On the 13th of September of the year 1500, Cabral reached Calicut. He went, not like Vasco da Gama, as a discoverer, but as the emissary of the noble Portuguese monarch, the bearer of his letters and proposals of alliance to the rajah of Calicut. As such he was received in a solemn audience. The Portuguese, donning their richest clothes and their best and brightest arms, thought to make an impression upon the Eastern potentate by their riches; but the representatives of Europe, poor and strong, were to be outdone by the magnificence of opulent India. The polish of their arms was dimmed by the blaze of precious stones “whose rays were blinding.”

The rajah was borne in a palanquin, or litter, upon the shoulders of his nobles, reclining upon silken cushions among coverlets worked in gold thread, falling in folds and edged with borders encrusted with precious stones. The litter advanced slowly, under a silken canopy fringed with gold, and within this double tabernacle appeared the black rajah, covered with precious stones. It was blinding to look upon him. On each side of the canopy were pages stirring the air with fans of peacock feathers, and beside the palanquin came those who bore the insignia of royalty—the sword and dagger, the foil of gold, the symbolical lily-flower, the ewer of water, and finally the cup into which the king spat the betel, the chewing of which makes the teeth pink, and gives “a most sweet breath.”

Throughout the whole length of the procession and bringing up the rear were bands of musicians rending the air with their drums, tom-toms of gold and silver suspended by cords from poles of bamboo, and enormous trumpets, some straight and some curved, raised in the air, which gave the musicians the appearance of elephants with golden trunks, their flags encrusted with rubies and emeralds.

The reception was conducted with solemnity on either side, although they could not understand each other well; the scribes displayed in vain their long palm leaves covered with writing; the Portuguese by signs indicated their wish to establish factories there. The scribes gradually came to understand, and distrusted; and the Portuguese also distrusted the smiles of the rajah. In spite of this, however, their request was granted, and Cabral founded the first Portuguese factory in India at Calicut. Afterwards the Moors came and exclaimed against the intruders who were despoiling them, and, favoured by the natives, fell upon the factory, murdering all the Portuguese therein—fifty in all. Then followed the terrible vengeance of the admiral. He took ten ships of the Arab merchants, and put the crews, five hundred men, to the sword; bombarded the city, and set it on fire.

The burning of Calicut on the 16th of December, 1500, was the gloomy dawn of modern oriental history. In the middle of January (1501) Cabral loaded his ships with pepper and cinnamon and returned to the kingdom. Of the thirteen ships with which he set out a year before, barely three returned with him. The terrible enemy though conquered was not subdued, and this first expedition to India, the first act of a tragedy of more than a century, sketched out the course of its action; assassination, fire, massacre, shipwreck; the sword and pepper; the soldier’s arms in one hand, the merchant’s scales in the other—a modern Carthage; and in the background the open maw of the sea, ready to devour men, ships, and treasure; a perennial fount of vice pouring forth torrents of wickedness.

To inflict a terrible chastisement upon the rajah and to consolidate the factory of Cochin by fortifying it, was the object of the second fleet which set out from Lisbon in February, 1502, under the command of Vasco da Gama, the implacable captain. The story of the voyage is full of horror; and the revenge of the captain a proof of the sanguinary, impassive, and cruel coldness which does indeed exist in the almost African temperament of the Portuguese. Obliterated in peace and subjection it ever bursts out afresh in dominion, victory, and warfare. If such sentiments, alive in the soul of Gama, inspired his actions, his campaign followed no plan, nor could his rude spirit entertain the wide views of the statesman. If he had any plan in view, it was to amaze India by the cruelty of his deeds, and dominate it by the terror of his slaughters. Navigating the Indian seas, Gama met a ship of Arabian merchants going to or coming from Mecca. Besides the crew the ship carried 240 men, passengers with their wives and children. This was on the 1st of October, 1502; “which I shall remember all my life,” wrote the pilot, still horror-stricken at the remembrance of the cowardly way in which the ship was set on fire with all whom it contained, so that every soul perished in the flames or in the sea. Well pleased with himself, the captain steered for Calicut. He intimated to the rajah that he must expel all the Moors, who numbered five thousand families, the richest in the city; saying that any servant of the king Dom Emmanuel was worth more than the Zamorin, and that his master had power to make every palm tree a king! As was to be expected, the rajah refused. Then the captain, who upon anchoring had captured a considerable number of merchants in the port, ordered their hands and ears to be cut off, and crowded them into a boat in which they drifted ashore with the tide, bearing Gama’s answer to the refusal of the wretched prince.

Then he began the bombardment, November 2nd. The city was in flames for the second time, and the lamentations of the people answered the cynical and ferocious laughter of the sailors sheltered behind the sides of the ships near the guns which vomited fire. This was a foolish, cruel, and cowardly deed; for the short lances and arrows of the natives could not measure themselves against the grenades fired from afar on board the ships. Gama left part of his fleet in India under the command of Vincente Sodre, as eminent and celebrated a man as the admiral, whose uncle he was.

The Portuguese dominion thus assumed from the very first the twofold character which it never lost in spite of all subsequent attempts at law and order. On the sea was anarchy and theft; on shore, a succession of blood-thirsty depredations. Vasco da Gama showed how to rule by fire and sword; Sodre showed how to reap a harvest at sea by boarding the ships of Mecca. Piracy and pillage were the two foundations of the Portuguese dominion, its nerves were cannon, and its soul was pepper. When Gama returned from his second voyage a third fleet left Lisbon (April, 1503) with Alfonso de Albuquerque and Duarte Pacheco on board. They went to Cochin to assist the rajah in his war against the rajah of Calicut, and built the first fortress in India. Albuquerque returned to the kingdom; Pacheco remained at Cochin with the troops and ships prepared for the attack. The hero—for he fought like a wild beast in his den of Kambalaan, nobly, disinterestedly, and fiercely—said at once that now all lay with the artillery. This will explain the possibility of the resistance of Pacheco’s seventy men, feebly assisted by the natives, against the fifty thousand attributed to the army of Samundri, rajah of Calicut. But the artillery alone would not have sufficed to repulse the solid body of the enemy’s columns, if the courage and wonderful rapidity of the marches, the ubiquity, so to speak, of the first soldier-hero of the East, had not supported the powerful means of defence. The fleet of Lopo Soares Albergaria brought back Pacheco to the kingdom in 1505. Being a simple and upright man he returned rich in wounds and poor in money and diamonds; he had remained in the captaincy of São Jorge da Mina, from whence he was brought in irons because of the accusations brought against him, to languish in prison for a long time and to die at last in poverty and oblivion. “The fate of this hero,” says Goes,n “was of a nature to warn mankind to beware of the inconstancy of kings and princes and their small remembrance of those to whom they are bound.” And yet Dom Emmanuel owed the consolidation of his still incipient empire in the East to this man.

Dom Francisco de Almeida was the man chosen to be governor of India, now constituted a viceroyalty. He is the first of the successive figures presented by the Portuguese empire of the East; and the first of the three most notable viceroys. The government of India formed three great men—Castro, who may be called a saint; Albuquerque, to whom the name of hero is better adapted; and Almeida, a wise administrator and intelligent factor. The viceroy, his plans matured by observation on the spot, and the first naval war with which he was received by the unrepentant rajah of Calicut, mentally completed his system of government. “Let all our strength be at sea,” he said; “let us refrain from appropriating the land. The old tradition of conquest, the empire of such distant lands, is not desirable. Let us destroy those new races (the Arabs, Afghans, Ethiopians, and Turks) and reinstate the ancient races and natives of this coast; then we will go further. Let us secure with our fleets the safety of the sea and protect the natives in whose name we may practically reign over India. There would certainly be no harm in our having a few fortresses along the coast, but simply to protect the factories from surprise, for their chief safety will lie in the friendship of the native rajahs placed upon their thrones by us, and maintained and defended by our fleets. What has been done so far is but anarchy, scarcely an outline of government, a system of murder, piracy, and disorder which it is necessary to remedy.” The difficulties seemed to him more formidable in that “the past warfare was with beasts, but now we are to fight Venetians and the Turks of the sultan.” The former impunity disappeared as soon as the Venetians and Egyptians launched a powerful fleet upon the Red Sea, with artillery.

Dom Francisco de Almeida advanced up the coast, leaving behind him a trail of ashes and blood which everywhere marked the passage of the Portuguese. The Egyptian admiral still feared the viceroy, and as soon as the fleet had anchored and grappled with his ships, he meant to cut the cables and drift ashore, dragging the Portuguese with him, where the Indian launches and fustas might fall upon them furiously. But the viceroy perceived the snare and ordered the anchors to be prepared in the stern, and the enemy’s ships went ashore alone. It was the 3rd of February (1509), the feast of St. Braz, at noon. The confusion of races gathered in that fight was inextricable; the banners of the cross and crescent flying from the masts covered the most extravagant sentiments and varying beliefs. The truth is that they fought not for faith or fatherland, but furiously disputed the spoils of India; and covetousness can make brothers of men of every faith and children of every race. There were French and Germans as bombardiers on board the Portuguese ships; there were Indian Brahmans and even Moors. On the other side in the confusion of ships there might be found from the Nubian to the Arab; from the Ethiopian to the Affran; there were Mussulmans of every caste; Persians and Rum[161] of Egypt—mercenaries from all parts to whom this generic name was given. Besides the heathen multitude was the Venetian renegade or Catholic—but above all the merchant, who had come with artillery to the Indian Sea by order of his republic to defend the interests of his associates in the commerce of the East. Around the confused bands on board the fleet of the Rum gathered the dark mass of Indians in their junks, from Diu in Guzerat and from Calicut in Kanara.

Once more the waters of the Indian Sea were stained with crimson. Countless numbers perished. The wounded floated, crying for mercy and receiving bullets. At last, after the scenes and episodes proper to such tragedies, the victory fell to the viceroy who destroyed Rum and Indians. This naval victory had a higher importance even than the victories of Duarte Pacheco in Cochin, for the Indians, observing and considering, recognised that the Portuguese forces were invincible not only to themselves but also to the Rum of Egypt and the artillery of Venice. The viceroy remembered that he had lost his son, and “he went and sat under the awning, a handkerchief in his hand which could not stem his falling tears.” All thronged to console him, and recovering his spirits he arose, drying his tears and calling them his sons, and said that this grief had pierced and must ever remain in his heart, but bade them rejoice at the gallant vengeance which God in his mercy had bestowed upon them! But to complete his vengeance for the death of his son, he ordered prisoners to be tied to the mouths of the guns, and the heads and scattered members of these unfortunate wretches were thrown into the city of Kanara like shot. The death of his son disturbed his sound judgment and transformed his former opinions of a statesman to blood-thirsty furies, attested by the devastation of the coast of Guzerat. He yielded also to the intrigues and slanders of the captains who had come from Ormus, recently conquered by Albuquerque and ruled with the terrible wildness of his titanic enterprises. They scoffed at the viceroy who had just finished his term of office, and at Albuquerque, already appointed from Lisbon to succeed him; and treacherous accounts of the excesses of the wise Almeida had already reached the court. The dungeon of Duarte Pacheco awaited him in payment of his labours. However, on his journey to the kingdom he landed on the coast of Kaffraria, and was killed by the natives with assegais and javelins.

His plan of government, though wise, was chimerical, for India itself was insanity. Only a man of genius like Albuquerque could make the doomed enterprise great. Only a saint like Castro could save the Portuguese valour from the stain of positive ignominy. Dominion, as Almeida conceived it, was not to despoil; it was armed protection extended to a commerce, free on one side, and the monopoly of the state or appanage of the crown on the other. The captains and governors should be simultaneously commercial agents of his majesty, the high trader in pepper. This required a stolidity of which the Dutch alone were capable and that at the cost of salaries which outweighed temptation. Besides this, the Portuguese flung themselves famished upon this eastern banquet, as did the races of the north, centuries before, upon the banquet of Gaul, Italy, and Spain. No one could have wrenched from their fangs the palpitating flesh which they so anxiously devoured; the fatal consequences which Dom Francisco de Almeida wisely foretold were inevitable. Albuquerque in Ormus, Goa, and Malacca, established on land the limits of the empire, which in his predecessor’s judgment should have floated vaguely on the waves.

King Emmanuel forgave everything, crimes, robbery, incendiarism, and piracy, so long as they sent him what he most longed for, curiosities, novelties and riches, to fill his palaces in Lisbon and dazzle the pope in Rome with his magnificent embassy. “Send pepper, and lie down to sleep,” said Tristan da Cunha later on, writing from the court in Lisbon to his son Nuño, governor of India. The sack of the East—such a name best fits the Portuguese dominion—was already ordained in Lisbon.m

Albuquerque, like Almeida, for all his splendid services, was rewarded with envy and ingratitude. His abilities, his bravery, his successful administration made the courtiers fear or pretend that he aimed at an independent sovereignty in those regions; and by their representations they prevailed on the king to recall him. Dom Lopo Soares was despatched from Lisbon to supersede him. But before his successor arrived, he felt that his health was worn out in the service of his country; he made his last will, and died at sea, within sight of Goa. However violent some of his acts, his loss was bewailed by both Indians and Portuguese. He certainly administered justice with impartiality; laid no intolerable burdens on the people; restrained the licentiousness of his officers; and introduced unexampled prosperity throughout the wide range of the Portuguese establishments. If to this we add that the qualities of his mind were of a high order, that he was liberal, affable, and modest, we shall scarcely be surprised that, by his enthusiastic countrymen, he was styled the Great. It is probable that no other man would have established the domination of Portugal on so secure a basis: it is certain that no other, in so short a period, could have invested the structure with so much splendour. His remains were magnificently interred at Goa, and his son was laden with honours by the now repentant Emmanuel—the only rewards of his great deeds (1515).

Under the successors of Albuquerque, the administration of India was notorious for its corruption, imbecility, and violence, and in the same degree as wisdom and justice were discarded, so did the military spirit decay.e

EMMANUEL THE FORTUNATE

When Dom Emmanuel I had been proclaimed king in the town of Alcacer on the 27th of October, 1495, he had reached the age of twenty-six. He had found everything prepared for a quiet and prosperous reign; his predecessor, João II, had smoothed the way for him by overthrowing the power of the nobility. The conciliation of the fidalgos and great lords was easily effected.

Two matters seriously occupied the new king during the first years of his reign—his marriage, and the discovery of India. In the hope that he or his descendants would one day unite the crowns of Spain and Portugal, Dom Emmanuel desired to marry the widow of his nephew. The Catholic sovereigns, having first approved the king of Portugal’s request, appointed as their agent Ximenes, who was afterwards cardinal. The marriage of the king, Dom Emmanuel, and Doña Isabella of Castile being agreed upon, a treaty was made at Burgos, on the 30th of November, 1496, in which large dowries in money were promised on both sides.

In 1497, the king sent his delegate to Castile to continue the negotiations, and a new article was introduced into the treaty, to which the Catholic sovereigns attached extraordinary importance, going so far as to make it a question of annulling the treaty of Burgos and breaking off the marriage. This article was that Dom Emmanuel should expel from his kingdom and dominions all the Jews or Moors who refused baptism, and all those who had been found guilty of heresy or apostasy, the clause to be fulfilled before September, 1497. Such was the origin of the greatest political mistake and blackest injustice perpetrated by the “fortunate” king, Dom Emmanuel, which left an indelible stain upon his happy reign; for the ambition of eventually uniting the crowns of Portugal and Castile cannot be considered a sufficient excuse. Dom Emmanuel fulfilled this treaty, expelling from his kingdom all the Jews and free Moors who refused baptism, including all those unfortunates who, banished from Spain in 1492 by the Catholic sovereigns Ferdinand and Isabella, had fled to Portugal thinking to find in that country a refuge from the intolerance and tyranny of Castile. In October, 1497, the marriage of King Emmanuel of Portugal with the princess Isabella, daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Castile, and widow of Prince Alfonso, son of João II, took place in the town of Valencia de Alcantara.

It seemed at first that Dom Emmanuel’s lucky star would not abandon him in his relations with Castile. Indeed the kings of Portugal and Castile were still at Valencia de Alcantara when they received the news of the unfortunate death of the prince Don Juan, heir to the crown of Castile. By this event Doña Isabella, queen of Portugal, wife of Dom Emmanuel, became heir presumptive to the kingdoms of Castile, Aragon, and Leon. This fact, which plunged the kingdoms of Spain in consternation, filled Dom Emmanuel with joy and promised to satisfy his ambitions more promptly than could have been expected.

But his wife was advanced in pregnancy. In spite of her state, she resolved to continue her journey and go to Saragossa to be sworn heir to the throne of Aragon. Here she was seized with the pains of child-birth, and on the 24th of August, 1498, brought forth the infante Dom Miguel, in that city, his birth costing his mother her life. And Miguel died two years later.

Thus the dream of Dom Emmanuel vanished like smoke. The famous expulsion of the Jews and New Christians, an iniquitous measure, unwise and unpolitic, price of the marriage with Doña Isabella, was not a happy augury. Once more the attempt at an Iberian union under the sceptre of a Portuguese king by matrimonial means had failed.

Dom Emmanuel did not completely lose hope in his relations with Castile[162] by the death of his wife and son. The Catholic sovereigns also seemed determined on an alliance with Portugal. Without loss of time, in the same year, 1500, Dom Emmanuel sent Ruy de Saude, of his council, as ambassador to the sovereigns of Castile with full powers to request the hand of the infanta Doña Maria, the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella, and consequently sister-in-law of the king of Portugal. The heirs to the crown of Castile were Doña Juana, daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella, and her husband, son of the emperor Maximilian and the empress Mary of Burgundy. The princess of Castile had already a son at that time, Charles, who was born at Ghent in Belgium on the 24th of February, 1500, and was afterwards Charles I of Spain and V of Germany. Queen Isabella died on the 25th of November, 1504, and King Ferdinand on the 23rd of January, 1516. The throne of Castile was lost to Dom Emmanuel. The crown of Spain was about to pass to the house of Austria. The wedding to Maria nevertheless took place at Alcacer-do-Sal on the 30th of October, 1500.

In the same year, 1500, Gaspar Cortereal went to North America and discovered the land of Labrador, which was then called Cortereal, getting beyond 50° north latitude. He returned to Portugal, and repeated his voyage in 1501, but was never heard of again. His brother, Miguel, went in search of him, but he also disappeared. Other lands and islands were discovered in the time of Queen Maria. In 1501, João da Nova,[163] on his voyage to India, discovered the Ascension Island in the Atlantic, and the island which bears his name on the coast of Africa. On his return journey in 1502 he discovered the island of St. Helena in the Atlantic. The Florentine Amerigo Vespucci made voyages to America by order of Dom Emmanuel in 1501 and 1503, discovering Rio de la Plata and Patagonia. This navigator had the glory of giving his name to the group of lands discovered by Columbus, Cabral, etc. In 1506 were successively discovered: by Tristan da Cunha, the islands of that name in the Atlantic; by Ruy Pereira Coutinho and Fernão Soares, the western and eastern coasts of the island of Madagascar; in 1507, the Maldive Islands by Dom Lourenço de Almeida; in 1509, by Diogo Lopes de Sequeira, Malacca (Malay Peninsula) and Sumatra; in 1512, by Francisco Serrão, the Molucca Islands in the Chinese seas; in 1513, by Pedro Mascarenhas, the island to which he gave his name and which is at present called Réunion, in the Indian Ocean; in 1516, Duarte Coelho discovered Cochin-China; in 1517, Fernão Peres de Andrade went to China.k

THE GREAT VOYAGE OF MAGELLAN

The celebrated line of demarcation between the right of discovery and conquest was not so clearly understood as to avoid disputes between Dom Emmanuel and his brother sovereign of Castile. His splendid empire in the East had long attracted the jealousy of Ferdinand, who had frequently attempted, but as frequently been deterred by his remonstrances, to share in the rich commercial advantages thus offered to the sister kingdom. After the death of that prince, a disaffected Portuguese who had served Emmanuel with distinction both in Ethiopia and India, and who was disgusted with the refusal of his sovereign to reward his services with becoming liberality, fled into Castile, and told the new king, Charles V of Austria, that the Molucca Islands, in virtue of that line, rightfully belonged to Spain. This man was Ferdinand Magellan (Fernão de Magalhães), whose name is immortalised in the annals of maritime discovery. He proposed a shorter route to the Moluccas than the passage by the Cape of Good Hope—the route by Brazil: he well knew that the American continent must terminate somewhere, and his notion of the earth’s rotundity was sufficiently just to convince him that a western voyage would bring him to the same point as the one discovered by Dias and Vasco da Gama. In August, 1519, he embarked at Seville, with five vessels, over the crews of which he was invested with the power of life and death. On reaching the Brazilian coast, he cautiously proceeded southwards, and in September, 1520, arriving at a cape which he called after the Eleven Thousand Virgins, he passed into the dreaded straits which bear his name. After a passage of fifteen hundred leagues, unexampled for its boldness, he reached the Philippine Islands. Here closed his extraordinary career in 1521. Though the object of the expedition failed, through the catastrophe of its leader, he will be considered by posterity as by far the most undaunted, and in many respects the most extraordinary man that ever traversed an unknown sea.e

In the midst of this splendid series of voyages and discoveries, and of brilliant victories and conquests of the Portuguese in Asia, a fatal incident afflicted Lisbon, in the year 1506. The deplorable catastrophe which plunged the capital in mourning sprang from religious intolerance, of which Dom Emmanuel had given such a fatal example on the occasion of his first marriage. On Low Sunday, the 19th of April, 1506, in the church of St. Dominic in Lisbon, where a vast concourse of people were assembled, the rays of the sun striking upon the splendour of a crucifix produced such a brilliant effect that certain visionaries, religious, or fanatics, took it for a miracle. The cry of “a miracle” already flew from mouth to mouth, when a bystander, more intelligent but with little prudence for his speech, suggested that this effect was due to the reflection of the sun and could only be called a natural phenomenon. This sufficed to cause him to be looked upon as a disguised Jew; a tumult arose, and such was the frenzy of the populace that a horrible massacre upon the so-called New Christians followed.

The massacre lasted for three days. More than a thousand persons perished. Dom Emmanuel was at Aviz at the time. As soon as he heard of what had occurred in the capital, he sent Dom Diogo Lobo, baron de Alvito, and the prior of Crato with full powers to punish the guilty.

He ordered that besides the special punishment of the guilty all the inhabitants should forfeit a fifth of all their property, movable and immovable, to the crown, and that from the date of the sentence there should be no more courts of aldermen, freemen of guilds, nor judges of hospitals; he further subjected the municipality to the jurisdiction of the harbingers, the amount of these impositions to be levied by officers of the crown. This species of interdict lasted for two years.

This splendid period of the reign of Dom Emmanuel, which includes the years 1500 to 1517, the eighteen years during which the fortunate monarch was married to Doña Maria of Castile, the most brilliant in Portuguese history for the military glory and wealth and commerce enjoyed by Portugal, and in which science, letters, and art were so flourishing—was not equally happy as regards public health, the safety of the lives and property of the inhabitants of these kingdoms, and internal administration.

The plague, which had frequently visited Portugal since the fifteenth century, attacked and ravaged the capital many times, as well as other towns of this kingdom; then royalty and those able to follow their example might be seen flying from the infected places. Real preventive measures were never adopted until the reign of João III. Novenas, feast-days, processions of the relics of St. Roque, which Dom Emmanuel sent for from Venice, such were the chief means adopted by the king and people to combat the epidemic, not, however, forgetting the safest course of flight.k

Dom Emmanuel died December 12th, 1521, after one of the most glorious reigns on record. Of his public administration enough has been said; and of his private character what little we know is chiefly in his favour. He administered justice with impartiality; and had regulated hours when he received his subjects without distinction; nay, such was his anxiety to do them justice, that if at the expiration of the appointed period complaints remained unredressed, he would sacrifice the hours sacred to enjoyment or repose. The persecution of the unfortunate Jews is a deep stain on his memory; but in every respect he was a great monarch, and his fame filled the world as much as his enlightened policy enriched his kingdom. He despatched embassies to all the potentates of his time—to the king of England, and the ruler of Abyssinia; to the royal chief of Congo, and the sultan of Egypt; to the sultan of Persia, and the emperor of China. Some of them—that, for instance, in which he displayed before the astonished pope and cardinals a Persian panther and an Indian elephant, with their native attendants—were distinguished by magnificence suitable to the lord of so many regions.e

FOOTNOTES