SPICES AND CHRISTIANS:
Vasco da Gama Sails to India (1498)
Before 1500, trade between Europe and India was minimal. Overland travel was slow, expensive, risky, and more to the point, Europe had very little to trade that India needed or wanted. But by the early fifteenth century, the times they were a-changing. Driven by the promise of the lucrative Far Eastern spice trade, Europeans began searching in earnest for a way to get to India and beyond more quickly, cheaply, and safely. In other words, they started looking for a sea route. It wasn’t hard to figure out which way to go, since there were only two possible directions.
One way was west, the route taken by an Italian sailor named Cristoforo Columbo (1451?-1506), better known to American school children as Christopher Columbus. Like most Europeans of his time, Columbus knew the earth was round, and so he reasoned that by sailing West across the Atlantic he could eventually reach the East. Theoretically he was right of course, though he mis-judged the circumference of the Earth, reckoning it much smaller than it is (possibly on purpose to make his voyage seem less dangerous to his royal sponsors), and he didn’t know about those bothersome continents, nowadays called North and South America, that blocked his way. So in 1492, when he bumped into his first Caribbean island, he thought he was somewhere off the coast of India. As a consequence he optimistically called the curious and unsuspecting natives who surrounded his landing party “Indians” and their sacred chili “red pepper,” a pair of unfortunate misnomers that persist to this very day. (Incidentally, even if the continents hadn’t been in his way, if Columbus had tried to cross the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans together in the relatively small ships of his day–they were about 120 feet long (the length of a tennis court) and maybe 30 feet wide–with their limited cargo capacity, he would have run out of supplies long before he reached land).
The other way went south along the west coast of Africa, swung around the continent’s southern tip, then turned north and east across the Indian Ocean. The Portugese were the most ambitious explorers in this direction. They spent a good part of the early to mid-1400s pushing further and further south, stopping here and there along the West African coast, finally crossing the equator in 1473. Along the way they discovered they could make some decent money trafficking in slaves ... writing one of the least glorious chapters in Portugese history.
Finally in 1482, Bartolomeu Diaz (ca. 1450-1500) rounded Africa’s southern tip–which he dubbed the Cape of Storms–and headed north. But like Alexander’s men, Diaz’s sailors dug in their heels and refused to sail any further in uncharted waters, so the ship turned back without venturing to India. The Cape of Storms, by the way, was later re-named the Cape of Good Hope, but that didn’t help Diaz; eighteen years after he became the first European to round it, he died off the Cape ... when his ship sunk in a storm.
The job Diaz started for Portugal was finished ten years later by a hot-headed, ruthless adventurer named Vasco da Gama (b. ca. 1469), whose inaugural trip from Lisbon to Calicut, India took 10 months. Da Gama might have been a stalwart sailor, but he wasn’t a very nice person–on his way to India he took some time out to bombard a city on Mozambique, the island off the coast of East Africa–and he stunk at business, antagonizing the Indians with his arrogance, bullying behavior, and worse of all, cheap gifts.
When he got back to Portugal after two years, da Gama was treated as a national hero for his groundbreaking voyage to India, even though it was neither financially profitable nor politically successful. Seventy years later, his adventure was glorified by Luis Vaz de Camoes (ca. 1525-1580) in Os Lusiades (“The Lusiads,” i.e. the Portugese are presented as the descendent of Lusus, mythical founder of Lusitania), which has become the national epic of Portugal.
Da Gama headed for India a second time in 1502. Charged by king Emmanuel I to establish a spice-trade monopoly in the Indian Ocean by “cruel war with fire and sword,” da Gama was only too happy to oblige. On the way out, he attacked, looted, and torched a pilgrim ship, the Meri, killing most of the 300 passengers. Once back in Calicut his request for trading privileges was denied; apparently for some reason the Portugese had gotten a bad rap and the Indians wanted nothing to do with them. He retaliated by–you guessed it–bombarding the city and elbowing and kneeing his way into the spice business. Da Gama later returned to India for a third go-around, this time as Viceroy, but he died there a short while after arriving in 1524.
After 1500, with the sea route now blazed, the European rush to India was officially on; as one nineteenth-century historian commented:
The circumstances of this splendid fortune had violently attracted the attention of Europe. The commerce of India, even when confined to those narrow limits which a carriage by land had prescribed, was supposed to have elevated feeble states into great ones ... The discovery therefore of a new channel for this opulent traffic, and the happy experience of the Portuguese, inflamed the cupidity of all the maritime nations of Europe, and set before them the most tempting prospects. [1]
But Europeans weren’t interested only in trade. According to da Gama’s journal, when asked why he had come to India, he roared, “Spices,” then added ominously, “and Christians.”
Before 1500, trade between Europe and India was minimal. Overland travel was slow, expensive, risky, and more to the point, Europe had very little to trade that India needed or wanted. But by the early fifteenth century, the times they were a-changing. Driven by the promise of the lucrative Far Eastern spice trade, Europeans began searching in earnest for a way to get to India and beyond more quickly, cheaply, and safely. In other words, they started looking for a sea route. It wasn’t hard to figure out which way to go, since there were only two possible directions.
One way was west, the route taken by an Italian sailor named Cristoforo Columbo (1451?-1506), better known to American school children as Christopher Columbus. Like most Europeans of his time, Columbus knew the earth was round, and so he reasoned that by sailing West across the Atlantic he could eventually reach the East. Theoretically he was right of course, though he mis-judged the circumference of the Earth, reckoning it much smaller than it is (possibly on purpose to make his voyage seem less dangerous to his royal sponsors), and he didn’t know about those bothersome continents, nowadays called North and South America, that blocked his way. So in 1492, when he bumped into his first Caribbean island, he thought he was somewhere off the coast of India. As a consequence he optimistically called the curious and unsuspecting natives who surrounded his landing party “Indians” and their sacred chili “red pepper,” a pair of unfortunate misnomers that persist to this very day. (Incidentally, even if the continents hadn’t been in his way, if Columbus had tried to cross the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans together in the relatively small ships of his day–they were about 120 feet long (the length of a tennis court) and maybe 30 feet wide–with their limited cargo capacity, he would have run out of supplies long before he reached land).
The other way went south along the west coast of Africa, swung around the continent’s southern tip, then turned north and east across the Indian Ocean. The Portugese were the most ambitious explorers in this direction. They spent a good part of the early to mid-1400s pushing further and further south, stopping here and there along the West African coast, finally crossing the equator in 1473. Along the way they discovered they could make some decent money trafficking in slaves ... writing one of the least glorious chapters in Portugese history.
Finally in 1482, Bartolomeu Diaz (ca. 1450-1500) rounded Africa’s southern tip–which he dubbed the Cape of Storms–and headed north. But like Alexander’s men, Diaz’s sailors dug in their heels and refused to sail any further in uncharted waters, so the ship turned back without venturing to India. The Cape of Storms, by the way, was later re-named the Cape of Good Hope, but that didn’t help Diaz; eighteen years after he became the first European to round it, he died off the Cape ... when his ship sunk in a storm.
The job Diaz started for Portugal was finished ten years later by a hot-headed, ruthless adventurer named Vasco da Gama (b. ca. 1469), whose inaugural trip from Lisbon to Calicut, India took 10 months. Da Gama might have been a stalwart sailor, but he wasn’t a very nice person–on his way to India he took some time out to bombard a city on Mozambique, the island off the coast of East Africa–and he stunk at business, antagonizing the Indians with his arrogance, bullying behavior, and worse of all, cheap gifts.
When he got back to Portugal after two years, da Gama was treated as a national hero for his groundbreaking voyage to India, even though it was neither financially profitable nor politically successful. Seventy years later, his adventure was glorified by Luis Vaz de Camoes (ca. 1525-1580) in Os Lusiades (“The Lusiads,” i.e. the Portugese are presented as the descendent of Lusus, mythical founder of Lusitania), which has become the national epic of Portugal.
Da Gama headed for India a second time in 1502. Charged by king Emmanuel I to establish a spice-trade monopoly in the Indian Ocean by “cruel war with fire and sword,” da Gama was only too happy to oblige. On the way out, he attacked, looted, and torched a pilgrim ship, the Meri, killing most of the 300 passengers. Once back in Calicut his request for trading privileges was denied; apparently for some reason the Portugese had gotten a bad rap and the Indians wanted nothing to do with them. He retaliated by–you guessed it–bombarding the city and elbowing and kneeing his way into the spice business. Da Gama later returned to India for a third go-around, this time as Viceroy, but he died there a short while after arriving in 1524.
After 1500, with the sea route now blazed, the European rush to India was officially on; as one nineteenth-century historian commented:
The circumstances of this splendid fortune had violently attracted the attention of Europe. The commerce of India, even when confined to those narrow limits which a carriage by land had prescribed, was supposed to have elevated feeble states into great ones ... The discovery therefore of a new channel for this opulent traffic, and the happy experience of the Portuguese, inflamed the cupidity of all the maritime nations of Europe, and set before them the most tempting prospects. [1]
But Europeans weren’t interested only in trade. According to da Gama’s journal, when asked why he had come to India, he roared, “Spices,” then added ominously, “and Christians.”
