The Covenant (16 page)

T
HERE WAS NO CLOSE PARALLEL TO THE MIRACULOUS THING
that happened at the cape called Good Hope.

In 1488 Captain Bartholomeu Dias in a Portuguese caravel rounded this cape, which he considered to be the southernmost point of Africa, and he proposed going all the way to India, but like other captains before and after, he found his crew afraid and was forced by their near-mutiny to turn back.

In 1497 Captain Vasco da Gama landed near the cape, remaining eight days and establishing contact with large numbers of small brown people who spoke with clicks.

In the ensuing century the Portuguese penetrated to the far reaches of the Indian Ocean: Sofala of the gold dust, Kilwa the splendid entrepôt, Aden and its shrouded figures, Hormuz with the metaled jewelry of Persia, Calicut offering the silks of India, and Trincomalee with the rare cinnamon of Ceylon. It was a world of wonder and riches which the Portuguese dominated in all respects, shipping its spices back to Europe to be sold at enormous profit and leaving at the outposts priests to Christianize and functionaries to rule.

As early as 1511 one of the greatest Portuguese adventurers, Afonso de Albuquerque, ventured out of the Indian Ocean, establishing at Malacca a great fort that would serve as the keystone to
Portuguese holdings. Whoever controlled Malacca had access to those magical islands that lay east of Java like a chain of jewels; these were the fabled Spice Islands, and their riches lay in fee to Portugal.

During the entire sixteenth century this small seafaring nation transported untold wealth from the area, making irrelevant the fact that Muslims controlled Constantinople. Profit was now made not from tedious overland camel routes but from seaborne traffic. However, it was not this explosive wealth which led to the miracle.

In the opening years of the seventeeth century two other very small European nations decided to seize by force their share of the Portuguese monopoly. In 1600 England chartered its East India Company, known in history as John Company, which quickly gained a solid foothold in India. Two years later the Dutch launched their counterpart, Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (United East India Company), to be known as Jan Compagnie, which operated with stubborn troops and very stubborn traders.

The eastern seas became a vast battleground, with every Catholic priest a forward agent of Portugal, every Protestant predikant a defender of Dutch interests. Nor was it merely a commercial-religious rivalry; real warfare was involved. Three hideous times—1604, 1607, 1608—mammoth Dutch fleets strove to capture the dominating Portuguese fortress on Moçambique Island, and the sieges should have ended in easy victory, because the island was small, 3,200 yards long, 320 yards wide, and defended by as few as sixty Portuguese soldiers against whom the Dutch could land nearly two thousand.

But the defenders were Portuguese, some of the toughest human beings on earth. Once when there was little hope that the few could resist the many, the Portuguese mounted a sortie, swept out of their fortress walls and slew the attackers. The Portuguese commander taunted: “The company defending this fort is a cat that cannot be handled without gloves.” During one of the sieges, when all seemed lost, the Portuguese proposed that the affair be settled by fifty Dutch soldiers fighting a pitched battle against twenty-five Portuguese, “a balance honoring the character of the contesting armies.”

The Dutch tried fire, trenching, towers, secret assaults and overpowering numbers, but never did they penetrate those fortress walls. How different the history of South Africa might have been had the Portuguese defenders been one shade less valiant. If in 1605 the sixty had surrendered to the two thousand, by 1985 the strategic ports of Moçambique would probably rest in the hands of the descendants of
the Dutch; all lands south of the Zambezi River could have been under their rule, and in the ensuing history South Africa would have been the focus, not Java. But never could the Dutch mount that final push which would have carried them to great victory in Africa.

In these years, when a Portuguese soldier disembarked from one of his nation’s ships to take up duty within a fort at Moçambique or at Malacca, on the straits near Java, he could expect during his tour of duty three sieges in which he would eat grass and drink urine. Some of the most courageous resistances in world history were contributed by these Portuguese defenders.

One salient fact differentiated the colonizing efforts of the three European nations: the manner in which the effort related to the central government. The Portuguese operation was a confused amalgam of patriotism, Catholicism and profit; the government at Lisbon decided what should be done, the church ruled the minds of those who did it. When the English chartered their East India Company they intended it to be free of governmental interference, but quickly saw that this was impossible, because unless John Company behaved in a generally moral way, the good name of the nation was impugned; thus there was constant vacillation between commercial freedom and moral control. The Dutch had no such scruples. Their charter was handed to businessmen whose stated purpose was the making of profit on their investment, preferably forty percent a year, and neither the government nor the church had the right to intrude on their conduct. Any predikant who sailed in a ship belonging to Jan Compagnie was promptly informed that the Compagnie would determine what his religious duties were and how they would be discharged.

It was soon apparent that three such radically different approaches would have to collide, and soon the English were battling the Dutch for control of Java, while the Dutch stabbed at Portugal for control of Malacca, and all three fought Spain for control of the Spice Islands. Yet ships of these battling nations constantly passed the Cape of Good Hope, often resting there for weeks at a time, with little effective effort to occupy this crucial spot or arm it as a base from which to raid enemy commerce. It is inconceivable that these maritime nations should have rounded the Cape on their way to war and passed it again on their return without ever halting to establish a base. It is even more difficult to believe that hundreds of merchant ships bearing millions of guilders’ and cruzados’ worth of spices should have been allowed to navigate these difficult waters without
confrontation of some kind. But that was the case. In two hundred years of the most concentrated commercial rivalry in Asia and war in Europe, there was only one instance in which a ship was sunk at the Cape by enemy action.

The explanation, as in the case of many an apparent inconsistency, rested in geography. A Portuguese ship setting out from Lisbon made a long run southwest to the Cape Verde Islands, replenished there and sailed almost to the coast of Brazil before steering southeast to round the Cape for the welcoming anchorage at Moçambique Island, from which it headed east to Goa and Malacca. Dutch and English ships also passed the Cape Verdes, but realizing that the Portuguese would not welcome them, continued south to the crucial island of St. Helena, which they jointly commanded, and once they cleared that haven, it was a brisk run to India. From there the English could head for entrepôts in the Spice Islands while the Dutch could anchor at their tenuous foothold in Java. There was really no reason why anyone need interrupt his journey at the Cape.

So from 1488, when Dias “discovered” it, to 1652—a period of one hundred and sixty-four years climactic in world history—this marvelous headland, dominating the trade routes and capable of supplying all the fresh food and water required by shipping, lay neglected. Any seafaring nation in the world could have claimed it; none did, because it was not seen as vital to their purposes.

Although it was unclaimed, it was not untouched. In this empty period one hundred and fifty-three expeditions actually landed at the Cape, and since many consisted of multiple ships, sometimes ten or twelve, it can be said with certainty that on the average at least one major ship a year stopped, often staying for extended periods. In 1580 Sir Francis Drake, heading home at the end of his circumnavigation with a fortune in cloves, caused to be written in his log:

In 1601 when Sir James Lancaster arrived with a small fleet—an appalling two hundred and nine days out of London—one hundred
and five men were dead of scurvy, with the rest too weak to man the sails. There was one exception; in General Lancaster’s own ship the men were in good shape:

Lancaster kept his men ashore forty-six days, plus five more at anchor in the roads, and during this time he was astonished at the level of society he encountered among the little brown men who occupied the land:

Year after year the ships stopped by, the sailors lived ashore, and the clerks wrote accounts of what transpired, so that there exists a rather better record of the unoccupied Cape than of other areas that were settled by unlettered troops. The character of the little brown people with their clicking tongue is especially well laid out—“they speak from the throat and seem to sob and sigh”—so that scholars throughout Europe had ample knowledge of the Cape long before substantial interest was shown by their governments. Indeed, one enterprising London editor compiled a four-volume book dealing largely with travels past the Cape,
Purchas his Pilgrimes
, and entered unknowingly into literary history as the principal source for
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
.

Two engaging traditions endeared the Cape to sailors. It became the custom that whenever the navigator sensed that he was nearing
the Cape, he would alert the crew, whereupon all ordinary seamen would strain to see who could first cry out: “Table Mountain!” After his sighting was verified, the captain ceremoniously handed him a silver coin, and all hands, officers and men alike, stood at the railing to see once more this extraordinary mountain.

It was not a peak; as if some giant carpenter had planed it down, its top seemed as flat as a palace floor, and not a small floor, either, but a vast one. Its sides were steep and it possessed a peculiarity that never ceased to amaze: at frequent intervals, on a cloudless day when the tabletop showed clear, a sudden wind sweeping north from the Antarctic would throw a cloud of dense fog, and even as one watched, this fog would spread out, obliterating Table Mountain. “The devil throwing his tablecloth,” men would say later, and the mountain would be hidden, with the hem of the cloth tumbling down the sides.

The second tradition was that of the post-office stone. As early as 1501 the captain of a Portuguese vessel passing the Cape came ashore with a letter of instructions to aid future travelers, and after wrapping it in pitched canvas, he placed it under a prominent rock on whose surface he scratched a notice that something of importance lay beneath. Thus the tradition started, and in all succeeding years captains would stop at the Cape, search for post-office stones, pick up letters which might have been left a decade earlier, and deliver them either to Europe or to Java. In 1615 Captain Walter Peyton, in the
Expedition
at the head of a small fleet, found post-office stones with letters deposited by different ships:
James, Globe, Advice, Attendant
. Each told of dangers passed, of hopes ahead.

There are few reports of letters ever having been destroyed by enemies. A ship would plow through the Indian Ocean for a year, fighting at port after port, but when it passed the Cape and posted its letters beneath some rock, they became inviolate, and the very soldiers who had fought this ship would, if they landed for refreshing, lift those letters reverently and carry them toward their destination, often dispatching them on a route that would take them through two or three intervening countries.

What was the miracle of the Cape? That no seafaring nation wanted it.