PORTUGUESE LESSONS
Recently I read The Worst Journey In The World, a first-person account of explorer Robert Falcon Scott’s fatal last expedition to the Antarctic. The book was written by Apsley Cherry-Garrard, one of only a handful of men to survive the expedition. Scott and his crew left England in 1910 aboard a ship called the Terra Nova. The ship traveled south through the Atlantic Ocean between the continents of South America and Africa. On its way south the ship stopped at Madeira, the Canary Islands, an uninhabited island off the coast of Brazil called Trinidade, and another uninhabited island, this one in the Indian Ocean, called St. Paul Island. Each time the Terra Nova stopped at an island, I went to my computer and looked it up on the Wikipedia. And each time I did this, I learned that the Portuguese were the first Europeans to discover the island in question (although the Portuguese discovery of the Canary Islands is disputed by many historians).
A few weeks earlier, at an antique faire, I purchased a travel journal written in 1922 by a young American from Hawaii as she took a sea cruise of the Far East. In nearly every town she visited, she reported seeing the remains of some old Portuguese fortress.
The other day my wife and I were looking at a globe and wondering what exactly were the boundaries of the area of the Atlantic Ocean known as the Sargasso Sea. We went to the Wikipedia and found that “Portuguese sailors were among the first to discover this area in the 15th century, naming it after the sargassum seaweed growing there (sargaço in Portuguese).”
Any mention of the great deeds of Portuguese historical figures always annoys me. I have a good friend named Darrell who is of Portuguese descent. What’s more he is one of those people afflicted with a serious case of ancestor worship. He reminds me of the character in the film My Big Fat Greek Wedding played by Michael Constantine who claims that every noteworthy development in human history owes its origins to the ancient Greeks. Darrell is a talented writer and has written countless stories, poems, and essays about Portugal and the Portuguese. Last year he published an epic novel about Portugal’s Azores Islands titled The Undiscovered Island that has received several rave reviews. I have known Darrell for twenty years. During that time I have spoken to him on the phone on average five times a week. Darrell calls me every weekday morning to compare notes on the writing life. And almost always he manages to slip some reference to Portuguese history into our conversation. Sometimes he slips a lot of Portuguese history in our conversation. He has traced his family tree back to about 1300. He claims to be related to half the monarchs of Portuguese history. He is forever telling me about his great great great great great great great great grandmother Inez or his great great great great great great great great great grandfather Afonso and their exploits in 16th century Portugal. To be polite, I let him ramble on about these ancestors but, truth be told, I never pay any attention to what he is saying. If there were any substance to the theory that one can acquire knowledge subliminally while one sleeps or daydreams, I would be a walking repository of facts about Portuguese history. Alas, I have learned almost nothing about Portugal from the 1000 hours of lectures Darrell has delivered over the years during our near-daily phone conversations. All I know is that it shares the Iberian peninsula with Spain. And for years and years, I never cared to know anything more about it.
Lately, however, I can’t seem to escape the Portuguese. I have been reading a lot of old travel and exploration literature in which references to the Portuguese seem to pop up nearly every five pages or so. I went online and Googled “Portuguese discoveries and explorations” and learned that the Portuguese were the first Europeans to just about every part of the globe except the north and south poles. According to some sources, a Portuguese explorer named Joao Vaz Corte-Real landed on present-day Newfoundland twenty years before Columbus reached Hispaniola. For years Darrell has been bragging about what incredible sailors and explorers the Portuguese were, but I assumed this was just tribal pride and that were he of Spanish or Dutch extraction he’d be bragging about the sailors and explorers from Spain or Holland. But according to my cursory internet researches, the Portuguese truly were exceptional sailors and explorers. Some say that this is because Portugal is a narrow country with a very long seacoast. For hundreds of years seafaring and fishing were the primary occupations of much of Portugal’s male population. What’s more, Portugal is located in southern Europe, just a few miles from North Africa. The first great seagoing adventurers were from northern Africa and Arabia. The Arabs in particular were the first to become truly adept at celestial navigation. The Arabs invented the astrolabe and the quadrant. Due to their relatively close proximity to the Arab world, the Portuguese were among the first European people to acquire mastery of these tools. In many respects, they were 100 years ahead of most other European countries when it came to seagoing technology. Their boats were the best, their navigating tools were the best, and their sailors were the best. Thus, when the Age of Discovery dawned in Europe, the Portuguese were the first contestants out of the gate. According to an entry at the Wikipedia, the Portuguese were the first Europeans to sail to China, Japan, Brazil, Madagascar, Burma, the Maldives, New Guinea, and hundreds of other places around the globe. Theirs was the first truly global empire and the longest-lived of all European colonial empires.
The more I read about the Portuguese, the more annoyed I got. It turned out that there was more to Darrell’s claims on behalf of the Portuguese than just ancestor worship. A lot of what he has bragged about turns out to be true. When I mentioned this to my wife the other night at dinner, she asked me, “So what happened? Why don’t the Portuguese rule the world? Nowadays Portugal is nothing but a second-tier European tourist trap, about as prominent in world affairs as Ireland or Italy.”
She was right, of course. But I couldn’t really answer her question. Discovering why the Portuguese lost their empire would have required more reading and research than I was willing to do. If I wanted an easy answer to the question of “Whither the Portuguese empire?” I would be forced to do something I had never done before. I would be forced to actually ask Darrell a question about Portugal. This I was loath to do. For twenty years he had been telling me about Portugal without the slightest bit of encouragement from me. What in god’s name might happen if I were to actually show some interest in the Portuguese? Would he start sending me massive tomes about the history of Portugal and expect me to read them? Would he call me with pop quizzes in the middle of the day? Would he insist that I join him some summer on a six-week tour of historic Portuguese cities? These possibilities were nearly terrifying enough to prevent me from even picking up the phone. Alas, it occurred to me that, besides just idle curiosity, I had another, fairly strong motivation for learning the truth about how the Portuguese lost most of their colonial possessions. For the past two years my wife and I have been on the verge of losing our home to foreclosure. Perhaps, I thought, I just might be able to learn how to avoid losing my own solitary landholding by discovering how the Portuguese lost so many of theirs. It is sometimes possible to glean helpful insights into one’s own tiny problems by reading about the massive problems of much larger entities – corporations, kingdoms, empires. Even if you merely run a hotdog cart, there may be valuable lessons to be derived from reading a book about the downfall of Enron or the collapse of Lehman Bros.
And so I did it. Earlier today, for the first time in our twenty-year friendship, I posed a question to Darrell about Portugal. I called him up and asked him what the hell happened to the Portuguese overseas empire. To my relief, his answer was fairly succinct. He told me that the decline of the Portuguese empire could be traced to three pivotal occurrences. First, around 1500, under pressure from the Catholic Church, Portugal expelled much of its Jewish population from the country. Many of these Jews were prominent political advisors, economic experts, and scientists. When they were forced to leave the country they took valuable knowledge and experience with them. According to Darrell (who is half Jewish) this massive brain drain diminished Portugal’s intellectual resources disastrously. Secondly, in 1578 King Sebastian of Portugal led an army of 23,000 men, including much of the Portuguese aristocracy, into battle as part of a Christian Crusade against the Muslims of North Africa. The battle between the Portuguese Christians and the African Muslims lasted only a few hours. Apparently god was on the side of the Muslims that day. When the fighting was over, most of the Portuguese were either slaughtered or taken captive. Thousands of sons of the Portuguese nobility were among the captives. Ransoming these captives drained the wealth of almost all of Portugal’s wealthiest families, which devastated the Portuguese economy. And finally, in 1755, Portugal’s capital city of Lisbon was destroyed by a huge earthquake that triggered both a ferocious firestorm and a tsunami. The quake, the fires, and the tidal wave claimed tens of thousands of Portuguese lives and nearly wiped the Portuguese capital off the map. Portugal was forced to ignore its colonial ambitions while it struggled to rebuild both Lisbon and the domestic economy. While the Portuguese regrouped at home, other European countries cherry-picked their most desirable colonial outposts, leaving Portugal a vastly diminished empire.
Darrell’s narration of the decline of the Portuguese Empire was actually quite fascinating and informative. I only hope I haven’t triggered a massive increase in the amount of Portuguese historical information he doles out to me on a daily basis. I guess I will find out tomorrow morning when he calls.
Alas, the information I got from Darrell wasn’t as useful as I hoped it would be. If there are any lessons to be learnt from the decline of the Portuguese Empire they are these: 1) Be nice to Jews and Muslims; and 2) Avoid earthquakes, floods, and firestorms. Those are two really good pieces of advice, but I don’t know if they will be enough to help me prevent the loss of my home to foreclosure. Throughout my life I have generally been nice to Jews and Muslims. I have also managed to avoid fires, floods, and earthquakes. And yet still I find myself dangerously close to losing my one and only landholding. Ah well, Robert Falcon Scott knew more about the history of Antarctic exploration than any other man of his era, and yet he still lost his life in a bungled attempt to reach the south pole. Reading history cannot always help one avoid disaster. But reading a history book such as Cherry-Garrard’s devastating The Worst Journey In The World can certainly help us to put our own puny disasters into perspective. I may yet have to abandon this house of mine. But I doubt that I will ever have to eat a sled dog.