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| The Padrão dos Descobrimentos and the Jardim Botânico Tropical in Belém, Lisbon (2022) |
Though [Pedro Alvarez] Cabral had sailed away, the Portuguese had not abandoned the Indian Ocean. On the contrary, Dom Manoel assumed for himself the title of ‘The Lord of the Navigation, Conquest and Commerce of Ethiopia, Arabia, Persia and India’ and fitted out an even stronger expedition with orders to enforce his claim to the supremacy of the Indian seas. It was Vasco da Gama himself who was appointed captain-major of this fleet. The fleet consisted of fifteen ships of which six were larger and more powerfully equipped than those which had previously arrived in the Indian sea. San Jeronymo was the flagship. The other five were lateen rigged caravels fitted with heavy artillery and the expedition carried 800 trained soldiers. Since it was realized that there might be serious opposition a reinforcement of five vessels under Estavo da Gama was sent five months later.
The most impressive fact about this first and most decisive period of Portuguese endeavour is the remarkable manner in which the fleets in the East were kept reinforced by the Portuguese home government. Armada followed armada in unending succession under trained captains, and the Portuguese chiefs in the Indian waters knew that men and ships were on the way bringing succor to them. Even in the most difficult circumstances they could therefore hold out with the firm conviction that help was not far away. In this work, the Portuguese Government had the financial backing of the great merchant princes of Antwerp who, realizing the revolutionary change in trade that the Portuguese discoveries involved, had hastened to annex the benefits. The Weslers, for example, had invested in the Portuguese voyages of 1505, and the Lisbon Government had found it necessary as early as 1503 to open a depot for spices in Antwerp. To this system of continuous reinforcements, worked out by Dom Manoel with the assistance of Antwerp capital, must be attributed the success that attended the navies of Portugal on the Eastern seas.
Da Gama and his associates, even before they reached the coast of India, began to enforce the claim of his sovereign to be ‘the Lord of Navigation’. Without any kind of warning he intercepted and destroyed any vessel he came across on his voyage. The following incident quoted in Lendas da India is typical of the policy of terrorism and piracy that he introduced into Indian waters. The Portuguese armada ran across some unarmed vessels returning from Mecca. Vasco da Gama captured them and in the words of Lendas, ‘after making the ships empty of goods, prohibited anyone from taking out of it any Moor and then ordered them to set fire to it’. The explanation for capturing the vessel is perhaps to be found in Barroes’ remark: ‘It is true that there does exist a common right to all to navigate the seas and in Europe we recognize the rights which others hold against us; but the right does not extend beyond Europe and therefore the Portuguese as Lords of the Sea are justified in confiscating the goods of all those who navigate the seas without their permission.’
Strange and comprehensive claim, yet basically one which every European nation, in its turn, held firmly almost to the end of Western supremacy in Asia. It is true that no other nation put it forward so crudely or tried to enforce it so barbarously as the Portuguese in the first quarter of the sixteenth century, but the principle that the doctrines of international law did not apply outside Europe, that what would be barbarism in London or Paris is civilized conduct in Peking (e.g. the burning of the Summer Palace) and that European nations had no moral obligations in dealing with Asian peoples (as for example when Britain insisted on the opium trade against the laws of China, though opium smoking was prohibited by law in England itself) was part of the accepted creed of Europe’s relations with Asia. So late as 1870 the President of the Hong Kong Chamber of Commerce declared: ‘China can in no sense be considered a country entitled to all the same rights and privileges as civilized nations which arc bound by international law. Till the end of European domination the fact that rights existed for Asians against Europeans was conceded only with considerable mental reservation. In countries under direct British occupation, like India, Burma and Ceylon, there were equal rights established by law, but that as against Europeans the law was not enforced very rigorously was known and recognized. In China, under extra-territorial jurisdiction, Europeans were protected against the operation of Chinese laws. In fact, except in Japan this doctrine of different rights persisted to the very end and was a prime cause of Europe’s ultimate failure in Asia.
K.M. Panikkar, Asia and Western Dominance: A Survey of the Vasco Da Gama Epoch of Asian History 1498–1945 (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1953), 41-43. Panikkar (1895–1963) was a prominent historian and diplomat in late colonial and post-colonial India. Sanjay Subrahmanyam, the author of a number of scholarly histories of the Portuguese Empire and its personalities, has contested Panikkar’s characterizations of da Gama and described Panikkar variously as an “idealogue” and “Indian nationalist,” which he was. Asia and Western Dominance was completed in 1951, just as Panikkar was finishing his tenure as Indian ambassador to China and moving to Cairo to become Indian ambassador to Egypt, however the idea for the book was conceived much earlier. “In 1925,” he recounts, “when I went to Portugal I visited the port of Belem from which Vasco da Gama set out on his fateful voyage to India and marveled at the momentous changes unleashed on the world by that trivial event. It was then that the idea of writing a full scale history of European domination over the Asian continent had occurred to me.” As an idealogue and nationalist, Panikkar oversaw the organization and elaboration of a series of cultural and intellectual projects related to the writing and publication of Indian and Asian history (more on those efforts, at length, in the future).
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