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An etching of Vasco da Gama.

HOLY WAR

How Vasco da Gamas Epic

Voyages Turned the Tide in a

Centuries-Old Clash of

Civilizations

By Nigel Cliff

Illustrated. 547 pp.

Harper/HarperCollins Publishers.

$29.99.

Why Vasco da Gama Went to IndiaBy ERIC ORMSBY

Published: September 9, 2011

The Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama set sail from Belm, a

village at the mouth of the Tagus River now part of greater Lisbon,

on July 8, 1497. An obscure but well-connected courtier, he had

been chosen, much to everyones surprise, by King Manuel I to head

the ambitious expedition to chart a new route to India. The king

was not moved chiefly by a desire for plunder. He possessed a

visionary cast of mind bordering on derangement; he saw himselfspearheading a holy war to topple Islam, recover Jerusalem from

the infidels and establish himself as the King of Jerusalem.

Da Gama shared these dreams, but

like his hard-bitten crew, rogues or

criminals to a man, he coveted the

fabled riches of the East not only gold and gems but

spices, then the most precious of commodities. On this

voyage, as on his two later ones, he proved a brilliant

navigator and commander. But where courage could not

bring him through violent storms, contrary seas and the

machinations of hostile rulers, luck came to his rescue.

He sailed blindly, virtually by instinct, without maps,charts or reliable pilots, into unknown oceans.

As Nigel Cliff, a h istorian and journalist, demonstrates in

his lively and ambitious Holy War, da Gama was

abetted as much by ignorance as by skill and daring. To

discover the sea route to India, he deliberately set his

course in a different direction from Columbus, his great

seafaring rival. Instead of heading west, da Gama went

south. His ships inched their way down the African coast,

voyaging thousands of miles farther than any previous

explorer. After months of sailing, he rounded the Cape of

Good Hope. From there, creeping up the east coast of

Africa, he embarked on the uncharted vastness of theIndian Ocean. Uncharted, that is, by European

navigators. For at the time, the Indian Ocean was crisscrossed by Muslim vessels, and it

was Muslim merchants, backed up by powerful local rulers, who controlled the trade

routes and had done so for centuries. Da Gama sought to break this maritime

dominance; even stronger was his ambition to discover the Christians of India and their

long-lost Christian king, the legendary Prester John, and by forging an alliance with

them, to unite Christianity and destroy Islam.

The ambition was not entirely fanciful; there were Christian communities in India,

founded according to legend by St. Thomas the Apostle. Da Gama couldnt tell an

Indian Christian from a cassowary, but on this occasion, ignorance was truly bliss.

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A version of this review appeared in print on September 11, 2011, on

page BR22 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: The Last

Crusader.

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Christians and Christianity

When his ships finally moored at Calicut, near the southern tip of the subcontinent, he

and his crew rejoiced to learn that there were indeed many Christians long settled

there. As Cliff recounts, the landing party had assumed that Hindu temples were

Christian churches, they had misconstrued the Brahmins invocation of a local deity as

veneration of the Virgin Mary and they had decided the Hindu figures on the temple

walls were outlandish Christian saints. True, the temples were also crammed with

animal gods and sacred phalluses, but these surely reflected exotic local Christian

practices. What mattered to the Portuguese was that these long-lost Indian Christians

permitted images in their churches. Thus, whatever their idiosyncrasies, they could

not be Muslims. The Portuguese joined in the chants and invocations with gusto. Whenthe Hindu priests chanted Krishna, the Portuguese heard it as Christ.

Such farcical episodes recur throughout Cliffs account and add unexpected levity to

what is otherwise a dismal record of greed, savagery and fanaticism, especially but

not exclusively on the part of the European explorers. The Portuguese didnt know

that Hinduism, let alone Buddhism or Jainism, existed. For them, the world was starkly

divided between Christianity and Islam. They knew about Jews, of course; theyd been

steadily persecuting them with renewed vigor in the 1490s by forced conversion,

expulsion and massacre, but to them, Judaism was merely a forerunner of Christianity,

not a faith in its own right.

NEXT PAGE

Eric Ormsbys latest book is Fine Incisions: Essays on Poetry and Place.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: September 13, 2011

An earlier version of this review stated incorrectly that Vasco da Gama was the first

European to round the Cape of Good Hope. But in fact it was another Portuguese

explorer, Bartholomeu Dias, in 1488.

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