Vasco da Gama

Vasco da Gama was the Portuguese commander whose fleet, in 1497–1499, became the first to sail from Europe around Africa to India. His voyage gave Portugal direct access to the spice trade of the Indian Ocean and laid the foundations of the Portuguese Empire in Asia. His second expedition, marked by extreme violence against Muslim shipping and the people of Calicut, showed how force would accompany that trade. He died in India in 1524 as viceroy.

Da Gama was born in the small Alentejo port of Sines, around 1460 according to some authors and in 1469 according to others. His father, Estêvão, was a knight who served as civil governor of Sines; Vasco was the third of five sons. Little is known of his youth. Around 1480 he joined the military Order of Santiago, whose master became King John II in 1481. In 1492 the king sent him to seize French ships in Portuguese ports in reprisal for attacks on Portuguese shipping.

For decades Portuguese captains had pushed down the African coast, and in 1488 Bartolomeu Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope. John II wanted a sea route to the spices of India that would bypass the overland trade dominated by Venice and Muslim merchants. That task fell to da Gama under the next king, Manuel I.

Da Gama left Lisbon on 8 July 1497 with four ships and about 170 men. Swinging far out into the South Atlantic to catch favourable winds, the fleet was out of sight of land for over three months before reaching southern Africa on 4 November. Moving up the east coast, the Portuguese met hostility at Mozambique and Mombasa and seized goods from Arab trading ships, but at Malindi the ruler provided a Gujarati pilot who knew the monsoon. The crossing took 23 days, and on 20 May 1498 the fleet reached Calicut (Kozhikode) on India's Malabar Coast. The Zamorin, Calicut's Hindu ruler, received him, but da Gama's gifts seemed paltry, Muslim merchants suspected him of piracy, and no trade agreement was made. Sailing home against the monsoon took more than 90 days and cost about half the crew to scurvy and other illness. Two ships and well over half the men were lost, but the spices brought back proved the route's value. Da Gama reached Lisbon in late August or September 1499 and was richly rewarded.

After a later Portuguese fleet under Pedro Álvares Cabral fought with Calicut in 1500, da Gama led a heavily armed fleet of fifteen ships to India in 1502 to force the Zamorin to submit. On the way he made Kilwa pay tribute. Off the Indian coast, according to the eyewitness Thomé Lopes and the chronicler Gaspar Correia, his men captured a ship carrying several hundred Muslim pilgrims bound for Mecca, looted it and burned it with most of its passengers aboard, sparing about twenty children who were forcibly converted. At Calicut he demanded the expulsion of all Muslims, mutilated the crews of captured rice vessels and bombarded the city for nearly two days. He defeated the Zamorin's fleet, loaded spices at the rival ports of Cochin and Cannanore, and returned to Portugal in 1503 without achieving the Zamorin's submission.

For about two decades da Gama was kept away from Indian affairs. When Ferdinand Magellan went over to Spain, da Gama hinted that he too might leave Portugal, and in 1519 Manuel I made him Count of Vidigueira. The new king, John III, appointed him viceroy of India in 1524 to restore order to a corrupt administration. Da Gama reached India in September, began replacing officials, but caught malaria and died at Cochin on 24 December 1524. His remains were later taken back to Portugal. The poet Luís de Camões celebrated his first voyage in the epic Os Lusíadas of 1572.

Our 1500 map shows the world just after his first voyage, when Portugal was beginning to build its seaborne empire, and the 1530 map shows Portuguese bases spreading along the coasts of Africa and India.