Rounding Africa, he opened Europe’s ocean road to India
Vasco da Gama (c.1460s–24 December 1524) found the first continuous sea route from Europe to India—around the Cape of Good Hope and across the Indian Ocean from Malindi to Kozhikode. Landing on 20 May 1498, he turned decades of failed Indies attempts into Portuguese spice power.
He was born in Sines, one of the few harbours on Portugal’s Alentejo coast, in either about 1460 or 1469 depending on the author. His father Estêvão was a knight of the Order of Santiago and civil governor of Sines; his mother Isabel Sodré belonged to a prominent clan with English roots. He may have studied mathematics and navigation at Évora. Around 1480 he joined Santiago, whose master became King John II in 1481, and in 1492 the king sent him to seize French ships at Setúbal and in the Algarve in reprisal for attacks on Portuguese shipping, a job he did quickly.
John II wanted royal trade to fill the treasury and free him from the nobles. In 1487 he dispatched two agents, Afonso de Paiva and Pero da Covilhã, overland through Egypt to scout the spice markets, while Bartolomeu Dias rounded Africa’s southern tip. What remained was a captain to join the two discoveries into one route.
On 8 July 1497 da Gama left Lisbon with four vessels and 170 men: the carracks São Gabriel and São Rafael, the latter under his brother Paulo, the caravel Berrio under Nicolau Coelho, and a supply ship later scuttled at Mossel Bay. After Sierra Leone he swung out into the open South Atlantic. By 16 December he had passed Dias’s furthest point at the Great Fish River, and with Christmas near the crew named the coast Natal. The round trip was longer than the equator.
At Mozambique Island he posed as a Muslim to meet the sultan. Off Kenya his men plundered largely unarmed Arab merchant ships; Mombasa received them with hostility in April 1498, but rival Malindi supplied a Gujarati pilot who rode the monsoon to Kozhikode. He led the fourth and largest India Armada, became Count of Vidigueira in 1519, and was named viceroy in 1524.
Source: Vasco da Gama
