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.