Vasco da Gama: the sea route from Europe to India

On Saturday, 8 July 1497, four ships sailed from the coast at Restelo, near Lisbon, the capital of Portugal. Their commander was Vasco da Gama and their destination was India. No European ship had ever sailed round Africa to reach India. The voyage is recorded in the journal of an unknown sailor, which the geographer E. G. Ravenstein translated into English in 1898 for the Hakluyt Society.

The fleet and crew

The first sentence of the journal says that in 1497 King Manuel I sent four ships “in search of discoveries and spices”. According to Ravenstein, the commander’s ship was the São Gabriel. The second was the São Rafael, captained by Vasco’s brother Paulo da Gama. The third was a small ship called the Berrio, captained by Nicolau Coelho. The fourth was a supply ship. Writing in the World History Encyclopedia, Mark Cartwright says the fleet also carried a pilot, Pêro de Alenquer, who had earlier gone with Bartolomeu Dias to the southern tip of Africa.

According to Ravenstein, old sources put the number of the crew at between 118 and 260. He himself considers 170 closer to the truth.

Ninety-three days at sea

The ships passed the Canary Islands on 15 July. They were separated in thick fog but gathered again on 22 July near the island of Sal in the Cape Verde Islands. On 3 August they left the island of Santiago, and the boldest part of the voyage began there.

Ravenstein writes that earlier sailors had followed the African coast, but Vasco da Gama made a long sweep from Cape Verde straight into the middle of the Atlantic to find favourable winds. As a result, the ships spent ninety-three days in open sea without sighting land. In Ravenstein’s view, this first crossing of the South Atlantic is among the great feats in the history of navigation. At last, at nine in the morning on 4 November, land was sighted. The sailors put on their best clothes, fired the guns in salute to the commander and dressed the ships with flags.

Rounding the Cape of Good Hope

On 7 November the fleet anchored in a wide bay, which was named St Helena Bay. It left on 16 November. For several days a south-westerly wind prevented it from rounding the Cape of Good Hope. At last, on 22 November at midday, the wind came from behind and the ships rounded the cape and moved on along the coast.

On 25 November they reached the bay of São Brás, now called Mossel Bay, and stayed for thirteen days. Here the supply ship was broken up and its cargo shared among the other three ships. The journal records a pleasant scene. About two hundred local people came with some cattle. Four or five of them played flutes, whose high and low notes blended in fine harmony, and began to dance. In reply, the commander had trumpets sounded and the Portuguese danced in the boats too.

By Christmas Day, 25 December, they had seen a coast seventy leagues beyond Dias’s furthest point. The Portuguese named this coast “Natal”.

East Africa and the Malindi pilot

In the following months the fleet passed along the coast of Mozambique and reached Mombasa on 7 April 1498, then Malindi on 15 April. According to Cartwright, many sailors had by then fallen ill with scurvy. The fleet stayed nine days in Malindi, with festivities and music.

Here the ruler of Malindi gave them a pilot to show the way to India. The pilot’s identity is disputed. Citing the Portuguese historians Barros and Goes, Ravenstein describes him as a sailor from Gujarat whom the Portuguese called “Malemo Cana”. According to Cartwright, an old claim that he was the famous Arab navigator Ahmad ibn Majid has been rejected by researchers.

Crossing the Arabian Sea and Calicut

The fleet left Malindi on 24 April. On 29 April the sailors saw the Pole Star again after a long time. No land was seen for twenty-three days, and on 18 May high mountains came into view. On 20 May 1498 the pilot recognised the mountains and said they lay above Calicut. That night the fleet anchored two leagues from the city.

The next day a member of the crew was sent to the city. According to the journal, he met two merchants from Tunis there, who spoke Spanish and the language of Genoa. Their first question was what the Portuguese had come so far to get. The journal’s author writes: “We were greatly astonished, for we never expected to hear our own language so far from Portugal.”

The Portuguese stayed off Calicut for about three months. According to Cartwright, Vasco da Gama met the ruler of Calicut, the Zamorin, and the ships were loaded with spices such as black pepper, ginger, cloves and cinnamon. However, trade talks were not very successful because of mutual distrust. At the end of August the fleet left Calicut, and in early October it put out to open sea from the island of Anjediva.

The return: a voyage of scurvy

The return voyage proved the hardest. According to the journal, the wind often dropped or blew the wrong way, and the crossing of the Arabian Sea took three days short of three months. The author writes that the sailors’ gums grew over their teeth so that they could not eat, their legs and bodies swelled, and thirty men died of the disease, as many as had died before. Only seven or eight men on each ship remained fit for work. He writes: “If this state of things had lasted two weeks longer, there would have been no one left to navigate the ships.”

On 2 January 1499 the African coast came into sight and they passed Mogadishu. On 7 January they reached Malindi, whose ruler sent oranges for the sick, but several of the sick died there. On 13 January the São Rafael was burned, because there were not enough men left to sail three ships. The Cape of Good Hope was rounded on 20 March. The journal ends abruptly on 25 April, near the coast of West Africa.

Ravenstein tells the rest of the story as follows. Coelho’s Berrio reached Cascais, near Lisbon, on 10 July 1499. Vasco da Gama took his sick brother Paulo to the island of Terceira in the Azores, where Paulo died. The date of Vasco da Gama’s own arrival in Lisbon is uncertain: Portuguese sources give 29 August, 8 September and 18 September 1499. According to Cartwright, only about 55 of the roughly 170 men who set out returned home.

Next instalment: Pedro Álvares Cabral: Brazil.