Da Gama's Second Voyage to India
Vasco da Gama returned to India in 1502 with a fleet of some twenty armed ships, four years after his first voyage, and with instructions that made the difference between the two expeditions plain. The first voyage had opened the sea route and had been commercially thin: the goods he carried were of no interest in Calicut, and he had left without a treaty. The second was a punitive and coercive expedition intended to establish by force what negotiation had not. Portugal's problem was structural. The spice trade ran through Arab and Gujarati merchants to the Red Sea and Venice, and the Portuguese had nothing to sell that the Indian Ocean wanted. What they had was ships that could carry heavy cannon and fight at sea, which the trading vessels of the region were not built to do. Da Gama used them. Off the Malabar coast he intercepted the Miri, a pilgrim ship returning from Mecca, took its cargo, and burned it with several hundred people aboard including women and children, over some days of resistance. He then bombarded Calicut when the Zamorin refused his demand to expel all Muslim traders, and had captured fishermen and crews hanged and mutilated, sending their remains ashore. He forced treaties on Cochin and Cannanore, rivals of Calicut, and left a permanent squadron behind. The voyage established the cartaz system, under which Indian Ocean shipping required a Portuguese licence. He returned in 1503 with a very large cargo and was made a count. The violence of the voyage was not incidental to the Portuguese method in Asia but the substance of it. Within a decade Albuquerque had taken Goa, Malacca and Hormuz and closed the Red Sea route.
- Year: 1502 CE
