The Taste of Conquest (28 page)

S
HIPWRECKS AND
C
USTARD
T
ARTS

Across the railroad tracks and the highway that now separate the Mosteiro dos Jerónimos from the Tejo River stands Lisbon’s best-known monument, an ornate little tower that looks like nothing so much as a toy fortress put up so that children can play king of the castle in the radiant southern sun. Like the monastery, the Torre de Belém is constructed of shiny white limestone and decorated with graceful arches and proud shields bearing the Crusaders’ cross. The whole thing is girded with a faux stone rope tied in a sailor’s knot, as if the architect had decided to gift wrap his present to the king. Yet all this is disguise, an ornate blind with twelve-foot walls, a platform for the sixteen cannons pointed at anyone who would dare trespass into Lisbon’s estuary. From the tower’s highest platform, there’s an unlimited view of the entire river—all the way to where it opens up to greet the Atlantic near Cascais. Any enemy ship arriving from the ocean would have had to sail past these cannons, but perhaps even more important, the lace-covered gun battery reminded any would-be smuggler not to mess with the king. When the pepper-laden ships entered the estuary, they were met by customs officials who followed the ships all the way to Lisbon to make sure none of the crown’s spices were surreptitiously brought to shore.

The sea could be treacherous between here and the mouth of the bay. There, the unseen sandbanks shifted with every storm. Hundreds of ships wrecked within sight of Belém. We know a great deal about one in particular thanks to recent joint American-Portuguese archaeological excavations led by Filipe Castro and Francisco Alves.

On September 15, 1606, the lookouts of the Torre de Belém saw the tall masts of the
Nossa Senhora dos Mártires
careening in the blowing wind, tilting and then crashing to the water as the massive hull struck an underwater obstacle and shattered, spilling cannons,
caixas,
sailors, and close to a million pounds of black pepper into the boiling waters. The next morning,
Lisboetas
awoke to beaches tinted black from the midnight tide of peppercorns. Witnesses report a mad rush to collect the costly cargo washed ashore before the king’s officials could fish out the remainder. Even recently, when the marine archaeologists went looking for the remains of the great
nau,
they discovered them embedded in a layer of muck mixed in with peppercorns. Many of the artifacts were long gone, pilfered by amateur divers and swept away by four centuries’ storms, but in the midst of the peppercorns, the fragments of the hull contained a sampling of the riches of the east—silver pieces of eight, gold jewelry, and Chinese porcelain—as well as the more common pewter plates and earthenware pots that are the bread and butter of the archaeology trade. You can go and see some of the finds at the Museu de Marinha. There’s even a generous pile of peppercorns. Pepper does keep well, but not this well. Some of the team’s members actually tasted the four hundred–year–old peppercorns. Not surprisingly, any trace of taste was gone. All the same, Professor Castro confesses that he detected a dim aroma when he dove down into the deepest of the muddy layers. Mostly, though, the peppercorns were just a flimsy outer layer with nothing inside. They had to be dehydrated in alcohol, then dried with a hair dryer in small batches, and impregnated with glue so that they would not turn to dust in the exhibit.

The breakup of the
Mártires
was just one more incident to add to a rising tally of shipwrecks that were a symptom of an empire that was increasingly as flimsy and hollow as the
Mártires’
peppercorns. You can blame the loss of Lisbon’s spice trade on a long inventory of reasons, but the empire built on a shoestring—and held together with the spit and sealing wax of distant forts and factories—was just too wobbly to sustain the incompetence within and the assault from without.

Much of what went wrong, all my sailor historians are quick to point out, can be blamed on the Spanish. In 1578, King Sebastião I of Portugal (one of the more unhinged of the royal line) got himself killed on yet another crusade against the Moors. The result was that two years later, the Portuguese crown fell into the lap of the workaholic and fanatically religious Hapsburg monarch of Spain, Philip II, thereafter also Filipe I of Portugal. “We refer to those sixty years of Spanish rule as our ‘Babylonian captivity,’” Lieutenant Neves informs me, lest I have any illusions about the love lost between Portugal and her pushy neighbor. Theoretically, the two kingdoms were supposed to stay separate under Philip, but it didn’t work out that way for long. The Spanish ruler just couldn’t keep his fingers off the profits from the spice trade, especially when he needed the money to pay for his religious wars. At the same time, the annual
Carreira da Índia
, which was already depending on too many slaves and convicts to man the sails, lost even more of its experienced sailors to the comfier and more profitable Spanish galleons that used to make the relatively quick passage to the Americas. When Philip sent his disastrous armada to punish England’s Protestant queen in 1588, a good part of his fleet was actually Portuguese. “Those were our ships he wrecked!” Hernâni Xavier spits out. But the Spanish kings had their eyes fixed elsewhere—which meant that Lisbon’s fleet withered and her empire shriveled from neglect.

Holland’s entry into the spice trade—or at least, its timing—can also be laid at Philip’s door. Portugal had had a long, cordial history with the Low Countries from the days when her kings married into Burgundian nobility and her merchants unloaded salt and oil on Bruges’s medieval piers. Throughout most of the sixteenth century, Portuguese pepper was distributed through Antwerp, and Dutch middlemen regularly came down to Lisbon to fill their holds with melegueta, black pepper, and cinnamon. The Portuguese kings had encouraged this trade, granting the Dutchmen a package of privileges analogous to the Venetians’
fondachi
in Muslim lands. The crown even allowed the northerners to practice their heretical rites within their own compound. In 1580, though, Holland was in the midst of an armed rebellion against Spain (the Netherlands had fallen under Hapsburg rule some years earlier). Philip II reacted by closing all his ports to Dutch shipping and sending his shock troops north to bring the heretics to heel. It didn’t work out quite the way he planned. The conquistadores experienced one humiliating defeat after another, and Holland’s navy sailed right up to Gibraltar and sank a Spanish armada a stone’s throw from Andalusia’s shore. With no pepper available to them in Lisbon, the Hollanders decided to go to the Asian source, looting and sinking as many of the enemy’s ships as they could along the way. The poorly manned Portuguese ships were especially tender targets, particularly when compared to the heavily armed Spanish galleons that made up the silver fleet from New Spain.

Goa was always too well defended for the Dutch to take it by force, but Portugal’s other redoubts in the Estado da Índia were picked off one by one. The spice islands of Tidore and Amboina fell in 1605, Malacca in 1641, Ceylon in 1656. Even Cochin, where the
carreira
had so long filled its ships to bursting with pepper, succumbed to Dutch assault in 1663. When, after the sixty years of Spanish captivity, a Portuguese king once again occupied the Paço da Ribeira in 1540, he could count on a mere eleven ships worthy of the name: eight galleons of Portuguese construction—of which, one was not fit to sail—and three other ships that had been seized from the French and the Dutch. In contrast, according to one contemporary estimate, the Hollanders could muster more than fourteen thousand vessels for war! Increasingly, the pepper fleet left India later and later in the season to avoid the Dutch (and later English) marauders, with the result that they missed the dependable winds of the monsoon and wrecked on the way home. The number of wrecks rose so precipitously in the early seventeenth century that in some years, Portugal had no pepper to sell at all.

Nonetheless, the Dutch could hardly be held responsible for every shipwreck. The Lisbon-bound ships were always chronically overloaded because of the crews’ own allotments of merchandise, whether in the form of the official
caixas
or in contraband. Given their rotten salaries, it was the only way to make the perilous trip worthwhile. Incompetence at every level could also take a share of the blame. In Portugal, the job of captaining a ship was assigned as a royal favor to members of the high nobility. Knowing prow from stern was not one of the prerequisites. As a result, the actual practice of sailing the ships was handed over to the pilot. You can imagine what happened when captain and pilot disagreed. Beaches from Moçambique to Madeira saw their share of pepper tides. As if this weren’t bad enough, experienced pilots were in short supply. In a meeting held at the viceroy’s Goan palace in 1643, the local authorities realized that, back home, there wasn’t a single pilot qualified to navigate a ship to India, since all those with adequate experience (all ten!) were stuck in Goa due to a Dutch blockade.

Sailors who had some idea of what they were doing were hard to find, too. Between the death toll on the
carreira
itself and the seamen who never returned from the Indies, the kingdom had been hemorrhaging sailors for years. Lieutenant Neves supplies a telling statistic, noting that in many years, there were more deaths on the return trip to India than there were mariners in the entire Spanish armada that sailed to America. Neves, like every historian of the spice route, repeats the story recounted by the royal chronicler Castanheda of the 1505 departure of the pepper fleet from Belém. The sailors were so green that the captain of one caravel nailed a braid of garlic to one side of the ship and an onion braid to the other so that they could tell right from left. Then, when he wanted to turn the ship to starboard, he shouted “Garlic,” and to port, he yelled “Onion.” The confusion wasn’t limited to the sailors, though, for Castanheda mixed the two up as well. Just imagine the first storm they encountered! And the sailors didn’t get better as the century progressed.

The Portuguese enthusiasm for promoting the faith, the very same fanaticism that had once led to the voyages of discovery, was now dragging the empire down. Not only was the king’s purse being drained to gild the magnificent altars of
Goa Dourada,
the realm’s policy of gunboat evangelism wasn’t making it too many friends in the East. Meanwhile, back home, the jackboot tactics of the Inquisition were sending many of the “New Christians” packing to less hostile climes. The exodus of these formerly Jewish artisans, merchants, and professionals was a disaster for the Portuguese middle class, even as it did wonders for Amsterdam, Antwerp, and London, which took them in. What’s more, the Counter-Reformation had insidious effects on the culture that were not as public as the autos-da-fé, where pork abstainers were burned alive. Compare the era of King João II, who authorized two French booksellers to import tax-free as many books as they chose because he believed “it is good for the common weal to have many books circulating in our kingdom,” to the stultifying climate of a hundred years hence. By then, the dread of foreign heresies had imposed a totalitarian form of censorship on any books printed in or imported into the kingdom. Even masterworks by Portuguese authors such as da Orta were much more widely circulated abroad than at home.

In Asia, it used to be that the promotion of religion was every Lusitanian’s business. Lieutenant Neves describes the early Portuguese mariner as a kind of multipurpose tool that could function as a sailor, soldier, merchant, and Christian enforcer, depending on the time and place. However, even before the years of Spanish rule, the religious campaign was firmly in the hands of a cadre of professionals, the Jesuits, many of whom were not even Portuguese. The Lusitanians once firmly believed that the reason their little country had conquered the waves was that they were doing God’s will. Yet by the middle years of the sixteenth century, the crusading impulse had more or less evaporated in the rank and file who sailed out past the Torre de Belém, now wholly replaced by a quest to line their pockets.

Echoing the locals’ low expectations, Linschoten mentions that when each viceroy arrives in Goa for his three-year term, he spends the first year redecorating, the second amassing as much treasure as possible, and the third covering his footmarks. Much the same could be said for every other crown official. The Dutchman writes, “There is not one of them, that esteemeth the profit of the commonwealth, or the furtherance of the king’s service, but rather their own.” This had direct consequences on the spice trade across the Estado da Índia. You could make a lot more money buying and selling within Asia than sending pepper and cloves to the king’s agents, who were sending spices back home. Consequently, the trading system settled back to pretty much the same pattern that had existed before da Gama’s arrival. It’s been estimated that in 1515, the Portuguese were shipping some 30 percent of Malabar’s pepper production. At the end of the century, this had shrunk to some 3 or 4 percent. (Admittedly, total production had increased in the meantime.) Once more, Gujarati merchants brought pepper to ports on the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf. And yet again, Venice became the Mediterranean’s greatest spice emporium. The viceroys and the captains of forts across Asia were happy to cream off what they could from this trade and made sure that little was done to stem the flow that greased their palms. The result of this was that even before the Spanish takeover, and long before the arrival of the swift ships from Amsterdam, the Portuguese had been losing market share in Europe.

It’s a wonder that the whole Lusitanian empire did not collapse like a half-baked soufflé at the crash of the first Dutch cannon. But maybe that’s the wrong way to look at it. Rather than bemoaning the Estado da Índia’s demise, it might be better to marvel at how long this improbable realm actually prospered, especially given the fact that it was based on nothing much more than the profits loaded into the half dozen ships that arrived yearly in the
carreira.
Amazingly, this rather impromptu empire survived, even if in greatly diminished form, until the twentieth century. Goa finally submitted to Indian troops as late as 1961. In the meantime, Lisbon found other revenue streams to build her palaces and gild her churches. As the Dutch slowly strangled the Portuguese spice route in the East, the monarchs in Lisbon turned west to their long-neglected territories in Brazil for a source of income. Sugar, not pepper, would be the lure of this new El Dorado.
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