Not With A Bang But A Whimper (June 1955 | Volume: 6, Issue: 4)

Not With A Bang But A Whimper

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Authors: Bruce Catton

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June 1955 | Volume 6, Issue 4

When an empire falls apart the cracks usually can be seen ahead of time. There may never be an actual crash—a moment of final disaster of which, long afterward, men can say definitely: Here is where it all ended. Instead there is likely to be a long period in which things just don’t seem to go right. We may not see the fabric coming unstitched, but we do begin to notice that a good many big jobs are held by rather small men. There is a failure here, a piece of bad luck there, a cumulative deterioration in the way society works. It may not seem like much at the time, but afterward it is clear that what we thought was just a shutter banging in the wind was the noise of the house coming down.

Not without reason, this sort of thing tends to have a morbid fascination nowadays; and an excellent case history on the clinical symptoms which a dying empire can display is provided in James Duffy’s compact little book, Shipwreck and Empire .

Mr. Duffy threads together a string of unfortunate accidents which befell the Portuguese sea-carrying trade in the century beginning around 1550, shows how and why these marine disasters took place, and presently demonstrates that they were not simply an unrelated set of tragedies. They were the fatal symptoms of the slow death of Portugal’s great maritime empire, they took place because the spirit was leaving that empire, and what everybody took for no more than a run of bad luck was actually the process of decay and dissolution.

Portugal had been a great seafaring nation. Her navigators explored the eastern Atlantic, prowled far down the African coast, and at last doubled the Cape of Good Hope; they went on, over seas of wonder and peril, to open the fabled islands of the Far East, and they won for Portugal a maritime empire of remarkable wealth and solidity. The empire was based on places whose very names have magic: Goa, and Macao, the coast of Malabar, Calicut and Mozambique and—a name for the book, if ever there was one—Ormuz. By the middle of the Sixteenth Century this was one of the great empires of the world.

This empire had a glitter and a ring to it, and it had been built by hardy soldiers and by sailors of almost fantastic daring and endurance; but at bottom it was a commercial empire, the merchant followed the explorer—in the very next ship, usually—and the tiny kingdom of Portugal suddenly found itself right in the middle of a rich new trade that was expanding beyond anything men had ever dreamed of. There was gold from Africa, cotton from India, pepper and ginger and cinnamon and the other spices from the coasts beyond the sunrise, the rich fabricated goods of China and all the Orient, pouring wealth into a small country that was almost totally