The Sea Route Opens: Why the Portuguese Came First

UNIT 1 · PART 1 · ADVENT OF THE EUROPEANS

In May 1498 three ships dropped anchor off Calicut. The Zamorin received them politely and thought little of it. Within twenty years the Indian Ocean — which for a thousand years had belonged to everyone — belonged to whoever carried the most cannon.

A problem of arithmetic

Begin with pepper, because Europe did. A sack bought on the Malabar coast changed hands perhaps six times before it reached a kitchen in Lisbon — Gujarati shipper, Arab merchant, Egyptian customs, Venetian galley, and a tax at every stage. By the end the buyer paid roughly ten times what a European would have paid buying direct.

For centuries that was simply how the world worked. Then in 1453 Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks, and the arithmetic got worse. The Red Sea route was already a state monopoly earning Islamic rulers enormous revenues; the land routes ran through Arab hands. Venice and Genoa had grown rich as the last link in that chain — but they were too small to fight the Ottomans and too invested in the old system to want to bypass it.

Portugal was neither. It was poor, Atlantic-facing, and had spent a century turning shipbuilding into a state project. Prince Henry, remembered as the Navigator, made finding an ocean route to India close to an obsession, and in 1454 Pope Nicholas V issued a bull granting Portugal the right to navigate as far as India. In 1494 the Treaty of Tordesillas divided the non-Christian world with Spain along a line in the Atlantic: everything east was Portugal’s to claim.

In 1487 Bartholomew Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope and turned back convinced the route existed. It took another decade before anyone sailed it.

What da Gama actually found

Vasco da Gama reached Calicut in May 1498. He had been guided across the Arabian Sea by a Gujarati pilot, Abdul Majid — a detail worth pausing on, because it punctures the word “discovery”. These waters were not unknown. They were densely, expertly sailed.

The Zamorin, Calicut’s Hindu ruler, welcomed him. His city was an entrepôt and prospered by being open to everyone; another set of traders was another source of revenue. The Arab merchants already established on the Malabar coast were far less relaxed, and they read the situation more accurately than the Zamorin did.

Da Gama’s trade goods were an embarrassment — coarse cloth and trinkets suited to West African ports, close to insulting at a Malabar court. He stayed three months and left with a cargo that sold in Europe at enormous profit. That figure, not the diplomacy, is what mattered. Within two years a second fleet was on its way.

The turn from trading to ruling

Pedro Alvarez Cabral arrived in September 1500 and established a factory at Calicut. When locals attacked it and killed several Portuguese, Cabral’s response set the pattern for the century that followed: he seized Arab merchant ships in the harbour, killed hundreds of their crew, burned the vessels and bombarded the city. He then made favourable treaties with Calicut’s rivals — Cochin and Cannanore.

Da Gama returned in 1501 and demanded the Zamorin expel all Arab traders. The Zamorin refused. He was, after all, being asked to destroy the basis of his own prosperity to please a visitor.

The response came from outside India. Venice, watching its commerce evaporate, encouraged the Mameluke Sultan of Egypt to act. In 1507 a combined Egyptian and Gujarati fleet defeated the Portuguese off Diu and killed the son of the Portuguese viceroy. The following year that viceroy destroyed both navies.

Two men, two doctrines

The viceroy was Francisco de Almeida, and his doctrine has a name: the Blue Water Policy. Hold the sea, he argued, and India follows; hold forts on land without the sea and you hold nothing. “As long as you may be powerful at sea you will hold India as yours,” he wrote, “and if you do not possess this power, little will avail you a fortress on shore.” The instrument was the cartaz — a permit. Any ship not carrying one could be seized.

His successor, Afonso de Albuquerque, agreed about the sea but disagreed about the land. Control the chokepoints, he reasoned, and the sea controls itself. He took Goa from the Sultan of Bijapur in 1510 — the first Indian territory under European rule since Alexander — then Malacca in 1511 and Ormuz in 1515. Three gates: the Malabar coast, the Straits, the Persian Gulf. He is fairly called the real founder of Portuguese power in the East.

Two other things about Albuquerque sit awkwardly together. He abolished sati in Portuguese territory, and he encouraged his men to marry Indian women and settle permanently. He also pursued Muslim commercial interests with a bitterness that even sympathetic accounts record as a serious flaw.

Why it worked

Portugal did not win because it was strong. It won because of what it arrived into. Northern India was fragmented; the Bahmani kingdom in the Deccan was breaking apart; only Gujarat under Mahmud Begarha was a serious power. Crucially, none of them had a navy worth the name, and none thought they needed one. Chinese ships had been pulled back by imperial decree decades earlier. The Arab shipowners had numbers but no unified command.

And the Portuguese had cannon mounted on their ships. Not better sailors, not better merchants — better artillery at sea, against opponents who had not imagined the sea as a place to be fought over.

Under Nino da Cunha, governor from 1529, the capital moved from Cochin to Goa. Gujarat’s Bahadur Shah, pressed by Humayun, ceded Bassein in 1534 and promised a base at Diu; when Humayun withdrew and relations soured, Bahadur Shah was invited aboard a Portuguese ship in 1537 and killed there. In Bengal, Portuguese settlers made Hooghly their headquarters.

Within fifty years of da Gama’s arrival the Estado Português da India held much of India’s western coastline. The Dutch, the English and the French were still to come — and every one of them would arrive into a sea that Portugal had already taught to be violent.