1469-1524
The Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama discovered the sea route from Europe to India. Continuing the long-term Portuguese project of exploring the African coastline, he rounded the Cape of Good Hope and continued to Calicut, India, during a voyage that lasted from 1497 to 1499, ”an open-sea excursion of unprecedented duration for a European navigator …a demonstration of audacity rather than ability” (Fernandez-Armesto 2000a, p. 479).
Gama was a violent, ruthless, and ambitious man whose successes in forging a network of Portuguese footholds in Asia became, over the course of his lifetime and subsequent centuries, the stuff of Portuguese national legend. Portugal’s national epic, The Lusiads (1572) by Luis Vaz de Camoes (1524-1580), is based on Gama’s activities, transforming a story of seamanship and poor diplomacy into one of endurance, adventure, and heroism in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles.
Vasco da Gama was a minor Portuguese noble born in the 1460s (probably 1469, argues Sanjay Subrahmanyam [1997] in the most authoritative and scholarly biography of Gama), possibly in the southern Portuguese coastal town of Sines. Much of what we know about Gama’s background and life are based on conjecture from notoriously inclusive and fragmentary surviving documents. There are huge gaps in our knowledge and much disagreement among historians over many of the details.
It is far from certain why Gama was chosen as the leader of the expedition that made his name and career.
He was a member of the Order of Santiago, one of the several military orders that played important political and social roles in medieval Portugal. In the 1490s the orders were particularly tied up with contests over court influence and the ends and means of overseas expansion.
Subrahmanyam argues that Manuel I (known as ”the Fortunate,” r. 1495-1521) gave Gama command of the modest expedition of four ships to the pepper emporium of Calicut in the hope that, should the expedition fail, some of the disrepute would rub off on the political faction with which Gama was associated. This group gathered around Dom Jorge (1481-1550), the illegitimate son of Joao II (r. 1481-1495), Manuel’s predecessor on the throne. Dom Jorge’s faction believed that the old enemy Castile, rather than India, should be the object of the state’s imperial activity, although Gama himself pragmatically came to see the value of India once his own fortunes became tied to the success of Portugal’s expeditions to the region.
Motivations for the ”voyage of discovery” were mixed. As Gama acknowledged at the beginning of the narrative of his first voyage (probably written by his crewmember Alvaro Velho), ”In the year 1497 King Dom Manuel, the first of that name in Portugal, dispatched four vessels to make discoveries and go in search of spices” (Ravenstein 1898, p. 1). Adventure, colonization, commerce, and religion combined to send Gama in search of the sea route to India.
Once in the Indian Ocean, Gama encountered poly-centric networks of great religious and ethnic diversity— not a monolithic Islamic monopoly—a mix into which Gama’s aggression and ambition cast a further complicating factor. In East Africa, Gama and his men at first pretended to be Muslims out of fear of the locals. When this ruse was discovered, Gama’s party was regarded with distrust and suspicion. Gama aggravated things by frequently taking hostages as part of negotiations. In March 1498, several months before reaching India, he bombarded the shores of Mozambique in order to demonstrate, as an anonymous onlooker recorded, ”how much harm we could do them if we wanted.” He continued his confrontational strategy in India, which contributed to souring relations with the rulers of Calicut, the main pepper market and the principal destination of his voyage.
Vasco da Gama (ca. 1469-1524). The Portuguese explorer who in the 1490s rounded the Cape of Good Hope and discovered the sea route from Europe to India, in a 1572 woodcut portrait.
Despite his preference for violence and confrontation over compromise and negotiation, Gama was not above taking advantage of local expertise or politics. During his first voyage, Gama used local pilots (although not, as was thought, the great Ahmad Ibn Majid [14321500]) to cross the Indian Ocean, and exploited local political tensions to gain friends in Malindi in Africa and amongst the Saint Thomas Christians in Cochin in India. Yet he did so without compassion: One pilot was whipped after mistaking some islands for the mainland. Gama did not bring conflict single-handedly into the region, but rather intensified it by his ruthless tactics and by introducing new naval technology and a more systematic approach to warfare.
Upon his return to Lisbon in 1499, Gama was not received as the hero he felt himself to be. The Portuguese Crown awarded him a grant of land around Sines, but Gama was infuriated with what he perceived to be the meager nature of this prize. The turn of the century saw deep rivalry between other profoundly ambitious social climbers who sought patronage in Iberia for adventurous schemes of exploration and ”discovery.”
On the follow-up voyage to Gama’s discovery of the sea route, in 1500 Pedro Avares Cabral (ca. 1467-1520) happened upon the Brazilian littoral. Yet the failure of either Gama’s or Cabral’s voyages to yield tangible financial profits, considered in the light of news of the discoveries of Christopher Columbus (1451-1506) in the Indies to the west, put considerable pressure on Gama’s second expedition (1502-1503). On this voyage Gama bore the Columbus-inspired title of Admiral of the Seas of Arabia, Persia, and India. He was just as confrontational in style on this voyage, which included an infamous and terrible incident in which he plundered, burned, and sank a passing ship, the Miri, thus ensuring the death by drowning of the 240 Muslim pilgrims it was carrying.
Such deeds have not prevented a long Portuguese history of elaborating and promoting Gama’s legend. The image of Gama as national hero and icon grew out of his triumphant return to Lisbon from his second voyage in 1503, laden with gold and spices. Nevertheless, it was immediately followed by a lengthy period in the political wilderness from 1504 to 1523 because Gama did not share Manuel I’s conception of a universal Portuguese empire in Asia that might link up with the realm of Prester John, a mythical ruler of a Christian empire thought to lie in Central Asia or Africa, and other local Christians to outflank and destroy Islam.
Profits from the spice trade were a secondary consideration. Gama—famously spendthrift and money-grubbing—thought colonial enterprises to be a waste of money that a kingdom with meager resources like Portugal could ill afford. Gama believed it would be better for private merchants to handle the spice trade and for the state to establish and service just a few trading posts in order to facilitate commerce. This allowed others to reap the financial and political rewards of voyages to India, in particular one of Gama’s rivals, Afonso de Albuquerque (1453-1515). The descendents and admirers of the two men perpetuated the two heroes’ images and exploits in subsequent centuries, but Gama himself set about manipulating his growing legend during his period out of political favor precisely in order to ensure his own rehabilitation. That he did succeed in returning to a position of power and influence and that he died as a viceroy was testament to his vigorous social climbing and endurance.
Upon the death of Manuel I in 1521 and the arrival on the throne of Joao III (r. 1521-1557), Vasco da Gama became one of the king’s advisors, arguing forcefully that Portugal should limit its position in India to Cochin and Goa. Faced with financial constraints and Dutch and Castilian threats to Portugal’s imperial outposts, Joao sent Gama to India as viceroy and count of Vidigueira in 1524 to carry out a program of administrative and organizational reform and to remove Castilian infiltrators from the Moluccas. In the brief period in India that his poor health allowed him (less than a year), Gama once again revealed his characteristics as a stern disciplinarian, an avid fortune hunter, and an assiduous enemy of Muslims in Malabar. Overworked and unable to overcome the effects of the local climate on his weakened body, Gama died on December 24, 1524. He was buried with full honors in the Franciscan Church of San Antonio in Cochin.
Contemporaries did not all see Gama as a courageous hero. Some saw him as a ”xenophobe improbably transplanted to the tropics” (Fernandez-Armesto 2000b, p. 13). Certainly he was an arrogant and uncompromising leader who was resolutely focused on his own status and wealth (and that of his clientele). He was a merciless killer of opponents and unfortunates. Yet his legend continued apace, assured most notably by the success of Camoes’s Lusiads. In the late nineteenth century, the Portuguese state sponsored extravagant and drawn-out celebrations surrounding the reinterment in Lisbon of Gama’s bones.
The Indian nationalist historian K. M. Panikkar (1959) dubbed the period of European imperialism in Asia from 1500 to 1945 as the ”Vasco da Gama era.” Gama’s discovery of the sea route to India for Portugal was not the forceful heroism of one man but the culmination of decades of advances and incremental accumulation of knowledge. Gama’s tactics in assuring the success of his explorative and commercial ventures were hard-nosed, confrontational, aggressive, and often violent. His initial cultivation of the legend surrounding his heroism was pursued with equal vigor. Gama was the first to profit from the ”actual financial, fiscal and material returns” (Subrahmanyam 1997, p. 361) of this legend, but he was by no means the last.
