1492: The Year Our World Began (29 page)

Of course, the destiny of the world was not determined by a single decision made in China. China’s renunciation of maritime imperialism belongs in a vast context of influences that help to explain the long-term advantages of Atlantic-side European peoples in the global “space race.”
These influences can be classified as partly environmental and partly economic. The limits of Zheng He’s navigations are a clue to the environmental influences beyond the reach of the monsoons. The Indian Ocean is hard to get out of. Even ships that safely make it through the belt of storms, bound toward the Atlantic around southern Africa, must negotiate lee shores in the region of what is now KwaZulu-Natal, which, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, became a notorious graveyard for ships that ventured there. This was probably the location of the place called Ha-pu-erh on the maps generated by the Zheng He voyages, beyond which, according to the annotations, the ships did not proceed, owing to the ferocity of the storms. On its eastern flank, maritime Asia is hemmed by the typhoon-racked seas of Japan and the vastness of the Pacific.

To undertake voyages into such hostile seas, Indian Ocean navigators would need a big incentive. The Indian Ocean was an arena of such intense commercial activity, and so much wealth, that it would have been pointless for indigenous peoples to look for markets or suppliers elsewhere. When merchants from northern or central Asia or Europe or the African interior reached the ocean, they came as supplicants, generally despised for their poverty, and found it hard to sell the products of their homelands.

Chinese disengagement from the wider world was not the result of any deficiency of technology or curiosity. It would have been perfectly possible for Chinese ships to visit Europe or the Americas, had they so wished. Indeed, Chinese explorers probably did get around the Cape of Good Hope, sailing from east to west, at intervals during the Middle Ages. A Chinese map of the thirteenth century depicts Africa in roughly its true shape. A Venetian mapmaker of the mid–fifteenth century reported a sighting of a Chinese or, perhaps, Javanese junk off the Southwest African coast.
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But there was no point in pursuing such initiatives: they led to regions that produced nothing the Chinese wanted. Although the evidence that Chinese vessels ever crossed the Pacific to America is, at best, equivocal, it is perfectly possible that they did so.
Again, however, it would have been folly to pursue such voyages or attempt systematic contacts across the ocean. No people lived there with whom the Chinese could possibly wish to do business.

To a lesser—but still sufficient—extent, the same considerations applied to other maritime peoples of the Indian Ocean and East and Southeast Asia. The Arabs, the Swahili merchant communities, Persians, Indians, Javanese and other island peoples of the region, and the Japanese all had the technology required to explore the world, but plenty of commercial opportunities in their home ocean kept them fully occupied. Indeed, their problem was, if anything, shortage of shipping in relation to the scale of demand for interregional trade. That was why, in the long run, they generally welcomed interlopers from Europe in the sixteenth century, who were truculent, demanding, barbaric, and often violent, but who added to the shipping stock of the ocean and, therefore, contributed to the general increase of wealth. Paradoxically, therefore, poverty favored Europeans, compelled to look elsewhere because of the dearth of economic opportunities at home.

The Indian Ocean was by no means unknown to Europeans. The widespread assumption that Vasco da Gama was the first to penetrate deep inside it when he rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1498 is a vulgar error. Italian merchants often plied their trade there during the late Middle Ages. Typically, they traveled across the Ottoman and Persian empires, in the rare interstices of war and religious hostility. Or else, even more commonly, they undertook a long and arduous journey upriver along the Nile from Alexandria, and overland by camel caravan from the first or second cataract to the Red Sea coast, where they awaited the turn of the monsoon before shipping for Aden or Socotra. It was inadvisable to attempt to join the Red Sea farther north because of the formidable hazards to navigation.

Most of the Western venturers who worked in the Indian Ocean are known only from stray references in the archives. Merchants rarely
wrote up their experiences. But two circumstantial accounts survive from the fifteenth century: the first by Niccolò Conti, who had been as far east as Java, and had returned to Italy by 1444; the second by his fellow Florentine Girolamo di Santo Stefano, who made an equally long trading voyage in the 1490s. Conti knew something of the Near East as a result of working as a merchant in Damascus, and therefore chose to travel overland via Persia to the Gulf, where he took ship for Cambay in the Bay of Bengal. Santo Stefano used the other main route. In company with a business partner, Girolamo Adorno, he traveled up the Nile and joined a caravan bound for the Red Sea. He crossed the ocean from Massawah—a port generally under Ethiopian control at the time.

On his return, Conti sought papal absolution for having abjured Christianity in Cairo in order to save the lives of his wife and children, who traveled with him. In Rome, he was able to enhance geographers’ knowledge of the East, adding glosses, derived from experience, to the available traditions, which derived in part from the sometimes obscure texts transmitted from classical antiquity, and sometimes from the dubious claims of travelers and pseudo-travelers, like Marco Polo, whom the learned were disinclined to believe. Exchanges of geographical lore had constituted leisure-time conversation for delegates at the Council of Florence in 1439 and had excited much interest in new discoveries: it was an ideal moment to share revelations. Conti told his story to a Florentine humanist, who made a record of it as a morally edifying tale of changing fortunes.

The convention Conti’s work established was of “the inconstancy of fortune.” When Santo Stefano wrote up his experiences of the Indian Ocean in 1499, he, too, focused on lamentations against ill luck and sententious reflections on the “disastrous journey” he endured “for my sins.” Had he eluded his sufferings, he might have retired on the riches that slipped through his hands during his career as a merchant in the Indies and would have avoided the need to throw himself on the mercy of patrons—the obvious subtext of his work. “But who can contend with fortune?” he asked, rhetorically, concluding with “infinite thanks
to our Lord God, for that he has preserved me, and shown me great mercy.”
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He and Adorno got as far east as an emporium in northern Sumatra, where they took ship for Pegu, in Burma, apparently with the idea of engaging in trade in gems. It was painfully slow doing business there. In Sumatra on the way back a local ruler confiscated their cargo, including the valuable rubies they brought from Burma. Adorno died in 1496, “after fifty-five days’ suffering” in Pegu, where “his body was buried in a certain ruined church, frequented by none.”
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The Indian Ocean with the route of Niccolò Conti.

In the Maldives, in an attempt to head homeward with what little fortune he had salvaged from his adventures, Santo Stefano waited six months for the monsoon to turn. When it did, it unleashed so much rain that his deckless ship sank with the weight of it, “and those who could swim were saved and the rest drowned.”
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After floating on wreckage from morning to evening, the merchant was rescued by a passing ship. No tale of the ocean would be complete without a shipwreck and a dramatic escape, but if Santo Stefano embellished the truth, he also, like Conti, managed to convey a great deal of representative information about how Westerners perceived the ocean and the lands that lined its rim.

Naturally enough, as they were merchants, both Conti and Santo Stefano inventoried trade goods of all kinds wherever they went, and took special interest in spices and aromatics. Santo Stefano described the drying of green peppercorns at Calicut, the profusion of cinnamon in Sri Lanka, the availability of pepper in Sumatra, the location of sandalwood in Coromandel. Conti’s description of aromatic-oil production from cinnamon berries in Sri Lanka reflects personal observation (whereas some of his purported observations seem rather to have been culled from his reading). He reported camphor and durians (“the taste varies, like that of cheese”
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) in Sumatra. As specialists in gems, both travelers were always interested in where rubies, garnets, jacinths, and crystals “grew.” Both showed some interest in military intelligence. Santo Stefano was interested in elephant breeding for war and confirmed Conti’s claim that ten thousand war elephants were maintained in the stables of the ruler of Pegu.

These were hardheaded observations. But the writers seemed to go soft in the head when they succumbed to the lure of exotica. They crowded their narratives with descriptions of improbable marvels—the travelers’ tidbits that readers at the time called “mirabilia.” No one was expected to believe them, but readers demanded them. Around the Indian Ocean, Conti and Santo Stefano described a topsy-turvy world in which murder is moral, serpents fly, monsters trap fish by lighting irresistible magnetic fires on shore, and miners use vultures and eagles to gather diamonds.
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Some of the tales echo stories in the Sinbad corpus, and should be seen as evidence that the authors really did know the East at first hand.

The taste for sensationalism was most apparent in the travelers’ obsessions with sex. Santo Stefano devoted much space to polygyny and polyandry. He described how Indian men “never marry a virgin” and hand prospective spouses over to strangers for deflowering “for fifteen or twenty days” before the nuptials. Conti was scrupulous in enumerating the harems of great rulers and commending the sangfroid of wives who committed
suti,
flinging themselves on their dead husbands’ funeral pyres. In India he found brothels so numerous, and so alluring with “sweet perfumes, ointments, blandishments, beauty and youth,” that Indians “are much addicted to licentiousness,” whereas male homosexuality, “being superfluous, is unknown.”
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In Ava, in Burma, the women mocked Conti for having a small penis and recommended a local custom: inserting up to a dozen gold, silver, or brass pellets, of about the size of small hazelnuts, under the skin, “and with these insertions, and the swelling of the member, the women are affected with the most exquisite pleasure.” Conti refused the service, because “he did not want his pain to be a source of others’ pleasure.”
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On the whole, the merchants’ reports were of a world of abundance and civility. Beyond the Ganges, according to Conti, in a translation made in the reign of Elizabeth I, people “are equal to us in customs, life, and policie; for they have sumptuous and neat houses, and all their vessels and householde stuffe very cleane: they esteeme to live as noble people, avoided of all villainie and crueltie, being courteous people &
riche Merchauntes.”
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But if there was one thing the civilizations of the East lacked, it was shipping adequate to meet the huge demands of their highly productive economies and active trades. Santo Stefano marveled at the cord-bound ships that carried him along the Red Sea and across the Indian Ocean. He noted the bulkhead construction that divided ships’ hulls into watertight compartments. But while ships were well designed, well built, and ingeniously navigated, there were never enough of them to carry all the available freight.

As a result, in the 1490s the Indian Ocean was trembling on the brink of a new future in which European interlopers would cash in on their advantages. For that future to happen, Europeans needed to penetrate the ocean with ships. Because they lacked salable commodities, they had to find other ways of doing business; shipping and freighting were their best resources. Without ships of their own, visitors such as Conti and Santo Stefano were reduced to little better than peddlers. But the Indian Ocean region was so rich and productive, so taut with demand, and so abundant in supply that it could absorb hugely more shipping than was available at the time. Any European who could get ships into the zone stood to make a fortune.

There was only one way to do it: sail the ships in around the southern tip of Africa. But was such a long and hazardous journey possible? Were the ships of the time equal to its strains? Could they carry enough food and water? In any case, it was not even certain that an approach to the ocean lay along that route. The geographer the age most revered was the second-century Alexandrian Claudius Ptolemy. His
Geography,
which became the favorite book on the subject in the West when the text became widely available in the early fifteenth century, was generally read to mean that the Indian Ocean was landlocked, inaccessible by sea. Maps of the world made to illustrate his ideas—and there were many of them at the time—showed the ocean as a vast lake, cut off to the south by a long tongue of land protruding from southeastern Africa and curling round to lick at the edges of East Asia. The fabled wealth of India and the spice islands lay enclosed within it, like jewels in a strong room.