Holy War in Brazil

The Brazilian edition of Holy War is published late July. For the cover, my publishers have chosen the page from the famous Memórias das Armadas of 1568 (held in the Academia das Ciências in Lisbon) that depicts the four ships that set out from Lisbon in 1497: the São Gabriel, Vasco da Gama’s flagship; the São Rafael, commanded by Gama’s brother Paulo; the Berrio, the caravel captained by Gama’s friend Nicolau Coelho; and a storeship skippered by Gonçalo Nunes. The storeship, which was abandoned on the way out in South Africa, is shown in flames; the S. Rafael was also abandoned and fired on the way home. As the image shows, the manuscript has suffered badly with time. Even so, these tiny drawings speak out from an age that kept few records – and the few it kept were mostly incinerated in the great Lisbon earthquake of 1755 – as the closest pictorial record we have of the modest ships that bore the explorers 24,000 miles to India and back.