In the short term Vasco da Gama’s expeditions were not a major commercial success, but in the longer term Portugal was to establish an important maritime trading empire on the back of its African and Asian discoveries: another Portuguese man, Fernão de Magalhães (Ferdinand Magellan) led the first expedition to circumnavigate the globe 20 years later. As supposed revenge for an attack on a Portuguese colony, he massacred 300 Muslim pilgrims (women and children included) on the vessel Miri, burning the ship. Responding to any obstruction or provocation with overwhelming force, he routinely ordered the crews of trading vessels he captured to be mutilated. The Portuguese returned to India in 1500 and in 1502, the latter expedition again led by Vasco da Gama, who was on this occasion to show himself a particularly cruel and ruthless commander.

Established Muslim traders also spoke against the European interlopers.

His expedition arrived near Kozhikode, also known as Calicut, on India’s Malabar coast in May 1498, where its reception was at best lukewarm: the voyagers seem to have underestimated the sophistication of the civilisation with which they were entering into contact the cheap goods they had brought as gifts did not impress. Vasco da Gama set out for India from Lisbon in 1497 with four ships and a crew of 170 men. The country’s seafarers had been gradually pushing further and further down the west coast of Africa throughout the 15th century and had developed a profitable commerce in gold and slaves.Īfter Bartolomeu Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1488 and discovered that the African coast turned there to the northeast, the next step was to join that knowledge with what was already known of east African ports, thus marking out a route to the East that avoided the Mediterranean and an overland route. He may have studied mathematics and navigation in the ancient town of Évora.Īt this time Portugal was engaged in an attempt to break Venice’s virtual monopoly of the valuable spice trade with the East. Vasco da Gama was born in the 1460s in the small port of Sines, where his father was civil governor. “God gave the Portuguese a small country as cradle,” wrote the Jesuit António Vieira, “but all the world as their grave.” Thus Portugal, with its back to the continent to which it culturally belonged, cut off from access to the Mediterranean by Spain but facing out on to a vast sea, might seem to have been almost inevitably cast in the role of explorer nation and trading empire. The path a nation will take – its destiny, some might say – can be strongly suggested, if not entirely dictated, by its geography.

Vasco da gama country