Celebrating an explorer

Almost all school history books used to feature an image of Vasco da Gama. There the celebrated explorer and navigator stood: flowing beard, dressed in ample, curious-looking clothing — layer upon layer, shirt and doublet and billowing gown, tight-fitting breeches, knee-high boots, angular hat on head — holding in one hand what looked like a rolled up royal charter and in the other some unidentified object (but possibly a visor), across his chest a series of golden chains and jewelled cross-bands, obvious markers of status.

It is the erect stance and the imperious look in the eyes, however, that we used to find so arresting. The lesson told us, simply, that he was the one who first charted the sea route from Europe to India, having started from Portugal, gone round the Cape of Good Hope at the tip of Africa, and crossed the Indian Ocean to land on the Malabar coast at Calicut in 1498. At that time, we did not naturally know that the hauteur in the stance, and the look, came, at least in part, from the exalted position he had come to occupy at the Portuguese court, and the titles he held: ‘Admiral of the Arabian, Persian, Indian and All Oriental Seas’, 1st Count of Vidiguera, Knight of the Order of Christ, eventually ‘Viceroy of India’ as appointed by the king of Portugal. But there is a great deal else that we did not know about this intrepid man then.

The career and the legend of Vasco da Gama have been recorded in great detail — far more at the Portuguese end naturally than the Indian — and are accessible. Through them run, consistently, threads of courage and cruelty, of personal aspiration and imperial design, of economic gain and political triumph. The fragrance of Indian spices from trading in which much money was to be made wafted in the air in the Europe of those times; there also were competing territorial ambitions fuelled by the rivalry between Portugal and Spain, both rising colonial powers. Charged by his king to get to India, Vasco is known to have set off from Portugal in 1497, fitted with a flotilla of four ships and a burning desire to succeed.

Stories of his encounters en route with local princes and traders in Africa, and with the Zamorin — Hindu ruler of the Calicut region — who received him first with courtesy but then with suspicion, continue to be current in local lore. There were exchanges of gifts but also hard negotiations. Eventually when Vasco — armed with the knowledge of the pulls and pressures within which the Indian political system worked, and filled with animus against Arab merchants who saw him as a natural rival — returned to Portugal, he was hailed as a hero and loaded with honours. Three years later, he was back in India, his designs now clear, his naval force now stronger — as many as 20 ships — and more relentless than before. There are accounts of reprisals against Muslim traders who opposed him, and of how his men seized a ship filled with Indians returning from a pilgrimage to Mecca and set it afire, burning every man woman and child on it alive. During this voyage, 1502-04, he set up trading posts and fortified them, established contacts with other local chiefs — of Cochin and Cannanore among them — and laid the foundation of Portuguese power in India.

Twenty years later, in 1524, he was to return a third time to India, this time as a Viceroy of the new king of Portugal, and went to Goa, which had become a Portuguese colony by this time. But this trip of his did not last long, for within a few months of arrival, he succumbed to an illness, his last days marked by a harrowing fear of the dark. Cochin is where Vasco died, but his remains were taken to Lisbon some years later to be interred there with honours.

Whatever the Indian view of Vasco da Gama, in Portugal he has always remained a national hero, an iconic figure of the Age of Discovery. Monuments to him exist everywhere: at Sines, his birthplace; in Lisbon; at Malindi in Kenya; and, of course, in Goa. One of the most striking of these, however, took the form of a great figurative tapestry, which I became aware of only a short time back. Regarded as possibly the most important art work commissioned by Manuel I of Portugal — the king at whose bidding Vasco da Gama set off for India — the tapestry was conceived as a cycle of 26 large pieces — one of them measured four metres in height and seven and a half metres in width — celebrating the ‘Conquest of India’. The gigantic task — figure piled upon figure, man-of-war followed by another great man-of-war — was entrusted in 1510 to a famous carpet and tapestry-weaving factory of Tournai in Belgium. And, when finished, it came to adorn the royal palace where it served much more than a decorative end: it made a powerful political statement.

Portugal, it seemed to proclaim aloud, was now a world power, which stretched from Europe to Asia, having established authority over lands where no European power had ever been before, and having made discoveries that were beyond other peoples’ ken. It is said the design of the exquisitely woven tapestries was conceived by king Manuel himself, for from now on he intended all official and diplomatic business to be conducted in the great hall of the palace, under the gaze as it were of these tapestries, which made sure that no one missed the message they embodied.

The narrative that these tapestries told had evidently to mix observation with imagination, the designers and the weavers never having been to the lands they were ‘describing’.

Everything, or nearly everything, was alien to them: the people, the flora and fauna, the landscape, the architecture, of ‘other’, foreign lands. In the tapestry that accompanies this piece — ‘The Landing of Vasco da Gama in India’ — one sees at left Vasco bending in front of the Zamorin of Calicut as he presents to him a letter from his royal master; from the ships are being unloaded ‘curiosities’ like ostriches and dromedaries and wild cats in cages, even a unicorn; at the right end a host of figures stands gazing wide-eyed at the spectacle. Nothing is exactly how it might have been, but then one knows that. The tapestry is a document of an empire, and all that is in it is there with a clear purpose: the celebration of a legend, a triumph.