Vasco da Gama and the Sea Route to India: History and Where to See It

Vasco da Gama was born in Sines, a small port on the Alentejo coast, around 1469, into a family of minor nobility with service at court. Little is documented about his early years beyond the fact that he was trusted with naval and diplomatic assignments before he was thirty. When King Manuel I decided to pursue the sea route to India that Bartolomeu Dias had made plausible by rounding the Cape of Good Hope in 1488, Gama was given the command.

Four vessels left Belém on 8 July 1497: the São Gabriel, the São Rafael, the caravel Berrio and a supply ship. Rather than following the African coast, the fleet swung far out into the South Atlantic to pick up favourable winds, a long arc of some three months out of sight of land. They rounded the Cape in November, worked up the East African coast through Mozambique, Mombasa and Malindi, and took on a pilot familiar with the monsoon crossing. On 20 May 1498 they anchored off Calicut, in present day Kerala.

The reception was complicated. The gifts the Portuguese had brought were modest by the standards of a port already trading in gold, silk and pepper with merchants from across the Indian Ocean, and negotiations with the Zamorin of Calicut did not produce the treaty Lisbon wanted. The fleet left in August, misjudged the monsoon and spent months at sea. Scurvy killed a large part of the crews, the São Rafael was burned for lack of men to sail her, and roughly a third of those who set out returned. Gama reached Lisbon in the late summer of 1499.

The consequences were immediate and lasting. A sea route between Europe and Asia now existed that avoided the overland and Red Sea intermediaries, and within a decade Portugal had built a chain of fortified trading posts from East Africa to Goa and Malacca. Gama returned to India in 1502 with a war fleet, an expedition that included acts of violence against civilian shipping which historians have long treated as a dark chapter of the period. He was appointed Viceroy in 1524, sailed east again, and died in Kochi in December of that year.

The voyage also reshaped Lisbon itself. Revenue from the spice trade paid for the Jerónimos Monastery in Belém, begun in 1501 close to the chapel where the crews had kept vigil before departure, and for the Belém Tower that guarded the river approach. Both are UNESCO World Heritage sites and both are best visited early, before the coaches arrive. Gama's tomb sits inside the monastery church, opposite that of the poet Luís de Camões, whose epic Os Lusíadas turned the voyage into the founding narrative of Portuguese literature.

For travellers who want the story outside Lisbon, Sines is a straightforward day out from the Alentejo coast: a compact castle, a museum with material on the navigator, and a working port below. The Padrão dos Descobrimentos in Belém, built in 1960, places Gama among the figures on its eastern face and offers a viewing platform over the river. Read the monument for what it is, a mid twentieth century interpretation of the period rather than a contemporary record, and the visit becomes more interesting rather than less.

Modern Portugal has kept the name in circulation without much ceremony. The Vasco da Gama bridge crosses the Tagus for more than seventeen kilometres, the longest in the European Union when it opened in 1998 for the Lisbon World Exposition, and a shopping centre, a football club and a crater on the Moon carry it too. The anniversary of the voyage is a reminder that the route he opened connected societies in ways that were profitable for some and destructive for others, and that both parts belong in the account.

Related reading on Touristic: The PALOP Countries: Portuguese Beyond Portugal, Portugal's Big Annual Events: A Year-Round Calendar, Sintra's Misty Palaces: A Romantic's Daydream.