Vasco da Gama
person · earth · Atlantic and Indian Oceans
The commander of the first fleet to sail from Europe to India, leaving Lisbon on 8 July 1497 with four vessels and reaching the Malabar coast near Calicut on 20 May 1498. The voyage's decisive stretches were not the ones usually pictured: the enormous open-water arc through the South Atlantic that kept the fleet out of sight of Africa for roughly three months, and the crossing from East Africa to India, which was made with the help of a local pilot engaged at Malindi who knew the monsoon. What he found at Calicut was not an isolated shore but a sophisticated, crowded, multinational trading system in which Portuguese goods were close to worthless — the gifts he offered the Zamorin were reportedly laughed at — and which had no particular need of him. The return crossing, made against the wind at the wrong season, killed a large part of his crew through scurvy. Da Gama did not discover a route to India; he found a way for European ships to enter a trade that had been running for a thousand years, and the violence of the following decades was the price Portugal paid to be taken seriously in it.
Read in · 1
Timeline
No dated observations are stored for this object. Atlas shows what was observed and when — it does not infer a history.
Connections · 1
- Vasco da Gama reaches Calicutparticipated_in
Assembled narrative · 1
Assembled from 16 blocks · 2 evidence · 10 related
- Story
- The commander of the first fleet to sail from Europe to India, leaving Lisbon on 8 July 1497 with four vessels and reaching the Malabar coast near Calicut on 20 May 1498. The voyage's decisive stretches were not the ones usually pictured: the enormous open-water arc through the South Atlantic that kept the fleet out of sight of Africa for roughly three months, and the crossing from East Africa to India, which was made with the help of a local pilot engaged at Malindi who knew the monsoon. What he found at Calicut was not an isolated shore but a sophisticated, crowded, multinational trading system in which Portuguese goods were close to worthless — the gifts he offered the Zamorin were reportedly laughed at — and which had no particular need of him. The return crossing, made against the wind at the wrong season, killed a large part of his crew through scurvy. Da Gama did not discover a route to India; he found a way for European ships to enter a trade that had been running for a thousand years, and the violence of the following decades was the price Portugal paid to be taken seriously in it.
- Knowledge
- Vasco da Gama
- Vasco da Gama reaches Calicut
- Connections
- Zheng He
- Vasco da Gama reaches Calicut
- Vasco da Gama reaches Calicut
- Vasco da Gama
- Vasco da Gama
- The Cape route (Carreira da Índia)
- Pepper
- Evidence
- Supports the dates and course of the first Cape-route voyage to India and the reception at Calicut. V55 verification basis: NOT consulted in this session. The dates 8 July 1497 and 20 May 1498 are given from the author's knowledge of the standard editions. The Roteiro's authorship is unknown and its account is one-sided.
- The standard single-volume account of Portuguese expansion: Ceuta, the African coast, the Cape route, the carreira da Índia, the Estado da Índia and the institutions that ran them. V55 verification basis: NOT consulted in this session. Boxer is a mid-twentieth-century imperial history and its framing has been substantially revised by later work, particularly on Asian agency and on the limits of Portuguese control; this pack uses it for structure, not for interpretation.
Observed changes · 0
No public Signals are attached to this object. Signals show what changed and when it was observed — never a direction or a rank.
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