126 THE WEALTH AND POVERTY OF NATIONSits ability to build and arm oceangoing vessels, were limited. This was
a lightweight going up against heavies.
The Portuguese achievement testifies to their enterprise and tough
ness; to their religious faith and enthusiasm; to their ability to mobi
lize and exploit the latest knowledge and techniques. No silly
chauvinism; pragmatism first. They drew in outsiders for their money,
know-how, and labor; used slaves as workers and occasionally as fight
ers; married women of every race and more than one at a time. They
had no room for Portuguese women on these long voyages, although
sometimes they sent out a few orphans, who could not say no. Like the
men, these few white women did not do well in pestilential climes:
childbirth, for example, was typically a death sentence for both mother
and babe. Miscegenation worked better: the men bought and enjoyed
female slaves of color by the dozen—as though to beget a new nation
from their loins.
Their one emotional outiay was piety. The Portuguese took priests
and friars with them on every vessel, for their own safety and salvation
(the power of prayer and sacrament); for the propagation of the faith
among infidels and pagans; and as salve to their own conscience. These
men of God legitimated and sanctified greed.
Religious commitment entailed a serious commercial disadvantage:
it introduced an element of irreconcilability into what might have been
an easier, more profitable encounter. For the Portuguese, the Muslims
were infidels and enemies of the true faith. No brutality was too much.
All Muslim shipping was fair game; all Muslim kingdoms were defined
as foes. On his second voyage of 1502, Vasco da Gama capped a vic
tory over a Muslim flotilla before Calicut by cutting off the ears, noses,
and hands of some eight hundred "Moors" and sending them ashore
to the local ruler with the facetious suggestion that he make curry of
them. And one of his captains, his maternal uncle Vincente Sodre
(whose name deserves to be remembered ad opprobrium), flogged the
chief Muslim merchant at Cannanore (Malabar coast) until he fainted,
then stuffed his mouth with excrement and covered it with a slab of
pork to make sure he ate the filth.^1
Such actions led to war with the many lands bordering the Indian
Ocean: East Africa, Arabia and Persia, much of India, the greater part
of the Indonesian archipelago. In the words of a sixteenth-century
essay on the Excellency and Honourableness of a Military Life in India:
"Nor is this to be wondered at, since we are the sworn foes of all
unbelievers, so it is hardly surprising if they pay us back in the same
coin.... We cannot live in these regions without weapons in our