I received this copy from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review Before I had read this book, I knew next to nothing about the role of the Portuguese explorers. I had heard the names of Vasco da Gama and Magellan, but would have been hard pressed to recall anything about them, even their nationality. I thought that the European history relating to the spice trade began and ended with the Dutch and British. In this I was very much mistaken. Not only did the Portuguese map the coasts of Africa, and discover a way of getting around the Cape of Good Hope into the Indian Ocean, to India and beyond well in advance of the British, but they set up trading posts all along the route and became one of the richest and most successful countries in Europe in the early sixteenth century. Not bad for a small and previously very poor land. Oh, and they discovered Brazil by mistake on the way. They also perpetrated some of the most appallingly brutal and unforgivable crimes arising from their messianic Christian zealotry and their mission to wipe Islam off the face of the Earth. Their default position was aggression and intimidation, underlined by excessive paranoia and suspicion of anyone not Portuguese: “they announced their intentions with red crosses painted on their sails and bronze cannons ... they shot first and never went away; conquest was a rolling national project” The book covers a relatively short period of time, from 1483 to 1520, by the end of which the Portuguese had created a trading empire that spanned the planet and was at the time without equal. The previous big players – the Venetians and the Mameluk empire – had been beaten into submission. The book covers the extreme privations and logistic nightmares that the early explorers had to overcome in building their empire. It focuses on the incorruptible, driven and strategically brilliant but flawed explorers and statesmen – Vasco da Gama, Almeida and Alfonso Albuquerque – who built it up, and fortunately did not live long enough to see all their work destroyed by their incompetent successors, thereby making the way for the subsequent empires of Britain and the Netherlands. The whole book is fascinating. It is clearly well researched, and very well written and deserves a very wide audience.

The Portuguese are generally a polite and modest people except when they get behind the wheel of the car and transform into speed freaks. It seems this was also true of their early Portuguese discoverers during the early 16C when they finally rounded the Cape of Good Hope. Motivated by their king’s desire to dominate the spice trade and the search for the weird semi-mythical christian called Prester John, they turned into blood thirsty maniacs blasting Muslim and Hindu cities into submission with their superior fire power often without provocation and usually vastly outnumbered. This book, covering only a small time period, is a revelation and is unrelenting in its accounts of the Portuguese atrocities against all including women and children, extreme even by the standards of the day. Luckily but all too late the messianic Alberquerque acquired dysentery and died before he could inflict more damage on the local peoples. However by this time the Portuguese had sown up trade with bases in Goa, Malacca and several other places and held these for half a millennium. The book is easy to read and races along between the conflagrations but doesn’t do much for the Christian brand.