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.
[1502-1503 A.D.]
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.
A Portuguese Captain of the Sixteenth Century
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.
[1505-1509 A.D.]
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.