Diário

Examples from the Diário archives.

  Vasco da Gama (1469-1524) was the first European to sail to India, thus completing the quest begun 80 years earlier by Henry the Navigator.

The youthful Da Gama participated in the wars against Castile. He was then commissioned by King Emanuel to search for the sea route to India. He left Lisbon with four ships on July 8, 1497. In November he rounded the Cape of Good Hope (first rounded in 1488 by the Portuguese navigator Bartolomeu Dias) having been out of sight of land for over 13 weeks, probably the longest sea voyage at that time. Natal was so named because he sighted it on Christmas day in 1497. He secured a pilot at Malindi, in present day Kenya, to guide him eastward, reaching Calicut on the Malabar Coast in May, 1498. Due to hostile Muslim merchants and poor quality goods with which he hoped to barter, he was unable to sign a trade agreement with the Indian ruler, Zamorin. With winds against him it took three months to return to Malindi and many of his crew died of scurvy. He returned to Portugal in September 1499. He had navigated some 24,000 miles and demonstrated that the Indian Ocean was not the landlocked sea Europeans had thought it to be since the time of the ancient Greeks.

Da Gama was rewarded with the title of Admiral of the Indian Ocean. His epic voyage led to Portuugal establishing a trading post in Calicut but the colonists there were massacred and, in 1502, Da Gama returned. He attacked Muslim ships killing more than 400 men, women, and children returning from a pilgrimage to Mecca and in Calicut he quickly subdued the inhabitants, impressing them with the superior fire-power of his Portuguese force. He made peace with Zamorin and, bearing a rich cargo of spice, he left for home establishing Portuguese colonies at Mozambique and Sofala (present-day Beira) on the way. He arrived in Portugal in September 1503 and was richly rewarded for breaking the Muslim monopoly of trade with India. He then led a quiet retirement for 20 years but in 1524 he was appointed Viceroy of India, charged with correcting corruption among the Portuguese authorities there: Three months later, however, he died in Cochin.

De Gama had made Lisbon the centre of the European spice trade and laid the foundation for the Portuguese Empire which controlled the ports of east Africa, south-west India, and Indonesia.

Vasco da Gama (1469-1524) was the first European to sail to India, thus completing the quest begun 80 years earlier by Henry the Navigator.