The Last Crusade: The Epic Voyages of Vasco Da Gama (12 page)

Eanes’s little ship crept up to the fearsome headland. The waves and currents were strong, the shallows reached a good way out from the coast, fogs and mists obscured the way, and the prevailing winds undoubtedly made it tricky to head for home. Yet past the sandy red dunes of the headland, the coast wore monotonously on. The perils were a myth, perhaps spread by Muslims to keep Europeans away from their caravan routes. Eanes returned in triumph and was knighted, and Henry loudly trumpeted his besting of generations of sages and sailors.

Nine years later, in 1443, Henry convinced his brother Peter, then regent of Portugal after Edward’s death, to grant him a personal monopoly over all shipping to the south of Cape Bojador.

To claim the ocean as his personal possession was a bold move even for the enterprising prince, and it needed backing up with action. There were only so many Portuguese sailors with oceangoing experience and an enthusiasm for out-of-this-world experiences, and Henry was forced to look abroad for new recruits. Conveniently, his personal estates in the Algarve—the name came from the Arabic
al-Gharb
, or “the west”—were close to Sagres Point, a flat-topped promontory at Europe’s extreme southwestern corner. In bad weather, ships heading from the Mediterranean to northern Europe took shelter behind its sheer cliffs, and Henry sent out his men to meet every vessel. They showed off samples of the wares his explorers had collected, they talked up the prince’s discovery of new lands and the fortunes to be made there, and they coaxed the sailors into enlisting in his fleets.

In reality, Henry’s ships had come home with little more than the pelts and oil from what had become a mass annual cull of seals,
though in 1441 one captain had returned with “ten blacks, male and female . . . a little gold dust and a shield of ox-hide, and a number of ostrich eggs, so that one day there were served up at the Prince’s table three dishes of the same, as fresh and good as though they had been the eggs of any other domestic fowls. And we may well presume,” our informant added, “that there was no other Christian prince in this part of Christendom, who had dishes like these upon his table.” Even so, plenty of daredevil sailors found Henry’s blandishments impossible to resist. Alvise Cadamosto, a gentleman adventurer from Venice, was on his way to Flanders when his galley was blown onto the Algarve coast. He was immediately approached by Henry’s recruiters and was regaled with the wonders of Africa. “They related so much in this strain,” he recorded, “that I, with the others, marveled greatly. They thus aroused in me a growing desire to go thither. I asked if the said lord permitted any who wished to sail, and was told that he did.” Like many others from as far away as Germany and Scandinavia, Cadamosto jumped ship and signed up on the spot.

Money, as much as manpower, was always in short supply in Portugal, and even with the key to the Templars’ treasury, Henry could not fund the expensive business of exploration indefinitely. Wealthy Italian financiers set up shop in Lisbon, and Henry licensed Genoese, Florentine, and Venetian merchants to fit out ships and sponsor voyages, always reserving a share of the profits for himself. The new policy paid off: in 1445, fully twenty-six ships headed out for Africa flying the red Templar crosses of Henry’s Order of Christ.

By now the prince’s shipwrights and crews had hit on the ideal vessel for exploring the coasts and, equally important, making it back home. The caravel was a slim, shallow-draft craft that could skirt the shore and enter rivers. It was equipped with lateen, or triangular, sails—borrowed via the Arabs from the Indian Ocean—that responded to the lightest breeze and made it possible to sail closer to the wind than the traditional square rig allowed. With a solitary cabin in the stern it was also horribly uncomfortable, and
progress was painfully slow. As the fleets picked their way down the Saharan coast, a constant watch had to be kept for breakers that warned of shoals and sandbanks ahead. The coastline had to be charted, and offshore islands had to be explored. The lead and line had to be dropped to sound the depths, and at night all work had to be suspended. Farther south, strong currents dragged the caravels toward the shore, and they were forced to sail out of sight of land. To return home, they had to head far out into the Atlantic, tacking—sailing in a zigzag pattern—against the northeasterly trade winds until they were far enough north to catch the westerlies that blew them back to Lisbon.

Yet there were many rewards. The ancient puzzle of where the birds went was solved: in the Saharan winter the sailors found swallows, storks, turtledoves, and thrushes, while in summer they saw the falcons, herons, and wood pigeons that wintered in Europe. Strange swordfish and suckerfish flapped in their nets, and the meat and eggs of showy pelicans and genteel flamingos made an exotic change of diet. As they put into shore, they marveled at the endless vistas of sand and rock and the variety of creatures that lived amid them. There were rats bigger than rabbits and snakes that could swallow a goat, desert oryx and ostriches, vast numbers of gazelles, hinds, hedgehogs, wild dogs, and jackals, and other beasts completely unknown. Swarms of red and yellow locusts filled the air for miles around, obscured the sun for days, and wherever they settled destroyed everything aboveground. Tornadoes made the barren land bloom in a single day, and sandstorms roared up like monstrous fires and hurtled turtles and birds around like leaves.

As they planted wooden crosses to announce that the land had been taken for Christ and set out to make contact with the local people, the explorers puzzled over the intricate African patchwork of kingdoms and tribes with their bewildering variety of languages. Since they introduced themselves by clambering onto beaches dressed in suits of armor, marching up to desert herders supping on camel milk or peaceable fishermen roasting fish and turtles over
kelp fires, crying “Portugal and St. George!” and seizing a couple of prisoners to serve as informants and translators, the incomprehension was mutual.

When the Europeans grew bolder and struck inland, they came across remote mountains where the finest dates in the world were grown but the people were reportedly cannibals, and desert towns whose houses and mosques were built entirely of blocks of salt. Every so often, they encountered one of the famous camel caravans. The camels served both as transport and sustenance: the unluckier beasts were kept thirsty for months, then made to gorge on water so they could be killed on the march and tapped for a drink. The traders were brown-complexioned, wore turbans that partially covered their faces and white cloaks edged with a red stripe, and went barefoot. They were Muslims who traded silver and silks from Granada and Tunis for slaves and gold, and they were determined to keep the interlopers at bay.

Eventually the desert petered out, and the fleets sailed past the mouth of the Senegal River into the more densely populated tropics. Suddenly everything seemed larger and more vivid. “It appears to me a very marvelous thing,” the Venetian adventurer Cadamosto expectantly wrote while still passing the Sahara, “that beyond the river all men are very black, tall, and big, their bodies well formed; and the whole country green, full of trees, and fertile: while on this side, the men are brownish, small, lean, ill-nourished, and small in stature: the country sterile and arid.”

The Europeans’ eyes had been opened to an unimagined new world. Here the men branded themselves with hot irons, and the women tattooed themselves with hot needles. Both sexes wore gold rings in their pierced ears, noses, and lips, and the females sported more gold rings dangling between their legs. The visitors marveled at the soaring trees, the sprawling mangrove forests, and the brightly colored talking birds. They bought apes and baboons to take home; they stared at hippopotami, witnessed elephant hunts, and sampled the huge animals’ flesh, which turned out to be tough
and tasteless. On their homecoming they presented exotic gifts to Prince Henry, including the foot, trunk, hair, and salted flesh of a baby elephant; Henry bestowed the tusk and foot of a fully grown specimen on his sister.

At first the Africans were equally fascinated by the newcomers. They rubbed spittle into their hands and limbs to see whether their whiteness was a dye. They seemed convinced that their bagpipes were some kind of musical animal. They paddled out to the caravels in dugouts, wondering, or so the Portuguese thought, whether they were great fish or birds, until they saw the sailors and fled.

To the Europeans’ dismay it turned out that even here the people were Muslims. Even so, their faith was far from rigid, they were mostly poor, and at least some were happy to do business with Christians. On one sortie up the Senegal, Cadamosto was invited to a nearby royal capital, where, typically of his fellow pioneers, he fully expected to find a European-style monarchy and court. As he approached the throne he saw petitioners throw themselves on their knees, bow their heads to the ground, and scatter sand over their naked shoulders. Groveling in this way, they shuffled forward, stated their business, and were brusquely dismissed. Since it turned out that their wives and children were liable to be seized and sold as punishment for minor misdeeds, Cadamosto decided their trepidation was appropriate. The king and his lords, he approvingly noted, were obeyed much more readily than their counterparts in Europe—though, he added, they were still “great liars and cheats.”

If many African customs seemed primitive, others made it hard to pass easy judgments. Cadamosto soon found himself debating the finer points of religion with the court’s Muslim priests. As usual, the Europeans opened the discussion by informing the king that he had taken up a false faith. If the Christian God was a just lord, the ruler laughingly replied, he and his men had a much better chance of reaching Paradise than they did, since Europe had been so much more favored with riches and knowledge in this world. “In this,”
remarked Cadamosto, “he showed good powers of reasoning and deep understanding of men.” The king showed a different type of understanding when he presented the Venetian sailor, as a mark of goodwill, with “a handsome young negress, twelve years of age, saying that he gave her to me for the service of my chamber. I accepted her,” Cadamosto recorded, “and sent her to the ship.”

Not every African ruler was so benevolent, and the explorers soon found themselves under relentless attack. Warriors emerged from the forests wielding circular shields covered with gazelle skins, spears with barbed iron tips poisoned with snake venom and sap, javelin-like lances, and Arab-style scimitars. Some launched into warlike dances and chants; others stealthily paddled out in canoes. All were fearless and much preferred to be killed than to flee. The caravels were equipped with small cannon that fired stone balls, but large numbers of knights, squires, soldiers, and sailors fell beneath the onslaughts, while the captives they tried to land as translators were invariably beaten to death on the beaches.

As more half-crewed caravels limped home, Henry began to grow alarmed at the escalating hostilities. He ordered his soldiers to fire only in self-defense, but by then their reputation for violence had already spread. When the next party of explorers arrived at the vast mouth of the Gambia River—more than fifteen hundred miles from Lisbon—they found they had been preceded by rumors that they were cannibals with a taste for black flesh. As they sailed upriver, massed ranks of Africans emerged from the cover of the forest, hurling lances and unleashing poisoned arrows. Fleets of war canoes paddled furiously at the intruders, the strongly built warriors dressed in white cotton shirts and white-feathered caps and, noted Cadamosto, “exceedingly black.” In the parley that followed, the Europeans demanded to know why they, peaceful traders who had come bearing gifts, had been attacked. The Africans, reported Cadamosto, replied that they “did not want our friendship on any terms, but sought to slaughter us all, and to make a gift of our possessions to their lord.” Even the shock
of gunfire failed to make them back off for long, and once again the unwanted visitors beat a hasty retreat.

As the Portuguese trading network crept along the coast a few bags of gold dust began to make their way back to Lisbon; soon Portugal’s first gold coinage in nearly a century, aptly named the
cruzado
, or “Crusader,” would be proudly hammered out in Lisbon’s mint. Yet the Gold River had turned out to be a mirage, and even less progress had been made with Henry’s second great quest—the search for a powerful ally against Islam.

Somewhere far overseas, age-old stories told, was a lost Christian empire of fabulous wealth and power. Its ruler was known as Prester John.

T
HE WORD
Prester
comes from the Old French
prestre
, or priest, but John was no ordinary ecclesiastic. Europeans firmly believed him to be a mighty Christian king, and most likely a descendant of one of the three Magi who brought offerings of gold, frankincense, and myrrh to the infant Jesus. Centuries of speculation had endowed the Prester’s kingdom with any number of marvels, including a fountain of youth that kept him alive through the centuries, a mirror in which the world was reflected, and an emerald table, illuminated by precious balsam burning in countless lamps, at which he entertained thirty thousand guests. In an age when Noah’s life span was an accepted fact, Prester John’s superannuated existence seemed perfectly plausible; or at least it validated Western Christendom’s dreams of universality.

The story of Prester John was not just a popular fable. It had grown out of a string of rumors, frauds, and half-understood truths, but many powerful figures, including a succession of popes, took it at face value.

The known facts were these. In 1122 a man who announced himself as John, Bishop of India, had presented himself to the pope and had described his land as a wealthy Christian realm. Two decades later a German bishop reported the news that an Eastern
Christian king was at war with Iran; according to his informant, he added, the king was called Prester John and carried a scepter fashioned from solid emerald. Not much was made of either piece of information until 1165, when copies of a letter signed by the Prester began to appear across Europe. It was written in the supercilious tone befitting a man who claimed to rule over seventy-two kings and who styled himself “Emperor of the Three Indias.” At his table, he informed his readers, he was served by “seven kings, each in his turn, by sixty-two dukes, and by three hundred and sixty-five counts. . . . In our hall there dine daily, on our right hand, twelve archbishops, on our left, twenty bishops.” Count the stars of the sky and the sands of the sea, he helpfully proposed, and you might get a sense of the vastness of his realm and his powers.