Tulipomania - Mike Dash [12]
*Flowers systematically cultivated and improved by man.
*The last man to save his neck by winning this life-or-death race was the grand vizier Haji Salih Pasha in 1822–23.
CHAPTER 4
Stranger from the East
The sailing ships that limped into Goa, the capital of the Portuguese possessions in India, late in October 1529 were in a very sorry state. They were badly battered about and manned, almost literally, by skeleton crews, having lost upward of two thousand men to a combination of fever and starvation on the long voyage out from Lisbon. The commander of the flotilla, a noble named Nunho da Cunha, had survived, however—and his arrival was extremely bad news for Lopo Vaz de Sampayo, the governor of Portuguese India.
Da Cunha carried instructions from the king of Portugal that named him governor in place of Lopo Vaz. Worse, Vaz himself was summoned home in disgrace. The recall had been ordered because word had finally reached Lisbon that Vaz had usurped the royal favorite, who was supposed to have been appointed governor, and ruled the Portuguese enclaves on India’s west coast for two years in his stead. Lopo Vaz returned home a prisoner and languished in jail until 1532, when he was banished to Africa for a while to await an eventual pardon.
All this matters because Lopo Vaz de Sampayo is said to be the man who introduced the tulip to Western Europe. The horticulturist Charles de la Chesnée Monstereul, in his Le Floriste François, published in 1654, says that Vaz brought the tulip home with him from Ceylon, and several other seventeenth-century authorities make an identical claim.
It is, however, difficult to see how Lopo Vaz could have accomplished this feat, given the circumstances of his return. To begin with, tulips do not grow in Ceylon, and the island is hundreds of miles off the route Portuguese ships took when they were sailing home. And though it would not be unreasonable to suppose that the Portuguese in Goa had acquired the flower—either from the Persians they sometimes dealt with in the gulf, or from Indians who had them from one of Babur’s gardens in the north of the subcontinent—the voyage to Lisbon was an arduous one that took about six months when the conditions were good, and anything up to two and a half years when they were not.
If the story about Lopo Vaz is true, then, he must have been a tulip maniac of some distinction—keen enough on flowers to persuade his captors to allow him to take his bulbs on board and perhaps even cultivate them in pots on the appallingly crowded and squalid little ships that the Portuguese used to sail to India and back. This is not quite impossible; prisoners of quality got decent treatment in those days whatever their crimes, and Vaz was certainly not carried back to Lisbon in chains. But it is improbable enough for us to doubt that this undistinguished and unlucky noble really deserves to be remembered as the man who first brought the tulip to Europe.
The truth is that no one knows exactly how or where or when the flower first left Asia. The Turks and Persians grew so many of the flowers, and the bulbs were so eminently portable, that it would be very surprising if at least a handful of tulips did not find their way west at some point during the Middle Ages. If they did, however, there is no record of them in the illustrations or chronicles produced at the time, so they can hardly have been planted in quantity or spread far, and the same applies to any specimens that may have come to Portugal from India; when European botanists did encounter the tulip in the 1560s they thought the flower a great novelty, something entirely new.
Occasionally, some new piece of evidence suggesting that the tulip was present in Europe before the mid-sixteenth century is uncovered, but none has gone without challenge. There is, for example, the problem of the wild red and yellow tulips of the species T. silvestris and T. australis, that still grow wild