Coming of Age in the Milky Way by Timothy Ferris

he was seeking, Da Gama answered, “Christians and spices.” 6
    The investment paid off, and by the end of the century the Portuguese annually were importing seven hundred kilograms of gold and ten thousand slaves from Africa. They traded wheat for the gold; the slaves generally could be obtained for free. Recalled one of Henry’s men who took part in a raiding party:
    Our men, crying out, “Sant’ Iago! San Jorge! Portugal!” fell upon them, killing or capturing all they could. There you might have seen mothers catch up their children, husbands their wives, each one escaping as best he could. Some plunged into the sea; others thought to hide themselves in the corners of their hovels; others hid their children under the shrubs … where our men found them. And at last our Lord God, Who gives to all a due reward, gave to our men that day a victory over their enemies; and in recompense for all their toil in His service they took 165 men, women, and children, not counting the slain. 7
     
    In all, over one million slaves were captured and brought to Europe by the Portuguese.
    Unknown to the Europeans, the Chinese, rulers of the greatest land in the fabled East, were trading along Africa’s east coast while the Portuguese were exploring its west coast. Theirs was a more venerable and less violent campaign. They mounted expeditions of thousands of men in fleets of junks each five times or more the size of the Portuguese caravels, conducted peaceful trade backed by this show of force, and are recorded to have resorted to violence on only three occasions in a century of exploration. But the Chinese furledtheir sails following the death of the adventurous emperor Yung Lo. By the time Da Gama reached India the Chinese antiexploration faction had made it a crime to build an oceangoing junk and had burned the ships’ logbooks—some of which are thought to have contained accounts of voyages extending across the Pacific as far as to the Americas—on grounds that they contained “deceitful exaggerations of bizarre things.” 8 (Which, by the way, was just what Western critics said of Marco Polo’s account of China.)

     
    Henry the Navigator’s reconnaissance of Africa, A.D. 1455–1498.
     
    The Portuguese, in contrast, were smaller in number but fierce with the torch and the sword. The first colonist in Portugal’s first colony, Joad Goncalves of Madeira, set the island afire. Da Gama and his successor Pedro Cabral “tortured helpless fishermen,” writes R. S. Whiteway in his
The Rise of Portuguese Power in India, 1497–1550
. He adds that
    Almeida tore out the eyes of a Nair who had come in with a safe-conduct because he suspected a design on his own life; Albuquerque cut off the noses of the women and the hands [of the men] who fell into his power on the Arabian coast. To follow the example of Almeida and sail into an Indian harbor with the corpses of unfortunates, often not fighting-men, dangling from the yards, was to proclaim oneself a determined fellow. 9
     
    Columbus was a fighting man, shaped, as we might expect, more in the Portuguese than in the Chinese mold. His destiny, he felt, had been sealed on August 13, 1476, when he floated to shore just up the coast from Prince Henry’s institute at Sagres, clutching an oar and leaving behind the burning wreck of the ship in which he had been fighting in the battle of Cape St. Vincent (on the Portuguese side, against his native Genoa). To be wringing the salt water out of his shirt on the beach near Sagres was just the sort of thing Columbus expected from a life he believed to be directed by the hand of God. He took his first name seriously, thought of himself as
Christophoros
, the “Christ carrier,” whose mission it was to discover “a new heaven and a new earth.”
    He was already something of an anachronism—a dead-reckoning navigator in an epoch of ever improving charts and navigational instruments, a sometime pirate in an age when violence at sea was busily