The arrival of Vasco da Gama’s Portuguese fleet off Calicut (Kozikhode) in May 1498 marked a violent break with longstanding tradition of free trade in the Indian Ocean. When asked by an Arab trader why he had come, da Gama responded with precision, ‘we seek Christians and spices’. He found both, but focused his attention on filling his ships with pepper for the voyage home. Not content with being one trading nation among many, da Gama and his successors used their naval supremacy to impose a commercial monopoly in the Indian Ocean. Only merchants who bought Portuguese permits were allowed to do business on pain of confiscation and death, a measure justified on the grounds that the right to free trade was limited to Christians. In a brutal extension of the wars of religion that raged between Christianity and Islam in the Mediterranean, the Portuguese enforced their monopoly with a savagery hitherto unknown in the region.
On his second voyage in 1502, da Gama dispensed with any attempt at negotiation. A large merchant ship bringing back 700 pilgrims from Mecca was taken, primed with gunpowder and sunk. He then moved on to Calicut, capturing 20 trading vessels and butchering their crews. More than 800 prisoners had their hands, ears and noses hacked off, the pieces piled into a boat and sent to the local ruler, the Zamorin, with a note telling him to make a ‘curry’ with what he found. In light of these and other incidents, the economic historian Niels Steengaard has concluded that ’the principal export of pre-industrial Europe to the rest of the world was violence’.
The Portuguese impact on the economies of the Indian Ocean should not be overstated. What is clear, however, is that for decades thereafter, Portugal’s Estado do India would dominate European imports of pepper, accounting for as much as 75 per cent until the 1580s. This was a state-managed affair, run from Portugal’s Asian capital at Goa and a suite of bases across the Indian Ocean from Mozambique via Malacca to Macau. Portuguese dominance would, however, be ruined by religion—from within by the horrors of the Inquisition and from without by the insurgent Protestant Dutch. When he died in 1525, Vasco da Gama was buried in St Francis Church in Fort Cochin. Today, his grave is empty, but his memory lives on with a mural in the lobby of the Indian Government’s Spice Board in Cochin, a peculiar choice for someone once described as ‘a fiend in human form’,
The Corporation that Changed the World, “Out of the Shadows”, p41-42
