8.4 — Why Europe Sailed

When Vasco da Gama reached Calicut in May 1498, having sailed round Africa, he sent ashore the goods he had brought to trade: striped cloth, hats, coral, sugar, oil and honey.

The local merchants laughed at them. The Muslim traders of Calicut, who dealt in Chinese porcelain, Arabian horses, Persian carpets and the finest textiles in the world, told him the Zamorin's customs officials were not interested. He had arrived at the richest trading port on the Malabar coast with a cargo suitable for West African barter.

That moment is the whole economic problem of the age in one scene. Europe wanted what Asia produced. Asia wanted almost nothing Europe produced. Everything in this chapter follows from that imbalance and from what Europeans eventually did about it.

What they were actually after

Spices, above all, and the reason is worth being precise about because the standard explanation is wrong.

The old story is that spices were needed to disguise rotten meat. This does not survive scrutiny: spices cost far more than fresh meat, so anyone who could afford pepper could afford a fresh animal. They were used because they tasted good, because they were believed to be medicinal in the humoral system, and above all because they were expensive and therefore displayed status.

Pepper from Malabar, cinnamon from Ceylon, and — the highest value of all — nutmeg and mace from the Banda Islands and cloves from a handful of islands in the Moluccas. Nutmeg grew in one small archipelago in eastern Indonesia and nowhere else on Earth, which is a fact that gets several thousand people killed later in this chapter.

The mark-up along the chain was enormous. Spices passed from Southeast Asian growers to Indian and Arab merchants, across the Indian Ocean, through the Red Sea or the Persian Gulf, through Mamluk Egypt or Ottoman territory where they were taxed, to Venice, which held the European distribution and took its own margin.

Gold and silver, to pay for it, since Europe had a permanent bullion deficit with Asia (Chapter 5.7).

And a religious motive that was genuine. The Iberian kingdoms had just completed the Reconquista — Granada fell in 1492, the same year Columbus sailed — and crusading was live. There was also a persistent belief in Prester John, a Christian king somewhere beyond the Islamic world with whom Europe might ally, which drove Portuguese exploration of the African coast and East Africa for decades.

Da Gama's own stated purpose on arrival was "Christians and spices."

What had to be solved first

Five problems, and each has a specific answer.

The ship. The caravel — small, with lateen sails allowing it to sail closer to the wind and therefore to beat back against a headwind — was essential for coasting down Africa, because the prevailing winds and currents run southward and getting home is the hard part. Larger carracks and naus carried the cargo and the guns (Chapter 8.3).

Getting home from West Africa. The volta do mar — the return by the sea — is the crucial navigational discovery. Rather than beating back up the African coast against wind and current, Portuguese pilots learned to sail far out into the Atlantic, northwest, to pick up the westerlies, and come back to Iberia from the northwest. It is counter-intuitive — you sail away from where you want to go — and it works because of the wind belts of Chapter 2.2. Columbus used the same principle in the Atlantic: out on the trades, back on the westerlies.

Latitude. The quadrant and later the astrolabe and cross-staff measure the angle of the Pole Star or the noon sun above the horizon, which gives latitude directly. Portuguese astronomers produced tables of solar declination so latitude could be found from the sun south of the equator, where the Pole Star is not visible.

Longitude was not solved for another 250 years, and the lack of it is the great danger of the age — a ship knew how far north it was and had to estimate how far east or west by dead reckoning. The problem was solved by Harrison's marine chronometers in the eighteenth century, after a British parliamentary prize was offered following a disaster in which a fleet was wrecked on the Scillies through a longitude error.

Money. Voyages were extremely expensive and extremely risky. The answer was to spread both, and Chapter 9.3 covers the instruments: shares in a voyage, then in a company, marine insurance, and eventually the permanent joint-stock company.

And state backing. Portugal's crown funded and directed exploration systematically from the early fifteenth century, associated with Prince Henry, called the Navigator — a title given by later writers, and he did organise, fund and collect information systematically even though he did not sail.

The Portuguese in the Indian Ocean

Da Gama returned in 1499 with a cargo that repaid the voyage many times over, and Portugal moved immediately to take control of the trade rather than participate in it.

The strategy, executed principally by Afonso de Albuquerque, was to seize the chokepoints. Goa in 1510 as the administrative centre. Malacca in 1511, controlling the strait through which all Southeast Asian trade passed. Hormuz in 1515, controlling the Persian Gulf. They attempted Aden and failed, which meant the Red Sea route stayed open and is one reason the Portuguese monopoly was never complete.

The cartaz system was the instrument: any ship trading in the Indian Ocean had to buy a Portuguese pass and call at Portuguese ports to pay duties. Ships without one were seized or sunk.

This was new and it should be named accurately. The Indian Ocean had been a trading system without a hegemon for a thousand years — merchants of many religions and states, operating under custom and local rulers, with piracy as an occasional nuisance rather than state policy. The Portuguese introduced the idea that the sea itself could be owned and taxed by force.

And they were brutal about it. Da Gama's second voyage included the burning of a pilgrim ship, the Miri, returning from Mecca, with several hundred passengers including women and children, after its surrender was accepted and its cargo taken. This is recorded by Portuguese chroniclers.

Why nobody stopped them: Chapter 6.1 and Chapter 8.3. The regional powers were land powers. The Ottomans and Mamluks made attempts and were beaten at sea at Diu in 1509. The Zamorin of Calicut fought a long naval campaign with the Kunjali Marakkar admirals and could not match the gun platforms.

Portugal's control was real and it was thin. A country of about a million people could garrison forts and control chokepoints, and it could not police an ocean, and a great deal of trade continued around it.

Spain, and the accident

Columbus's proposal was based on a mistake. He used an underestimate of the Earth's circumference and an overestimate of Asia's eastward extent, concluding that Japan lay about 4,000 kilometres west of the Canaries. The actual distance is about 19,000 kilometres.

The Portuguese experts who rejected his proposal were right and he was wrong. Educated Europeans knew the Earth was round and knew its approximate size — Eratosthenes had measured it in the third century BCE (Chapter 5.2), and al-Ma'mun's surveyors had confirmed it (Chapter 7.2). The flat-earth myth about Columbus's contemporaries was invented in the nineteenth century, largely by Washington Irving.

The dispute was about distance, and Columbus lost the argument and got funded anyway — by Spain, after Portugal, Genoa and Venice had refused, and because the cost of a small expedition was low relative to the possible payoff.

He was saved by a continent nobody in Europe knew was there. He reached the Bahamas in October 1492 and died in 1506 still maintaining he had reached Asia.

The Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494, brokered by the Pope, divided the non-Christian world between Spain and Portugal along a meridian in the Atlantic. This is why Brazil speaks Portuguese and the rest of South America speaks Spanish — the line happened to fall through the eastern bulge of a continent nobody had yet mapped.

Magellan's expedition, 1519–22, circumnavigated the globe. Magellan was killed in the Philippines; one ship of five returned with 18 of about 270 men. It established the Pacific's size, which nobody had guessed.

Why Europe and not China

Chapter 7.9 gave the Chinese decision. Here is the comparison stated directly.

China had better ships, more capital and greater state capacity in 1430, and stopped.

Europe was poorer, fragmented and technically behind, and kept going.

Four differences.

Motive. China had everything it wanted. The Ming court's view, expressed to European embassies for centuries, was that the empire possessed all things and had no need of foreign goods. Europe had a specific unmet demand — Asian goods — and no way to pay for them. Want is a stronger driver than capability.

Geography of the market. Europe sat at the far end of the Asian trade chain, paying every intermediary's margin. Cutting out those intermediaries was worth enormous sums to Europeans and nothing to Chinese.

Political structure. China's decision was made once, at court, and applied to everyone. In Europe, Columbus was rejected by Portugal and funded by Spain; when Spain and Portugal divided the world, England, France and the Dutch simply ignored the treaty. No single refusal could stop a project. This is Chapter 16.3's argument and this is its clearest single illustration.

And the competition itself. European states raced each other, and a state that abstained watched its rival get rich.

What it produced

A world economy. For the first time, all the inhabited continents were in regular contact, and the consequences — biological, demographic and economic — are Chapter 8.5's subject.

The Columbian Exchange, which reshaped agriculture and population on every continent.

Silver. The mines at Potosí in Bolivia and Zacatecas in Mexico produced silver on a scale that flooded the world economy. A very large share of it ended up in China, which had monetised its tax system in silver, passing through Manila on the annual galleon and through Europe. The world's first genuinely global trade circuit runs American silver to China in exchange for silk and porcelain.

And the beginning of the divergence. Chapter 9.4 asks how much Atlantic trade actually contributed to Europe's later industrialisation, and the answer is contested — the trade was a small share of European GDP, and it was concentrated in exactly the countries that industrialised, and it built the shipping, financial and manufacturing sectors that mattered.

Where this shows up in your life

The languages of the Americas, of Brazil, of the Philippines, and of large parts of Africa are a map of who sailed where.

The chilli in Indian food, the tomato in Italian food, the potato in Irish and Bengali food, and the chocolate in everything all crossed on these ships (Chapter 4.5).

And the honest framing of the whole enterprise. It was driven by demand for luxury goods, funded by states looking for revenue, executed with extreme violence where resistance was met, and it created the connected world that everything after it takes for granted. Chapter 8.5 and Chapter 8.6 are the bill.

What the next page covers

Within about a century of 1492, the population of the Americas fell by somewhere between half and nine-tenths. Chapter 8.5 covers the conquest and the exchange — how a few hundred Spaniards overthrew two large empires and what actually explains it, the honest demographic accounting, the silver system and what it did to the world's money, and the Columbian Exchange of crops, animals and diseases that changed what every human being on Earth eats.