The World Encompassed by G. V. Scammell

Author:G. V. Scammell [Scammell, G. V.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General
ISBN: 9781351014694
Google: XXdZDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-05-03T01:32:39+00:00

Fig. 12 Contemporary drawing of a Portuguese light galley coming to anchor off western India in 1539. Asian sailors – or, more probably, African slaves – are shown furling the main sail. The bearded figure at the stern is thought to be D. João de Castro (1500–48), humanist, seamen and ultimately viceroy of Portuguese India.

This fearsome voyage was, as a rule, made with only one stop (Mozambique) outwards, one or two (Mozambique or St Helena, and the Azores) inwards, and – astonishingly – sometimes with none at all. Ships fell apart on passage, sank through stress of weather, or were lost through the invincible ignorance and incompetence of their officers. In those that remained afloat such was the overcrowding, filth and disease that it was nothing unusual for half the 1000 or so humans crammed into a vessel 50m long and with a beam of 14m to die on the outward run. But these were the hazards of a seafaring life anywhere, and conditions were not invariably so hard. Officers took prostitutes with them, rich passengers gratefully or apprehensively provided livestock and fruit for crews and in 1582 a knowledgeable Italian thought it less dangerous to sail from Lisbon to India than from Barcelona to Genoa. Nevertheless the Portuguese lost about a quarter of the vessels employed in the carreira61 between 1500 and 1635, with, from the 1580s, Dutch and English attacks added to the many perils of the sea. Yet this reflects no especial ineptitude, for even in the eighteenth century the much better placed English East India Company was still losing roughly 10 per cent of its tonnage annually. And with officers and seamen alike vigorously engaged in every sort of private trade, and with spices selling at a profit of 90 per cent clear in the west, and pearls at 200–300 per cent, the toleration of this debilitating haemorrhage was no blind folly.

Such were the attractions of monopoly that the crown sought to extend it further. Between 1522 and 1535 there was an abortive royal monopoly of Moluccan cloves. From the mid-1500s the immensely profitable voyage from Goa via Macao to Nagasaki was limited to an annual ship under a commander appointed by the king. Even in the early 1600s there were still dreams that the riches of Ceylon could best be tapped by a crown monopoly. But by this time it was increasingly clear that such schemes were impracticable, since neither in theory nor in fact could these monopolies be made absolute. The Portuguese were never able to exclude Gujarati rivals from the many spice ports of the Malabar coast, and only momentarily did they close the Red Sea, through which, as through the Persian Gulf, spices and other goods continued to flow in ever-growing amounts in the sixteenth century (cf. pp. 139f.) Systematic blockade was beyond their administrative and naval resources, and already in 1508 it was recognized that there was little prospect of intercepting craft from Atjeh (Sumatra) which, coming to the Red Sea by a long southern route from Indonesia, passed outside the range of Portuguese patrols.

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