Vasco da Gama

8 Key excerpts on "Vasco da Gama"

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  Vasco da Gama and his Successors, 1460–1580

  • K.G. Jayne(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Vasco da Gama, 1497-1524

  Passage contains an image

  CHAPTER V BY SEA TO INDIA: THE START

  BARTHOLOMEU DIAS had found the sea-gates of the Orient; it remained for some mariner of equal daring to force them open. Wars with Castile and the death of King John II. had delayed this venture for a decade, but Manoel, who succeeded to the throne in 1495, did not long hesitate to resume the historic mission bequeathed to his country by Prince Henry the Navigator. This had now come to mean the search for a sea-route to India.

  The twofold purpose of the quest was explained with admirable brevity by the first Portuguese sailor who disembarked on Indian soil. “Christians and spices,” he replied, when asked what had brought him and his comrades so far.

  All those who still cherished the crusading ideals of a bygone age dreamed of an alliance with Prester John’s empire and with the other Catholic powers which were believed to exist on the other side of the world. This accomplished, the chivalry of Portugal would lead the united hosts of European and Asiatic Christendom in a campaign for the destruction of Muhammadanism. Others hoped to divert for their own profit the trade in Indian wares, and especially in spices, which had hitherto filled the treasuries of Genoa, Venice and Ragusa.

  Shortly after his accession King Manoel summoned to his court at Estremoz the son of a certain Estevão da Gama, who had been chosen to lead the way to India but had died while the preparations for the voyage were still incomplete. His third son Vasco was appointed in his stead to the office of Captain-Major (Capitão-Mór) or Commander-in-chief. Castanheda states that the honour was first offered to Vasco’s eldest brother, Paulo da Gama, who declined it on the ground of ill-health.

  Vasco da Gama was born about 1460 in the town of Sines, of which his father was Alcaide-Mór or Civil Governor. Sines, one of the few seaports on the Alemtejo coast, consisted of little more than a cluster of whitewashed, red-tiled cottages, tenanted chiefly by fisherfolk. Its inhabitants could hardly fail to be men of the sea, for a waste of barren sand, inhospitable as the unreclaimed Landes of Southern France, stretched for leagues behind the town and made all agriculture unprofitable. But westward lay the endless Atlantic, where the men of Sines could reap a surer harvest than any they could wring from the dunes, and on the north a little haven sheltered by granite cliffs gave a secure berth to their fishing-fleet. Born and bred in such an environment, Vasco da Gama was also fated to follow the sea. When he was chosen for the Indian voyage, he was already an expert navigator, about thirty-six years of age and unmarried. Courage, ambition, pride and unwavering steadfastness of purpose were the bedrock of his character. Although on occasion he might unbend so far as to join his sailors in a hornpipe, he allowed no relaxation of discipline; and although he made promotion depend exclusively on merit, never on the fortune of birth—“preferring,” as Corrêa puts it, “a low man who had won honour with his right arm to a gentleman Jew”—he was at heart an aristocrat.

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  The Shipwreck Hunter

  • David L Mearns(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Pegasus Books

    (Publisher)

  fidalgo of the royal household, when in 1497 he was chosen by the Portuguese King Dom Manuel I to be captain-major of Portugal’s most important exploration east to find the direct sea route to India. Since their discovery of Madeira Island in 1418 and the Azores archipelago in 1427, Portuguese ships commanded by their most skilled explorers and navigators had ventured south into the Atlantic Ocean, reaching successively distant locations down the west coast of Africa, in a quest to conquer new lands and to find Christian allies who could help in their costly conflict against the Moors. In 1488, a small Portuguese fleet commanded by Bartolomeu Dias finally rounded the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of

  Africa, but it ventured no further because his crew became frightened and refused to go on. The Portuguese knew that India was a land rich in valuable spices, especially pepper, and it was the ultimate objective in their plans for economic and territorial expansion. However, it wasn’t until the ambition of Dom Manuel was matched by the bravery of Vasco da Gama that they reached their goal.

  Da Gama’s discovery of the sea route to India in 1498, with an armada of just three ships, has been described by historians as one of the most important events recorded in the history of mankind. This daring and courageous exploit of seamanship and navigation gave Portugal virtually total control of the rich spice trade with India. By the middle of the sixteenth century they dominated the world’s trade, with a hundred-year monopoly in the Indian Ocean over their Dutch and English rivals. Along with the discovery of Brazil in 1500 by Pedro Álvares Cabral, it was one of the crowning achievements in Dom Manuel’s reign, helping to cement his reputation as ‘Manuel the Fortunate’ and one of Portugal’s most important rulers ever. For da Gama, it meant more riches and titles, including being named the first Admiral of the Indies.

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  Navigations

  The Portuguese Discoveries and the Renaissance

  • Malyn Newitt(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Reaktion Books

    (Publisher)

  6

  Vasco da Gama, PEDRO ÁLVARES CABRAL AND RENAISSANCE PORTUGAL

  I t is often held that the Renaissance was a period when individual attainment was recognized and individuals of genius inscribed their personalities and their fame on the European cultural memory. The great Portuguese navigators remain, for the most part, an exception and, although after their deaths chroniclers and poets celebrated their achievements, remarkably little is known about them from contemporary sources. The same is true of Columbus, though the fog of uncertainty that still hangs over him was not so much due to the lack of contemporary documents relating to his life but rather to misleading and cryptic comments deriving from his own pen and from the desire of obsessive seekers after conspiracies to find in his life an alternative to the accepted historical narrative.1

  Vasco da Gama Emerges from Obscurity

  As mentioned earlier, one of the major difficulties met by anyone writing about Bartolomeu Dias’s life is that there were several men active at that time who had the same name. Similar confusion surrounds the early life of Vasco da Gama. Sanjay Subrahmanyam outlines the problem of what he calls da Gama’s ‘doppelgängers’ – men living at the same time with the same name:

  One of these, a squire (escudeiro) to the kings Dom Duarte and Dom Afonso V , lived in Elvas, and had property in Olivença, but died in 1496. At least two others of the same name can be found in Olivença in the 1480s, besides one other in Elvas and one in Évora.2

  And it appears that da Gama’s own father had an illegitimate son, born before his marriage, whom he called Vasco, so that the great commander had a half-brother with exactly the same name as himself. The waters of history are muddied by other doppelgängers. There were a number of men in the early sixteenth century called Afonso de Albuquerque and no fewer than seven who bore the name Fernão de Magalhães (Magellan)!

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  Spices, Scents and Silk

  Catalysts of World Trade

  • James F Hancock(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • CAB International

    (Publisher)

  The nobleman Vasco da Gama was chosen by João II to complete this task. João II’s goals for him were straightforward, albeit challenging: find the route to India, wage holy war on the Moors and locate Prestor John. Da Gama was given a squadron of four well-armed ships, three years of supplies and a store of cheap goods to trade with what was assumed would be unsophisticated natives. The trinkets they carried ‘to delight a West African chief were: brass bells and basins, coral, hats and modest garments’ (Crowley, 2015, p. 53). Da Gama set off on 8 July 1497, and after passing down the western coast of Africa to the Canary and Cape Verde Islands, he followed the route of Dias into the Atlantic Ocean. After 95 days without sight of land, he boomeranged back to the coast of Africa some 125 miles north of the Cape of Good Hope (Fig. 16.1). He had not been as fortunate as Dias to be hurled around the Cape. Fig. 16.1. Route of Vasco da Gama. (Redrawn from Walrasiad, CC BY 3.0 < https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0 >, via Wikimedia Commons. File: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Map_of_Portuguese_Carreira_da_India.gif) When da Gama and his crew reached land, they were in desperate shape with scurvy, their hands and feet grotesquely swollen, and their bloody gums distended over their teeth. Scurvy was to become the scourge of all the future European voyages to India and led to countless deaths. No one escaped the symptoms after a couple of months at sea without fresh fruit and vitamin C. At St Helena Bay, the healthiest sailors were able to mend sails, collect water and search for fresh meat. They also had their first interactions with the Khoikhoi, which again turned sour when a misunderstanding led to a skirmish and da Gama received a minor spear wound. The Portuguese resolved to never again approach land without being heavily armed and ready to ‘fight at the slightest provocation’ (Crowley, 2015, p

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  The Portuguese Pioneers

  • Edgar Prestage(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Johnston Press

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER XII THE FIRST VOYAGE OF Vasco da Gama

  KING MANOEL the Fortunate succeeded to the throne of Portugal in October 1495 at the age of twenty-six, and, since he inherited with the realm the enterprise of the discovery of the sea route to India at which his countrymen had laboured for at least half a century, he caused it to be debated in the Royal Council the following December. Most of the members opposed the undertaking because India was a distant country to conquer;1 they feared that the attempt would be beyond the strength of Portugal, and foresaw that it would excite the jealousy of other powers, especially of Venice, whose commercial interests would be thereby prejudiced. Some councillors, however, held a contrary opinion, and, as their arguments fitted in with the King’s desire, he endorsed them. After all, Venice, in fear of the Turk, could only use the arm of intrigue, and no active opposition from elsewhere was likely.

  He conferred the leadership of the expedition on Vasco da Gama, a gentleman of his household, who had been indicated for the post in the preceding reign. The year of his birth, like that of a distant kinsman, the poet Camoens, who immortalised him in The Lusiads , is not certainly known, but it may have been 1460; the place was Sines, a seaport in the south of Portugal of which his father had been Alcaidemór . We know little of his education and early life, but his selection to complete the work of Bartholomew Dias may be regarded as evidence that he possessed training in naval matters as well as strength of character. Garcia de Resende asserts that the King trusted him because he had served in his fleets, and in 1492 had been employed to seize the French vessels lying in the ports of Setubal and the Algarve as a reprisal for an act of piracy, while Mariz, a later writer, says that he had as good an acquaintance with navigation as the best pilots. This is certainly an exaggeration, but as we find him landing near the Cape to determine the latitude, it is clear that he did not lack technical knowledge. This was not, however, the only qualification he needed, for discovery was not his main business; he went as ambassador to establish relations between King Manoel and Indian rulers for the sake of Christianity and commerce. Contemporary writers describe him as a brave, tenacious and authoritative man, proud and irascible; the Venetian envoy, Leonardo da Cha Masser, who knew him, calls him violent. In spite of such natural defects, however, he shewed patience as well as firmness in dealing with Orientals at Calicut and at the ports of call, and these qualities enabled him to control and keep the confidence of his crews in a voyage of unheard-of length through almost unknown seas. His fleet consisted of four vessels: the flagship St. Gabriel , commanded by himself, and piloted by Pero de Alemquer; the St. Raphael and Berrio , of which his brother Paul and Nicolas Coelho were captains, with John de Coimbra and Pero de Escolar as pilots, and a store-ship. The first two were square-rigged vessels of shallow draught, built for the voyage under the direction of Bartholomew Dias, and the timber for them had been cut in the royal forests before John II died; the Berrio was a lateen-rigged caravel of the class used in the Henrician expeditions. The tonnage of the St. Gabriel and St. Raphael is stated by contemporary historians as being from 100 to 120 tons, that of the Berrio as 50, while the store-ship seems to have been of 200 tons; but the ‘ton’ at that time was a different measure from what it is now, and if we multiply the figures by two we shall not be exaggerating them; even so, the vessels were small and of set purpose, according to Duarte Pacheco, because of the banks and shoals of the African coast. The St. Gabriel and the St. Raphael had three masts, with castles fore and aft, and square sterns, and they bore the figure of their patron saint at the bow. There is a coloured drawing of the vessels in the sixteenth-century MS. Memoria das Armadas at the Lisbon Academy of Sciences. The armament consisted of twenty guns, some of them breech-loaders; the officers were clad in armour and carried swords; the men wore leather jerkins and breastplates, and had cross-bows, axes and pikes. Everything had been carefully thought out and great expense incurred, but according to the Roteiro ,1

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  Maritime Exploration in the Age of Discovery, 1415-1800

  • Ronald S. Love(Author)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • Greenwood

    (Publisher)

  Thus equipped, they rapidly defeated all local naval opposition, where any could be mustered, asserted their con- trol over Asian commerce, and forged a seaborne empire secured by their warships and a system of factories built at strategic points along the coasts from Mozambique to China. As a result, within a decade of their arrival and for most of the sixteenth century that followed, Portugal held the dominant position in maritime Asia. Initially, however, the Portuguese were peaceful and concerned only with trade, not conquest. When Vasco da Gama sailed from Lisbon in July 1497, he had been provided not just with maps and reports from other navigators, including Bartolomeu Dias, about what he might expect to find on the unexplored littoral of east Africa, but also with letters of introduction from the new king, Manuel I (r. 1495–1521), as well as a cargo of gold, pearls, woolen textiles, bronzeware, iron utensils, and additional merchandise that he hoped to exchange for pepper and other spices in Indian markets. Nor was this all. According to sixteenth-century chronicler Gaspar Correa, before his departure Da Gama had ‘‘asked the king to give 22 MARITIME EXPLORATION IN THE AGE OF DISCOVERY him a few prisoners who were condemned to death, in order to adventure them, or leave them in desolate countries, where, if they lived, they might be of great advantage when he returned,’’ by reason of the languages they might learn and the geographic knowledge they might acquire. 11 This was clearly a trade mission, in other words, not a naval expedition to discover and claim unknown terri- tories for the Portuguese Crown. The voyage lasted for more than ten months, during which the ships encountered such difficulties, wrote Correa, that the crews grew ‘‘sick with fear and hardship .

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  The Hermeneutics of Suspicion

  Cross-Cultural Encounters with India

  • Dorothy Figueira(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  4

  Vasco da Gama, the Meaning of Discovery, and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion

  Viemos buscar christãos e especiaria.

  Diario da Viagem de Vasco da Gama1

  I. The voyage

  Voyagers carried with them royal commissions mandating that they “discover and gain” (Washburn 1962: 14).2 It is no surprise then that the anonymous first-hand account of Vasco da Gama’s first voyage, the Roteiro da Viagem de Vasco da Gama,3 begins in the following manner: “In the name of God. Amen. In the year 1497, to King Dom Manuel, the first of this name in Portugal, sent out (mandou) to discover (descobrir), four ships,4 which went in search of spices.…” The narrator uses the verb “discover” initially in an intransitive sense. The ships were sent in search of spices. Manuel, however, sent Gama to discover. What he was meant to discover remains unspecified in this first articulation. What was, in fact, discovered and what it even meant “to discover” unfolds in the course of Gama’s voyage. The verb “discover” is used strategically in this initial passage. In a letter of October 18, 1498, Gama wrote that he had reached the terra firma that was known to the ancients (O’Gorman 1961: 99–100). Gama’s terminology here suggests that he understood the act of discovery as entailing the arrival in lands that were known by reputation and past visitation. In this sense, the term “discover” meant uncovering land that was hidden but known to exist. Columbus also would have used the term “discover” in this sense (Washburn 1962: 12).5 The important point to be gleaned from this terminology was that the Portuguese saw themselves to be on a mission and believed that they were in control.

  Gama set sail from Lisbon on July 8, 1497. He carried with him letters of introduction from Manuel to be given to Prester John (Uebel 2005: 195–6). Routing themselves far out into the Atlantic Ocean, they passed the Cape of Good Hope on November 16. When they arrived in Mozambique, they anchored away from the settlement, off a small island, to avoid detection. Here, removed from the prying eyes of the natives, they celebrated mass. The sultan, learning of their presence, invited a representative, one of Gama’s captains, Nicolão Coelho, to his palace. They met and duly exchanged gifts. The sultan had received the impression that the Portuguese were white Moors who had come from Turkey.6

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  The Portuguese in India and Other Studies, 1500-1700

  • A.R. Disney(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  One of the most frequently cited stories of this kind concerns a sequence of outrages allegedly committed by Vasco da Gama and his men at Calicut, during the Admiral’s second voyage to India in 1502–3. There is a well-worn version of this story, to which historians writing in English about the Portuguese in India seem to be especially attracted. Stanley Wolpert, in his standard history of India, tells it as follows:

  Vasco da Gama returned with a fleet of fifteen heavily armed ships in 1502 and blasted the port [Calicut] until it was all but reduced to rubble. Then he captured several Muslim vessels and cut off the hands, ears and noses of some eight hundred “Moorish” seamen, sending the lot to the zamorin’s palace for his highness’s “curry.” Such orgies of piracy and plunder served to secure Portugal’s direct route to the East and assured an uninterrupted supply of pepper and cloves.1

  Almost a century before Wolpert, R.S.Whiteway had described these outrages in very similar terms in his classic history of the Portuguese presence in India in the early sixteenth century.2 O.K.Nambiar did likewise in the early 1960s, apparently taking his account secondhand from the notoriously unreliable F.C.Danvers.3 More recently, Bailey W. Diffie and George D.Winius have also repeated the story, once again saying essentially the same as Wolpert, though somewhat more judiciously.4 So what are the origins of the story, and is it really credible?

  Vasco da Gama’s second visit to India is relatively well documented, there being at least ten separate contemporary or near-contemporary published accounts of varying quality, detail and accuracy, that describe it. The longest of these accounts was written by Tomé Lopes, a Portuguese scribe aboard one of Gama’s ships, who personally witnessed most of what he narrated. Lopes probably composed the bulk of his account during the voyage itself, and was clearly a man of recognised ability in his profession — he was subsequently appointed keeper of the royal archives in Lisbon. His narrative now survives only through a near-contemporay Italian translation, originally prepared for the information of the Soderini family in Florence, and later published in Venice by the celebrated Giovanni Ramusio in 1550.5

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