The Indian Ocean (28 page)

To investigate the legitimacy of this claim, we need to consider whether there had indeed been any previous attempt to establish control, sovereignty, or even just suzerainty over the Indian Ocean. And we need to decide whether or not the copious violence which the Portuguese used to enforce their aims was new in the ocean.

The juridical matter is rather complicated. When the Portuguese sailed into the Indian Ocean in 1498 they carried with them baggage from the Mediterranean, such as the Roman claim to Mare Nostrum, and generally a tendency towards thalassocracy. As Mollat noted, from very early times in Europe 'the domination of the sea was a natural objective of maritime cities.'
16
In 1498 they entered a body of water which was almost completely
mare incognita
to them. They also implicitly considered it to be
mare liberum
, that is, as Barros noted, a sea space which had not been claimed by any previous state or other body. The distinction between
mare clausum
and
mare liberum
was set out by Grotius in the early seventeenth century, acting as a supporter of Dutch pretensions at sea. However, the notion of
mare clausum
can be traced back to the mid fifteenth century. The key question in evaluating Portuguese claims is to decide whether control over the Indian Ocean had already been parcelled out among the existing maritime powers, or was it a free international
highway? Alexandrowicz finds that there was freedom of navigation on the high seas. Grotius ridiculed the Portuguese claim that they had now occupied the high seas, for many others had sailed over it before them. Yet Grotius seems here to be setting aside the Portuguese claim that while certainly people had travelled over the sea before 1498, no state had claimed either sovereignty or even suzerainty. Thus, he said, the Indian Ocean before Europeans entered was
res communis
, that is open to all.
17
This has a nice echo of the modern concern with the notion of the sea as the last of the Commons.

If this be accepted, then it has to be argued that the Portuguese claim had, in their eyes, some validity; there was no preceding right of passage claimed so they could do it, and if necessary use force. There was a juridical vacuum which they could fill if they chose, which they did thanks to their own notions as set out above.

The second area of controversy concerns the existence, or prevalence, of state violence in the Indian Ocean before the Portuguese arrival. We discussed this matter at some length in the previous chapter (see pages 97–9). To sum up, there certainly had been violence at sea before the Portuguese arrived. Piracy was very widespread indeed, and took a heavy toll on merchant shipping. We will say more about this presently. There even are a few instances of Asian states at this time or in the past using sea power, such as Srivijaya, and the Cola state. However, it does not seem that any of these powers had very effective navies. We should see their maritime efforts as being completely adjunct to their land ones: their navies were only auxiliaries to their armies. Similarly, the controllers of the various port cities, such as Calicut, Melaka, Cambay, Hurmuz, made no attempt to force ships to call to trade. It is not too much of an exaggeration to say that the Portuguese introduced state controlled violence into the Indian Ocean.

Some Portuguese violence was not directly done by the state, but was tacitly accepted. Professor Thomaz wrote that,

Whereas the chief aim of the system of control set up by the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean was attained only in parts, its by-products seem, on the contrary, to have developed beyond all expectation. We refer mainly to extortion, bribery, peculation and piracy. The Bay of Bengal, which lay virtually out of reach of the Portuguese authorities, was the ideal ground for such activities.
18

He sees violence as implicit in the whole Portuguese presence in the Indian Ocean, especially in the matter of privateering. These state-sanctioned fleets could plunder ships outside the Portuguese system, and the proceeds were divided up among the officers and crew of the successful ship according to set shares laid down by the state. I would extrapolate a little more from this important point than Thomaz is prepared to do. The Portuguese unilaterally dictated a closed Indian Ocean, and then the king, instead of having to pay his men to enforce this, instead let the victims pay by letting his soldiers plunder those who infringed. This sounds very precisely like the sort of protection racket one gets in many societies, where a criminal element
collects protection from shop keepers in return for not breaking their windows. Analogous to this is the failure to capture Aden. It could be that this suited Portuguese captains very well. They could patrol and plunder, seize prizes and take bribes; had Aden been Portuguese these opportunities would have been reduced.

One way to demonstrate that peaceful trade was the accepted norm in Asian waters is to see how locals responded when first faced with European demands. What we find is surprise at such unprecedented notions, which clearly flew in the face of accepted practice at the time. The Portuguese in 1502 tried to get the ruler of Calicut to expel his 'foreign' Muslim traders, but he responded that he could not do this, 'for it was unthinkable that he expel 4,000 households of them, who lived in Calicut as natives, not foreigners, and who had contributed great profits to his Kingdom.' A century later the ruler of Surabaya, in eastern Java, was asked by the Dutch not to trade with the Portuguese as they were enemies, and he replied 'that he could not help it that we were in enmity with the Portuguese and that he did not wish to be in enmity with anyone; also that he could not forbid his people to trade, as they had to support themselves by it.' Later in this century the port of Makassar greatly increased its trade, and the Dutch noted that local merchants flocked there because the ruler 'treats those same foreigners very civilly' and allowed all to trade 'freely and openly, with good treatment, and small demands of tolls.' Unimpressed, the Dutch conquered the port city in 1669.
19

A Muslim inhabitant of Kerala, the famous Zain al-Din, wrote a vigorous denunciation of the Portuguese, as indeed did his brother in a long poem.
20
His vitriol can be contrasted with the benign, wondering, attitudes which greeted the first Portuguese. By the late sixteenth century the locals knew and feared them. He wrote how they attacked ships sailing outside their system, and of course roundly condemned this. He detailed the atrocities the Portuguese committed on Muslims, and added:

In addition to this system of persecution, also, these Franks sallying forth in the directions of Gujerat, the Conkan, and Malabar, and towards the coast of Arabia, would there lie in wait for the purposes of intercepting vessels; in this way, they iniquitously acquired vast wealth and made numerous prisoners. For, how many women of noble birth, thus made captive, did they not incarcerate, afterwards violating their persons, for the production of Christian children….
21

If we accept that Portuguese violence was new, how can it be explained? The precedent we should look at is not a spurious claim of existing violence in the Indian Ocean, but rather precedents from Portugal's European and Moroccan experience. It is often claimed that the Portuguese, unlike their interlocutors in Asia, had been hardened by their long struggles against Muslim enemies, struggles which had no exact counterpart for their Muslim adversaries in the Indian Ocean. As just one example, the Mapillahs, the local Muslims in Kerala, had no tradition of anti-Christian struggle.

The Portuguese anti-Muslim bias was clear, and openly acknowledged in the sixteenth century. It derived from memories of the struggle to free Portugal from Muslim rule, and from the previous North African service of many of the Portuguese, a service consisting of a hard and brutal struggle with Muslim enemies in which atrocities like mutilation of corpses were common. Several authors have pointed to this having a unusually brutalising effect. The author Richard Hall in his recent survey claimed that

The Moroccan crusade in the final decades of the fifteenth century was to set the pattern for Portugal's behaviour in later conquests much further afield. Many of the young knights – the noble
fidalgos
– received unforgettable lessons in plundering, raping and killing without mercy. They came to accept that the lives of Muslims, men, women and children alike, counted for nothing because they were the foes of Christendom.
22

Diffie and Winius put it in a wider context of disregard and contempt for all non-Christians, but at the end again point to Morocco as the formative experience: 'it is wise to remember that Europeans of the age were almost completely without feeling for non-Christian peoples and had little interest in or understanding of cultures other than their own. For the Portuguese especially, nearly a century of vicious fighting in Morocco had brutalised attitudes'.
23
So also with L.F. Thomaz. He notes numerous European precedents for Portuguese actions in the Indian Ocean area, such as privateering to Ceuta and further south. North African precedents were taken around to Asia. 'As Morocco was used as a military training ground for young Portuguese noblemen, most of the captains who served in India had substantial experience of marauding activities and considered these as honourable, worthy of reward from the king, and even of religious merit.'
24

We can use the concept of a frontier society, so fruitful in North American and Australian historiography, to illuminate the Portuguese experience in Asia. The setting, surrounded by 'teeming hordes' of 'natives', contributed to make Portuguese society in general rough, violent and extravagant. In the Portuguese settlements this was exacerbated by an unusually high proportion of soldiers and sailors in the total population. These men were usually discharged and left without pay during the monsoon months when sea patrols were impossible, and at these times especially Goa and other areas were notoriously dangerous.

The strains inherent in a frontier society, and particularly the need for solidarity among the greatly outnumbered Portuguese, was most clearly seen in the way deserters were treated. In 1512 Bijapur attacked Goa. They were beaten off, and had to surrender nineteen Portuguese deserters who had fought for them. Albuquerque had promised not to kill them. He kept his promise, 'but I ordered their noses, ears, right hands and left thumbs to be cut off, for a warning and in memory of the treason and evil that they did.' On this same occasion Albuquerque had another captured renegade burnt alive. Possibly such draconic punishments were not inflicted later, yet certainly many sixteenth century Portuguese authors
commented unfavourably on the large number of former soldiers or householders who had chosen to leave Portuguese areas, and more importantly those who had become renegades, that is had not merely left but now provided military service to enemies of the state.
25
True that it is here a matter of violence to fellow Portuguese rather than to Asians, but this merely reinforces how violent this society was, whether to each other or to the Asian 'Other'.

To complete this study of violence we need to consider piracy, which was prevalent in the Indian Ocean both before and after the arrival of the Europeans. We have already noted piratical activities by some of the Portuguese. In Bengal a ballad went,

The dreaded Portuguese pirates, the Harmads, were constantly watching the movement of these [grain] boats [in the delta], stealthily following them through the nooks of the coast. They plundered the boats and assassinated their crew, and the boatmen and captains of the seaside trembled in fear of the Harmads.
26

They were followed by other Europeans. One of the first English pirates, or perhaps corsairs, in the Indian Ocean arrived in 1635 in two ships, with a royal licence to plunder 'from the Cape to China and Japan, including the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, and the Coromandel coast.' Two years later they returned to England with booty worth £40,000. The mate of one of the ships was David Jones, who liked to scuttle captured ships; hence the sea is sometimes referred to as Davy Jones' Locker.
27

But who is a pirate? To the Portuguese, anyone flouting their system of trade control, most notably the Mapillah traders in Malabar, were pirates. Today we see these people as traditional traders who perforce tried to avoid the Portuguese system and continue trading in pepper and other products just as they had done for centuries. We will later find many other examples of Europeans stigmatising their competitors as pirates, and thus 'legitimate' objects of attacks by navies (see pages 198–9). Regardless, a strong case can be made that the trade control policies of the Portuguese substantially increased piracy, for many Asian traders were dispossessed, and turned to piracy simply in order to survive. This applies to the Malabar traders whose spokesperson was Zain al-Din.

Pirates are a very varied lot, and the attitude of states to them also varied. Some operated with tacit or even open state acquiescence, and so must be seen as corsairs. In 1610 the Sheikh of Qadil, on the Makran coast, allowed piracy, but it had to be focused and controlled. In particular, the Portuguese were not to be targets, as their ships routinely called at the port to get refreshments. The sheik and the pirates agreed to let them alone.
28
So also in Malabar, where at times the rulers of Calicut knew of the activities of the Kunjali corsairs, and at others did not, or claimed not to. Nor were all navies really that opposed to piracy. Mitchell points out that in the early eighteenth century in the Caribbean naval ships quite liked having piracy in the area. The crews of the men of war hired for escort duty were well paid, and could carry freight – illegally – at a premium as they were considered to be very safe. And
in any case pirates never attacked a guarded merchant convoy.
29
So also in the Indian Ocean, where Portuguese crews and captains sometimes, for a price, turned a blind eye to piracy.