Vasco da Gama

The 1498 voyage

Da Gama, from a minor noble family in Sines on the Portuguese coast, was commissioned by King Manuel I to find a sea route to India, building directly on decades of earlier Portuguese exploration down the West African coast under royal sponsorship, including Bartolomeu Dias's rounding of the Cape of Good Hope in 1488, which had demonstrated that a sea passage to the Indian Ocean around Africa was possible. Departing Lisbon in July 1497 with a small fleet of four vessels, da Gama sailed south along the African coast, rounded the Cape of Good Hope, and proceeded up the East African coast, calling at ports including Mozambique, Mombasa and Malindi, where local rulers and the presence of established Arab and Gujarati trading networks in the Indian Ocean gave the Portuguese their first direct exposure to the commercial world they were seeking to enter. Guided across the open Indian Ocean by a pilot taken on at Malindi, da Gama's fleet reached the vicinity of Calicut on the Malabar coast in May 1498, completing a voyage of roughly ten months that established the first known direct sea link between Europe and the Indian subcontinent, bypassing the overland and Middle Eastern intermediary routes, largely controlled by Venetian, Arab and other traders, that had previously carried the spice and luxury trade between the two regions.

Calicut and its aftermath

Da Gama's reception at Calicut, then ruled by a Hindu monarch known by the title Zamorin, was mixed and, in commercial terms, largely disappointing. The modest trade goods he had brought were of little interest to a court and merchant community accustomed to a long-established, sophisticated trade in spices, textiles and other luxury goods conducted with Arab, Gujarati and other Indian Ocean merchants, and relations with the established Muslim merchant community resident in the city, who saw the Portuguese as unwelcome commercial rivals, were tense from the outset and repeatedly threatened to derail the visit. Da Gama nonetheless departed with a cargo of pepper and other spices and returned to Portugal in 1499, having lost roughly half his crew and two of his four ships during the voyage, but with a cargo whose sale value in Europe far exceeded the cost of the entire expedition, a return that immediately prompted the Portuguese crown to organise further, larger voyages to secure a permanent commercial and, before long, military presence on the Indian coast.

Later voyages and Portuguese India

Da Gama returned to India in 1502 at the head of a much larger and heavily armed fleet, a second voyage during which he used force against Calicut, still hostile to Portuguese demands, and against Arab and other merchant shipping in the Indian Ocean to assert and enforce Portuguese commercial dominance by intimidation and violence; the voyage included attacks on merchant vessels and coastal targets that are recorded among the more violent episodes of early Portuguese activity in the region, and which set a pattern departing sharply from earlier Indian Ocean trading norms based on negotiated access rather than naval coercion. This second voyage helped establish the model of armed commercial expansion that subsequent Portuguese governors and viceroys, most notably Afonso de Albuquerque, built upon over the following decades to seize and fortify a chain of trading settlements at Goa, Kochi, Diu, Daman and elsewhere along the Indian coast, together forming the core of what became known as the Estado da Índia. Da Gama himself, after decades largely away from Indian affairs, was appointed Portuguese Viceroy of India in 1524 in an attempt to address corruption and disorder that had developed in the colonial administration, and returned to Kochi to take up the post, but died there in December of the same year, only months after arriving.