The Indian Ocean (38 page)

New crops have been listed in many places. However, a flow of new varieties from one place to another was not an innovation in the sixteenth century. Some products and styles that are today spread all around the ocean originated in the distant past in one particular area. The best example is bananas, which came from Indonesia with the migrants to Madagascar, and subsequently were much modified and improved in Africa. The areca nut, a mild stimulant which originated in southeast Asia, again is ubiquitous around the ocean. Ibn Battuta was offered some in Mogadishu as a gesture of respect for his learning. Newitt and Middleton provide quite long lists of products, techniques and crops imported into, and indigenised in, East Africa: cotton, rice, bananas, coconuts, mangoes, outrigger canoes, looms, square houses and the use of coral cement in construction.
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Sub-Saharan Africa over many centuries received from further east, via Hurmuz, the Hadhramaut, northern Ethiopia and then the Sudan, bananas, taro, pigs, goats, sheep, cattle, chickens.

Most plants which came from the Americas to Europe were transmitted by the Spanish, but Brazil sent to all of Africa, and to India and China, Indian corn, manioc, sweet potatoes, peanuts, cashews, pineapples, hot peppers, papaya, pumpkins and squashes. The Spanish made available such American species as tobacco, chillies, pineapples, sweet potatoes, corn, avocado and guavas.
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Tobacco provides an excellent example of flows and adopting. In the early seventeenth century the rulers of both England and Mughal India fulminated against the disgusting habit of smoking the noxious weed. Within the Portuguese empire the main production area was Bahia, from whence it was exported either direct to Goa, or via Lisbon and so to the Indian Ocean. The Portuguese also sent it to Macau, and into Qing China. Indian peasants were cultivating it with some enthusiasm by the early seventeenth century, and indeed many crops were taken up in new locations as a market appeared.
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Coffee originated in Yemen, but once a demand for it appeared in Europe, around 1700, the VOC picked it up and established plantations in Java. Around 1715 Java produced less than 2,000 pounds, but twenty years later it was producing nearly 6 million.
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The source of other products did not necessarily change, but the pattern and extent of distribution did. Tea from China is the best example. In 1701 for the first time the EIC imported over 100,000 lbs of this mild stimulant; this soon rose to over 1 million, and from 1747 was very seldom less than 3 million. Cowry shells, a humble and very important currency, provide another excellent example which we have mentioned before (see pages 84–5). The best examples of this gastropod come from the Maldives. These shells were very widely used indeed. They were especially prevalent in the Bay of Bengal, but they were also used in Timbuktu, Benin, and in the valleys of the Ganga and the Niger. Most African slaves were purchased with cowries. Other wide connections are legion. There was a 'seal rush' in
the 1770s. Sealers from New England hunted seals in the southern ocean, sold the skins in Guangzhou, and took home tea or silk. In the early eighteenth century the famous and luxurious 'gold cloth' of Gujarat was purchased by the mikado of Japan, the king of Thailand, and the Zaidi imam of Yemen. One of the best markets for madeira wine was the European communities in India and Guangzhou. Pirates operated globally (see page 000). The 250 or more blue and white willow-pattern tiles in the Cochin synagogue came from China around 1760. And so on....

Nor was it only people and products. Religious chains of authority spread, in the case of Christianity, all over the world, while Mecca was the sacred city for Muslims from all over the world. The vast seventeenth-century Baroque churches in Old Goa, especially the Sé Cathedral and the Basilica of Bom Jesu, are based on European models, albeit with some Indian input in decoration.

As people moved, so also did disease. The massive mortality in the Americas was not matched anywhere in the Indian Ocean world, because the area had been for centuries part of a Eurasian, or Afrasian, disease pool. The only important example of a new disease reaching the Indian Ocean was a much more virulent version of syphilis. It is believed that someone on Columbus' second voyage was responsible for bringing the infection into Europe, where it spread with remarkable rapidity. There was a case reported from Guangzhou as early as 1502, and in 1505 the Italian Varthema in Calicut claimed that the ruler had 'the French disease ["Frangi"] and had it in the throat.'
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However, it was not new diseases which affected populations around the ocean so much as faster communications, and increased densities of people in certain places: examples are the hordes congregated for the hajj, and the increasing populations of the port cities, especially from late in our period. Greater population concentrations meant that the protection provided by the vast expanses of the ocean was overcome, and crowd disease, such as cholera, smallpox and plague increasingly flourished; they had of course been present for many centuries.

It is time now to turn away from products, crops and politics, and look at people moving over the ocean for religious reasons. We will look at conversions, at the travels of religious exemplars keen to fortify the faith of their followers, and at pilgrimage in the context of widespread travels over the ocean. These three matters are very intricately mixed, but for heuristic reasons we will separate them to an extent. For that matter, there also are important links and connections with all of the preceding discussion: for example, the Portuguese opposed the Muslim pilgrimage, arguably the activities of their fleets hindered their own conversion drive, and most pilgrims chaffered their way to their destination, thus engaging in trade.

Conversion is a rather nebulous term. It is best to see it as a long process, taking perhaps several generations. There are entry points to be sure. For Muslims, to pronounce the profession of faith – 'There is no God but God, and Muhammad is his Prophet' – is a start. For Christians it would begin with baptism. However, for the exemplars of both of these religions the task then was to consolidate and improve. A whole world of social habits, customs, beliefs had to be set aside. The aim was not
additive change, where a new superstructure was imposed on a bedrock of existing believe, but rather substitutive change, where a totally new world view was imposed. This is where people I refer to as rectifiers were important; these men strove to improve the quality of religious practice of people who were already, ostensibly, members of their faith. For these people the term missionary would be inappropriate, for missionaries try to spread, not improve, the faith. We will begin with conversions.

The two main drives were those led by Muslims and Christians. However, it was only the Catholics who spent much effort on this: the Protestant Dutch and English provided spiritual counsel for their own people, but made no effort to convert anyone else. There are many similarities, and many contrasts. The Muslim effort was much more inchoate than the Christian one, which was directed from Europe – from Lisbon and from Rome. Christian missionaries were supported by the political authorities, Muslim ones much less so. Christian missionaries were foreign, Muslim ones rather less so. On the other hand, both frequently relied on the time-honoured 'trickle down from the top' technique, whereby great effort was put into converting a king or other political figure, with the expectation that his subjects would then follow suit.

Muslims obviously had a head start over the Christians in their race to convert people. We described some aspects of their conversion efforts in an earlier chapter (see pages 76–80). Accounts, or more correctly complaints, by Christian missionaries give us good information on how Islam was spread. As a Jesuit lamented from Goa in 1560, what was most disturbing and lamentable was 'to see how the
cacizes
[Muslim divines] of the accursed and abominable sect of Muhammad confound us, because they come from Mecca and from Persia and from many other places to infect and corrupt the poor Hindus who are almost tabula rasa', and their message had a very great appeal indeed. Often they won by default; what was needed was more Christian missionaries to counter these overly successful Muslims. The same Jesuit added that

the partisans of Muhammad don't sleep, rather their
cacizes
make themselves into seamen, and thus can go around preaching their accursed sect; and they have done so well that it seems incredible the number of gentiles that in a few years have here submitted to this evil sect, and I believe that here they have a great advantage over us.

Another Jesuit at the same time expanded on this Muslim conversion technique, describing again how they travel as 'lascars, which is the same as sailors', on Portuguese boats even, and sowed their 'evil seed' wherever the boat called, even as far as China, Siam and Java.

The main arena in our period was southeast Asia. Western Indonesia was converted before the Portuguese and Spanish arrived, mostly by new Muslims from India, especially from Gujarat and other coastal areas. It is a matter of missionary activity undertaken by people themselves relatively new converts, and again the
mechanism was trade and the use of the sea as a highway for the spread of Islam. It is debatable whether Muslims who were responsible for converting large numbers of people in southeast Asia can be described precisely as 'missionaries'. Few Muslims who spread their faith in the area were religious specialists engaged in fulltime proselytisation, in the way the members of the Christian orders were. Most conversions to Islam apparently were made by people who were traders or travellers, pious no doubt but engaged in worldly activities also. Many traders were members of Sufi orders, and indeed it is a matter of degree, for while most were primarily traders, a few were religious guides for their fellow Muslims and also people interested in spreading the faith.

Once the Portuguese arrived they engaged in vigorous competition with their Muslim rivals. The situation in Siam in the middle of the sixteenth century was well described in a letter by the adventurer-turned-religious Fernão Mendes Pinto. He told his Jesuit fellows that there were various religious beliefs followed in Siam, but the Muslims were doing very well. Already in the capital there were seven mosques, with foreign
cacizes
, and 30,000 hearths of Muslims. Proselytisation proceeded apace. The king, however, maintained a hands-off attitude to the whole matter: 'The king lets everyone do what they want; they can be Muslim or gentile, for he says he is king of nothing more than their bodies.'

The Christian missionaries tried to work from the top. This worked well in Japan, but not so much elsewhere. In India the Jesuits hoped to convert the Mughal emperor Akbar, after which the rest of India would follow. Hence the ecstatic claims from time to time that the Great Mughal was listening to them, was favourably inclined to them, was now no longer a Muslim, and indeed on occasion that his conversion was imminent. Alas, the hopes were all ill-founded, showing no doubt a Counter-Reformation failure to understand how Akbar could find some merit in all the great religious traditions. As was ruefully noted, he remained as Muslim as he had ever been. So also at a more humble level in Goa, where they encouraged the elite to convert, offering them jobs and other favours in return. In 1548 Lakshman decided to convert. He was a great catch. The bishop performed the ceremony, the governor stood as his godfather, and, now called Luquas de Sá, he was given an important government post.

Letters home to Europe from the religious often complain of the lack of support they received from the secular authorities. Most Spanish and Portuguese governors and captains put political, and especially economic, matters before conversions. Indeed, the efforts of the missionaries were often hindered and obstructed, rather than facilitated, by their fellow Christians. In many areas of seaborne Asia the Portuguese in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had unenviable reputations. This was both at an official and individual level. The Portuguese tried forcibly to monopolise trade in spices and some other products, and direct other Asian trade, forcing all sea trade to pay customs duties to them at their forts. Most sea trade in the Arabian Sea, and increasingly also in island southeast Asia, was handled by Muslims; this political and economic conflict spilt over into religious hostility, indeed the two were symbiotic and fed on each other.

Nor was it only the official policies of the Portuguese state which contributed to their unsavoury reputation. The conduct of private Portuguese traders also at times lowered the reputation of them all. It is true that these private traders simply operated in Indian Ocean waters on a basis of equality with any other petty traders, but even so their moral reputation seems to have been a low one; again this must have exacerbated the difficulties of their compatriots who were trying to make conversions, and must have made the task of the competition, the cacizes, that much easier. A longish account, admittedly by a hostile Spanish priest, makes clear precisely this problem. Writing in the later seventeenth century about Cochinchina, he said that

The Women there being too free and immodest, as soon as any Ship arrives, they presently go aboard to invite the Men; nay, they even make it an Article of Marriage with their own Countrymen, that when Ships come in, they shall be left to their own Will, and have liberty to do what they please.... A Vessel from Macao came to that Kingdom, and during its stay there, the Portugueses had so openly to do with those Infidel Harlots, that when they were ready to sail, the Women complained to the King, that they did not pay them what they owed them for the use of their Bodys. So the King ordered the Vessel should not stir till that debt was paid. A rare Example given by Christians, and a great help to the conversion of those Infidels! Another time they were so lewd in that Kingdom, that one about the King said to him, 'Sir, we know not how to deal with these people, the Dutch are satisfied with one Woman, but the People of [Portuguese] Macao are not satisfied with many.'