The Books
As each of us individually conducted research on a specific Atlantic traveler, collectively we read these books and used them as our navigational tools to sail the Atlantic's historiographical waters. The books' histories and stories guided us through our own process. Each of the following books features a unique, comprehensive approach to the early modern Atlantic world and the people who traversed it. Their authors provided us physical, conceptual, and narrative maps that we used to navigate our own understanding of the global Atlantic world. These books also offered us a set of concepts to understand and interpret the world our travelers inhabited and the challenges and opportunities they encountered in their journeys. Scott and Hébrard’s “micro-history set in motion,” Sparks's "Atlantic Creoles," Restall and Fernández-Armesto's "armed entrepreneurs," Sweet’s “Black Atlantic,” Jasanoff's "spirit of 1783," Pérez Morales's "masterless Caribbean," and Colley's "biography that crosses boundaries" offered us fruit for thought and nourished our weekly discussions.
The Books
As each of us individually conducted research on a specific Atlantic traveler, collectively we read these books and used them as our navigational tools to sail the Atlantic's historiographical waters. The books' histories and stories guided us through our own process. Each of the following books features a unique, comprehensive approach to the early modern Atlantic world and the people who traversed it. Their authors provided us physical, conceptual, and narrative maps that we used to navigate our own understanding of the global Atlantic world. These books also offered us a set of concepts to understand and interpret the world our travelers inhabited and the challenges and opportunities they encountered in their journeys. Scott and Hébrard’s “micro-history set in motion,” Sparks's "Atlantic Creoles," Restall and Fernández-Armesto's "armed entrepreneurs," Sweet’s “Black Atlantic,” Jasanoff's "spirit of 1783," Pérez Morales's "masterless Caribbean," and Colley's "biography that crosses boundaries" offered us fruit for thought and nourished our weekly discussions.
The Books
The Books
Ramusio Map (1534). Courtesy of John Carter Brown Library
Gaspar da Gama (c. 1444 - 1510)
By Trevor Davis
At the turn of the 16th century, as Portugal continued its mercantile and exploratory ambitions during the Age of Discovery, a polyglot Hebrew merchant known as Mahmet entered the service of Vasco da Gama. Taking the baptismal name of Gaspar da Gama, he would serve as an interpreter, or lingua in the Portuguese fleet, joining expeditions to India, Brazil, Africa, and Hormuz.
Gaspar Da Gama's extensive travels took him all over the world. His prowess as a translator made him an essential member of the Portuguese fleet.
Gaspar (whose original name is unknown), an Ashkenazi Jew living in Goa, claimed to have been born in Poznan, Poland.[1] After traveling for some time and being sold into slavery, he entered the service of a Goan ruler. It was in Calicut, in the summer of 1498, that he was impressed into the service of Vasco da Gama. Gaspar served thereafter as a translator for the duration of da Gama’s return voyage to Portugal. In order to prove his loyalty to the Portuguese, who distrusted him as a Jew and alleged he was a Moorish spy, he converted to Christianity, becoming an early New Christian just as Portugal began to follow Spain’s path of religious persecution.
Proving his worth through his service to Vasco da Gama, Gaspar became a favored translator of Portuguese King Manuel I. He subsequently accompanied Pedro Alvarez Cabral on his mission to the “Indies.” Cabral and his fleet had been charged with returning to India, in the hopes of negotiating a treaty with Calicut to procure spices. Carried by the Atlantic winds, however, Cabral’s route swung far further west than that of da Gama, landing on the coast of Brazil in the spring of 1500. This was the first Portuguese expedition to the New World, and Gaspar was among the first members of Cabral’s fleet to step foot ashore, making him the first natural born Jew to reach the Americas. Gaspar’s linguistic acumen allowed him to surmount communication difficulties with the native Tupiniquim peoples and make valuable contributions to the information gathering and exchange of goods done prior to the fleet's departure back towards Calicut. In both Eastern Africa, as well as in Calicut and Cochin, Gaspar helped to negotiate sensitive trade relations and political alliances with port cities and kingdoms vying for position in this emerging global marketplace. On his return journey back from India, Gaspar met Venetian explorer Amerigo Vespucci at Cape Verde. Gaspar’s tales of his voyage to Brazil made an impression on Vespucci, even leading the Italian explorer to write positively of Gaspar to his Medici patron.[2]
Upon the fleet’s return to Portugal, Gaspar built upon his favored status with King Manuel I, solidifying a place for himself in the Portuguese court. Over time, as the implications of Cabral’s discovery became clearer, and as word of Gaspar’s mystique and eccentric ways spread, his legend grew. As a Christian, Gaspar was able to own property, and was granted several royal favors. He would later accompany Vasco da Gama and Francisco de Almeida on voyages back to India, and up the strait of Hormuz. By the time of his death between 1510 and 1520, he had become indispensable to Manuel I, and had secured a place for his own son Baltasar as a lingua in the service of the Portuguese royal family.[3]
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Gaspar’s unique circumstances and navigational career encapsulate several coinciding trends in the greater Portuguese sphere of influence at the turn of the sixteenth century. Following the establishment of the Spanish Inquisition in 1478, the 1492 Alhambra Decree formally expelled all practicing Jews from Spain. As a result, a large number of Spanish Jews emigrated to Portugal. Despite pressures, both internal and external, to limit Jew’s freedom of religion, King Manuel saw the Jewish members of his empire, from Lisbon to Ormuz, to Cochin, as valuable subjects, who greatly contributed to the expansion of Portuguese influence abroad and the monopolization of trade routes. Expulsion, therefore, was not a desired policy for King Manuel. Instead, he ordered a forced conversion along with the extension of a thirty-year grace period during which former Jews were protected from religious questioning. Gaspar’s baptism as a Christian came as part of this wave of forced conversions, allowing him to ingratiate himself with Vasco de Gama.
Gaspar reaped significant personal and economic benefit from his early conversion. Accessing these benefits by foregoing his Jewish faith may have been less traumatic for Gaspar than for the Sephardic Jews of Portugal, who were also targeted for forced conversion. Having led the life of an Ashkenazi traveler across the Mediterranean and Near East, Gaspar may have experienced some detachment from the religion of his childhood that eased the emotional weight of conversion. Once a Christian, he was rewarded handsomely in ways other conversos were not. In the coming decades, the Jewish and New Jewish populations of Iberian Portugal, as well as Portugal’s burgeoning colonies in Goa, Cape Verde, and Brazil, would undergo massive forced conversions, public humiliations, kangaroo tribunals, and gruesome punishments. Fortunately for Gaspar, he benefited from his own merits, favorable circumstances, and King Manuel’s desire to vie with Spain for control of the Atlantic and Indian world. Wisely, he helped to protect his own son from the horrors of the inquisition by naming him Baltasar, continuing the trend of male Magi names in his line begun by Vasco da Gama. This, along with Baltasar’s linguistic training, helped ensure that he would escape persecution after Gaspar’s death.[4]
King Manuel of Portugal oversaw his country as the embers of religious inquisition had begun to burn. He came to value the contributions of Gaspar, and would resist calls to exile his empire's Sephardic population. Image from Wikimedia Commons.
Pedro Álvarez Cabral's fleet landed on the shores of what is now Bahia, Brazil in the spring of 1500. Gaspar would have come with him, attempting to translate the language of the never before contacted Tupiniquim native peoples. Image from Wikimedia Commons.
To achieve a primary role in King Manuel’s fleet during the early age of Portuguese exploration, Gaspar had to overcome the widespread distrust of linguas, especially those of Jewish and Muslim backgrounds, by the Iberian regimes of the time. Parisian maritime scholar Dejanirah Couto writes that: “The paradoxical status of the interpreter explains the general mistrust they engendered. This was aggravated by the fact that the lingua’s function was practically not dissociated from spying missions or secret negotiations.”[5] This general mistrust of foreign polyglots and their motives was apparent in the early treatment of Gaspar by Vasco da Gama, who tortured him extensively to prove he was not a “Moorish spy.” Jewish and Arab allegiances were often presumed in the tense political and cultural climate of Iberia, which had a recent history of Moorish occupation. Additionally, the religious freedom granted to large populations of Sephardic Ottoman Jews fueled Iberian suspicions of their own Jewish populations. This level of distrust informs Gaspar’s perilous status within the court. As a Jewish convert who was also a skilled translator, Gaspar was both a highly valuable asset and a potentially dangerous liability.[6]
Gaspar da Gama’s Atlantic and Indian trajectories provide insight into the religious, political, and economic priorities of Portugal and King Manuel I, as well as the increasing interconnectedness between previously disconnected geographic areas. While his linguistic skills and unique background contributed to Gaspar’s prominence in Portugal’s sixteenth-century exploration, he also benefitted from developing his career during the early stages of a significant increase in Iberian Anti-Semitism and religious fundamentalism, which would soon render Portugal far less hospitable to Jewish linguas such as himself.
[1] Lipiner, Gaspar da Gama.
[2] Greenlee (ed.), The voyage of Pedro Álvares Cabral; Siqueira de Carvalho, “Uma outra expressão do Divino”; MaIieckal, “Early modern Goa”; Markham, The letters of Amerigo Vespucci; Couto, “The role of interpreters.”
[3]Correa, Three Voyages of Vasco Da Gama; Couto, "The role of interpreters.”
[4] Stiefel, Jewish Sanctuary in the Atlantic World; Correa, Three Voyages of Vasco da Gama; Maleickal, “Early Modern Goa”; Saraiva, “Introduction.”
[5] Couto, "The role of interpreters.”
[6] Correa, Three Voyages of Vasco da Gama; Stiefel, Jewish Sanctuary in the Atlantic World; El Fadl, “Islamic law and Muslim minorities.”
References
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Correa, Gaspar. The Three Voyages of Vasco de Gama, and His Viceroyalty. London: Printed for the Hakluyt Society, 1869.
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Couto, Dejanirah. "The Role of Interpreters, or Linguas in The Portugese Empire.” E-Journal of Portuguese History 1, no. 2 (2003).
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Lipiner, Elias. Gaspar da Gama: um converso na frota de Cabral. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Nova Fronteira, 1987.
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Malieckal, Bindu. “Early modern Goa: Indian trade, transcultural medicine, and the Inquisition." Scripta Instituti Donneriani Aboensis 26 (2015): 135-57.
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Siqueira de Carvalho, Márcia. “Uma outra expressão do Divino: O Conhecimento do Espaço Geográfico pelos judeus na Idade Média e no Renascimento.” Mirabilia: Revista Electrônica de História Antiga e Medieval, no. 2 (2002).
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Stiefel, Barry. Jewish Sanctuary in the Atlantic World: a Social and Architectural History. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2014.
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The Letters of Amerigo Vespucci and Other Documents Illustrative of His Career. Edited by Clements R. Markham. Farnham, England: Ashgate, 2010.
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The voyage of Pedro Álvares Cabral to Brazil and India, from Contemporary Documents and Narratives. Edited by William Brooks Greenlee. London: Printed for the Hakluyt Society, 1938.