Whoever Fears the Sea, Justin Fox [i love reading .TXT] 📗

in a long line of mariners stretching back into the dim origins of Indian Ocean navigation. He made an impressive sight with his dishdasha flapping in the wind and ghutra of white cloth fringed with tassels wound around his head. It was a vision that calmed him, and he drifted to sleep.

 

CHAPTER 5

Feeling nauseous, Paul rested a cheek against the taxi’s windowpane on the way into town the next morning. Today, the plan was to forget about dhows and focus on historical research. The best place to start was Fort Jesus: a centre of Portuguese power, the perfect symbol for Europe’s expansion into Africa and the clash between Islam and Christianity on the continent.

Paul made his way towards the portal of Fort Jesus Museum, feeling the muggy heat weighing at his legs. He climbed the ramp, passed through an iron gate into a courtyard flanked by barracks and a chapel. Large-calibre cannons lined both sides of the praça. He found a table beneath a tamarind tree in the courtyard café. From his daypack, Paul pulled out a pile of readings about the great siege which he’d photocopied at Wits, but not had time to read. As he worked, he jotted an occasional note, testing sound bites on a separate sheet of paper:

VOICE-OVER: The Portuguese arrive in the Indian Ocean in their caravels and carracks, armed with cast-iron cannons that fire shot weighing ten pounds at a speed of six hundred feet per second. Swahili and Arab traders have no defence against this. The Europeans smash a peaceful maritime network that has existed for centuries and stretches from China to the gold fields of Zimbabwe.

Then comes 11 March 1696: Omani Arabs arrive off Mombasa with a force of three thousand men in seven ships, backed up by armed Swahili dhows from Lamu and Pate Islands. Portuguese civilians and loyal Swahili flee to Fort Jesus and the protection of a tiny garrison of fifty men. The great siege has begun.

Months drag by. Smallpox decimates the Omanis and the Portuguese commander succumbs to malaria. Finally, in December, a relieving fleet arrives from Goa. Attempts are made to bring reinforcements ashore in longboats, but the sailors are cut down by Omani musket fire. The few that get through find only twenty surviving Portuguese men, many weakened by venereal disease contracted from local women who’d taken refuge in the dry moat. After a few weeks the fleet, led by a cowardly commander, pulls up anchor and sails away. The defenders watch in dismay as the ships disappear over the horizon.

By the middle of 1697, only six Portuguese remain in the fort, with a few dozen Swahili men and about fifty women, who are taught how to use muskets. When the last of the Europeans dies, a young local sheik takes command and remains loyal to the defence with his band of female soldiers.

It takes the Portuguese a year to prepare another fleet. When it arrives off Mombasa on 13 December 1698, a terrible sight awaits them: the red flag of Oman flutters over the bastions of Fort Jesus. The fleet turns about and sails away.

 

VISUAL: Renaissance paintings of caravels. Pikes and swords, battle-axes and halberds. Shots of Prince Henry the Navigator’s fortress-cum-navigation school in Sagres, Atlantic waves exploding below the battlements. The camera glides down the length of a cannon. We see the ball being loaded into the muzzle, the touchhole ignites, smoke belches.

 

SOUND EFFECTS: Gregorian chant and wailing fado music, the sound of marching feet and an echoing martial song in Portuguese.

Paul remained in the café all morning, immersed in the history and only dimly aware of his surroundings. Since childhood, he’d developed a knack of transporting himself into another time or place, able to conjure all the details, and he found his imagination slipping in and out of the seventeenth century and the great siege of Fort Jesus.

Every so often, an elderly waiter, in black trousers and neatly ironed white shirt, strolled over and Paul would order something to keep from flagging: ‘Another Coke please, Anwar.’

‘I’m sorry, bwana, we’ve run out of Coke and the besiegers won’t let us collect more from the harbour. The last party were all killed. We only have water from the cistern. One pint ration per day.’

‘That will do fine, thank you, Anwar.’

Later, the waiter brought news from the battlements. José had been shot in the eye with a poisoned arrow and would not make it. A group of attackers using siege ladders had been driven off. The captain was suffering from hay fever. Paul chronicled each snippet of news in his notebook.

VOICE-OVER: More than 6,500 people fell in a defence that lasted thirty-three months. Portugal’s power in East Africa was broken. After two bloody centuries, the Europeans were chased from the western Indian Ocean, and all that remained of the empire initiated by Vasco da Gama were a few backwater ports in Mozambique. Between 1631 and 1875, Fort Jesus was won and lost nine times. Innumerable accounts of heroism, treachery and resistance cling to its ramparts. And so on, and so on…

The cloud of Paul’s hangover had lifted somewhat and he needed to stretch his legs. He left his papers in the care of Anwar and went exploring. At the far end of the courtyard, he came to a room adorned with charcoal drawings by Portuguese soldiers and sailors. There were doodles of crucifixes and churches, tents and sea creatures, the like of which any schoolboy might sketch. The drawing of a frigate had meticulously worked rigging and ratlines, no doubt a clue to the lower-deck identity of the artist.

Paul found a heart with an arrow through it: a sailor longing for a sweetheart back home. Many years would pass before he saw her again. Would he make it safely down the Indian Ocean, around the dreaded Cape of Storms, and all the way