dominate strange lands by terrifying the inhabitants. Once he deliberately set fire to an Arab ship, burning alive some three hundred passengers, including women and children. Nevertheless he earned the rank of almirante, bestowed upon him by his grateful sovereign, for Portugal’s rise as a world power owed much to him. On November 22, 1497, he rounded the cape Dias had found. Equipped with an Arab map and accompanied by an Arab navigator, he pushed on, first reaching Mozambique and Kenya on Africa’s east coast, and then, after a twenty-three-day run across the Indian Ocean, Calicut on the southwest shore of India.
THE PORTUGUESE had finally found a new passage to India, one free of the costly transshipment and tolls exacted by the old routes from Egypt, Arabia, and Persia via Italy. For more than a century the economic consequences of this commercial revolution—for that is what it amounted to—were more spectacular than the discoveries of Columbus and his successors in what was coming to be known as the New World. While Spanish navigators were floundering about in the Caribbean “Indies,” the vaults of Lisbon’s banks were filling up with profits from the new trade. Indeed, until the turn of the sixteenth century the Portuguese scarcely thought of the possibilities lying on the far side of the Atlantic and even then Manuel’s ministers were preoccupied with the markets created by vessels doubling the Cape of Good Hope.
Afonso de Albuquerque took office as governor of Portuguese India in 1509. His duties were more military than civil; fighting Hindus and Muslims, he captured and fortified both Goa and, on the Arabian coast, Aden; then he landed on Ceylon and moved on to seize Malacca on the Malayan Peninsula, the center of the East Indian spice trade. From Malacca alone he sent home $25 million in loot. His Excelência roamed all over the underbelly of Asia. He dispatched twenty ships to the Red Sea, and, in 1512, planted Manuel’s colors in Celebes and the Moluccas. The Portuguese expansion continued to pick up momentum; in 1516
Duarte Coelho opened Thailand and southern Vietnam to Portuguese commerce, and the following year Fernão Peres de Andrade reached trade agreements on the Chinese mainland with both Peking and Canton.
Half a world away, Columbus had continued to make one landing after another in the New World, sending back reports on his increasing