Vasco da Gama Reaches Calicut
Vasco da Gama reached Calicut on 20 May 1498, opening the sea route from Europe to India after eight decades of Portuguese effort down the African coast. He left Lisbon in July 1497 with four ships and about 170 men. The critical decision was navigational: rather than hugging the West African coast against contrary winds and currents, he swung far out into the South Atlantic in a great arc — the volta do mar — and picked up the westerlies to round the Cape. It kept him out of sight of land for ninety-six days, the longest open-ocean passage then recorded, and it became the standard route. He rounded the Cape of Good Hope in November, ten years after Bartolomeu Dias had found it and turned back. The East African coast was a shock. Mozambique, Mombasa and Malindi were prosperous Muslim trading cities in a commercial world stretching to China, and the Portuguese trade goods — cloth, hats, coral, washbasins — were received as insultingly cheap. At Malindi he obtained a pilot, and crossed to India in twenty-three days. The Zamorin of Calicut received him and was similarly unimpressed by the gifts. Da Gama got a cargo of pepper and cinnamon and left in August without a treaty, sailing into the monsoon and losing over half his men to scurvy on the crossing. He reached Lisbon in September 1499 with two ships and about fifty-five survivors, and a cargo that repaid the expedition many times over. Portugal had broken the Venetian and Egyptian monopoly on the spice trade, and the price of pepper in Lisbon collapsed within a decade. He returned in 1502 with a war fleet.
- Year: 1498 CE
- Category: Political
