Traveling northward to Mombasa, the Portuguese escaped a Moslem attempt to destroy the small fleet and hurriedly sailed for the nearby port of Malindi. A subsequent dispute, however, led da Gama to order a naval bombardment of the city. Proceeding to Mozambique, where they were at first mistaken for Moslems, the Portuguese were kindly received by the sultan. These towns were under Moslem control and gained their wealth largely through trade in gold and ivory. Sailing past the port of Sofala, the expedition landed at Kilimane, the second in a string of East African coastal cities. After a landfall in the Cape Verde Islands, he stood well out to sea, rounding the Cape of Good Hope on November 22. Raphael and Berrio (commanded, respectively, by his brother Paulo and Nicolas Coelho) and a large supply ship. Da Gama's voyage was to be the first complete step toward the realization of these ambitions.ĭa Gama, supplied with letters of introduction to Prester John and to the ruler of the Malabar city of Calicut, set sail from the Tagus River in Lisbon on July 8, 1497. He also hoped to join with Eastern Christian forces (symbolized to medieval Europeans by the legend of the powerful priest-king, Prester John) and thus carry on a worldwide crusade against Islam. Manuel hoped to displace the Moslem (and thus the Venetian) middlemen and to establish Portuguese hegemony over the Oriental oceanic trades. This trade had fallen under the control of Moslem merchants the Venetians were only the final distributors to Europe of these valuable commodities. Manuel, against the advice of a majority of his counselors, had decided to follow up Bartolomeu Dias's triumphal voyage round the Cape of Good Hope (1487-1488) with a well-planned attempt to reach all the way to the Malabar Coast of India, the ports of which were the major entrepôts for the Western spice trade with southeastern Asia. When he was commissioned for his famous voyage, he was a gentleman at the court of King Manuel I. He first comes to historical notice in 1492, when he seized French ships in Portuguese ports as reprisal for piratical raids. Little is known of the early life of Vasco da Gama his father was governor of Sines, Portugal, where Vasco was born.
It is this route established by Da Gama that secured Portugal’s dominant position in commodity trading with the East and its title of the wealthiest country in Europe 3.
The Portuguese were ambitious and further extended their influence to Southeast Asia, China, and Japan. The fleets also robbed the natives and established posts along the Indian Gulf, slowly colonizing the land. From then on, Portuguese fleets began to sail eastward regularly and purchased oriental merchandises at low prices. In 1499, Da Gama and his crew finally returned to Lisbon 2.
The crew left Malindi on April 24 th and passed through the Indian Ocean to reach Calicut, India on August 29 th. Da Gama reached Mombasa in early April and then Malindi later in the month. At the beginning of March, 1498, the crew landed on the Island of Mozambique. Da Gama and his crew reached the Cape of Good Hope on Novemand then continued to sail into the Indian Ocean. When the king of Portugal received news on Columbus’s discovery of the new American continent, he appointed Da Gama in 1495 as a leader in an expedition to explore additional maritime routes 1. On July 8, 1497, Da Gama’s ships set sail from Lisbon eastward toward the Indian Ocean. However, because the original East-West trade routes were controlled by the Arabs, European feudal lords, businessmen, and navigators began to risk their lives voyaging through the Atlantic to search for new routes in order to satisfy their greed for gold.
Vasco da gama purpose of exploration full#
Accounts of China and India in the book The Travels of Marco Polo left Europeans to believe that Far Eastern countries are paradises full of gold and treasures. Vasco Da Gama-The First to Arrive in Indiaĭuring the 14-15 th century, the commercial economy of Western Europe thrived and spurred the radical development of foreign trade.
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