Pepper by Marjorie Shaffer Page A

Prester John was as intractably implanted in the European imagination as a splinter. Da Gama carried a note from King Manuel to Prester John. The Portuguese desperately wanted to find the king and enlist him as their ally in their fight against their enduring enemy, the Moors. They convinced themselves that the people they met in India were bona fide Christians and were quite willing to superimpose Christian iconography and practices on Hindu temples and forms of worship. When da Gama and his retinue were taken inside a Hindu temple in Calicut, they believed it was a church, even though the “saints” painted on its walls had large flaring nostrils, bulging eyes, and numerous flailing arms. Da Gama dutifully reported that India was filled with Christians.
    Despite this deliberate mischaracterization, Christianity does have deep roots in India, planted most likely by missionaries who arrived in the subcontinent in the fourth and fifth centuries, and not, as often stated, by the apostle Thomas, or “doubting Thomas,” who was said to be taken as a captive to South Asia much earlier and to have preached there. In some areas of Turkey and in what is now Iran, Nestorian Christianity was more widely practiced, although this Eastern brand of Christianity was condemned by Rome in the fifth century because it separated the divine and human natures of Christ.
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    The pepper route was filled with misery and death for the Europeans. In addition to the hazards of navigating by dead reckoning, men sailing to Asia had to travel thousands of miles in unsafe ships plagued by frequent leaks and loose rigging, and outfitted with anchors that were easily lost because they were too light. A Portuguese writer named Figueiredo Falcão, who had access to official records, wrote in 1612 that some thirty-five Indiamen were wrecked in the years 1580 to 1610. Other observers have estimated that between 1550 and 1650, some 130 Portuguese ships were lost either through shipwrecks or enemy attacks. Likewise, between 1601 and 1620 the English sent out eighty-one Indiamen and only thirty-five of the ships returned to England, a dismal record.
    The crew also had to endure each other; drunkenness abounded and reckless behavior sent quite a few ships up in flames, as Pyrard related when his ship was wrecked off the Maldive Islands. The voyages were always accompanied by the deaths of fellow travelers from scurvy and dysentery, another major killer. The ships stank. Hygiene was awful and the sick would often lie in their own excrement. Cockroaches, rats, and other vermin abounded. It isn’t known exactly how many European sailors perished during the early days of Indian Ocean sailing, when a round-trip voyage could take up to two years—including a layover in India of three to four months to load spices—but the losses were great. Among the Dutch, only about one in three sailors survived the ordeal of travel to Asia, and the Portuguese, Spanish, and English probably fared no better.
    In the journals that survive of these voyages, deaths were recorded, and the cause was usually “flux” or “bloody flux” (dysentery). Oftentimes men died on consecutive days, as is evident in the dreary roll call of names in the following journal entry of a merchant on one of the early voyages: “The sixteenth day our general departed Bantam and came aboard to proceed on his voyage to the Malucos; this night died Henry Dewbry of the flux … The seventeenth day died of the flux William Lewed, John Jenkens, and Samuel Porter.”
    Even if they survived the voyage, the Bombay proverb, “two monsoons were the life [of] a man” described the fate of many Europeans in Asia. Unless one had a serious death wish, why would anyone want to leave Europe under these circumstances? The usual answer is money (spices) and religion. They were going to strike it rich or they were sailing for the glory of God, and riches usually