The Way of the World by David Fromkin

Author:David Fromkin [Fromkin, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-76605-2
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-10-30T16:00:00+00:00

The tiny Portuguese expedition led by da Gama was the first European force to reach India since that of Alexander the Great. In the intervening 1,800 years, India, like Europe, had experienced the rise and fall of great empires—among others, that of the Mauryas, just after Alexander, and that of the Guptas, which flourished as Latin Rome crumbled. Also like Europe, India often had to defend its civilization against nomad hordes, mostly from the north: White Huns, Mongols, Arabs, Turks, Tatars, and the like. Like Europe, too, India had witnessed religious conflicts and changes. Buddhism, though moving north and east to win converts throughout Asia, for reasons imperfectly understood had declined and disappeared in India, the land of its birth. The Muslim faith, brought by invaders and travelers from the Middle East and Central Asia, won over much of the country, while Jainism persisted, and Hinduism flourished as the creed of the majority.

In another major respect, however, India’s experience had been different from Europe’s for most of the time since their earlier encounter: starkly put, Europe had been poor, while India had been rich. This was a fact of life of which Vasco da Gama was made aware in unmistakable terms by representatives of the Samuri,2 the ruler of Calicut.

The merchants who represented the Samuri took a look at the gifts da Gama proposed to tender him—and burst into laughter. A dozen swatches of cloth, some clothes, a few strings of coral, a half-dozen washbasins, a bale of sugar, two barrels of butter—which must have gone rancid—and two barrels of honey: a meager offering, poor stuff, of inferior quality. Was the King of Portugal insulting the Samuri?

Da Gama smoothly explained it away: the gifts were from himself, a poor man, not from his great monarch. But the next day, when he appeared before the ruler, da Gama had no plausible response to the Samuri’s question as to why he had brought no gifts from his king.

Portugal’s goods could not successfully compete in the Indian market. The Muslim traders offered merchandise of superior quality and of a far wider range, including horses and copper from the Middle East, in exchange for the spices and jewels India could supply. This was not a problem on which Prince Henry and his successors had focused. For them, the hurdle to overcome had been to find out how to sail to the Orient. In the long years during which the Portuguese had been seeking a sea road to India, it seems never to have occurred to them that getting there was only the first of the challenges they would meet. Even with the aid of the Samuri, it was only with the greatest difficulty that da Gama and his crew conducted their trading activities.

In the years to come, the Portuguese discoverers would essay the sailing of the Pacific Ocean, and much else, but the age of reconnaissance was approaching its end. Driven by circumstances, Portugal once again was about to pioneer entry into a new era: an age of trade wars.

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