In East Africa, Gama and his men at first pretended to be Muslims out of fear of the locals. Once in the Indian Ocean, Gama encountered poly-centric networks of great religious and ethnic diversity- not a monolithic Islamic monopoly-a mix into which Gama’s aggression and ambition cast a further complicating factor. Adventure, colonization, commerce, and religion combined to send Gama in search of the sea route to India.
As Gama acknowledged at the beginning of the narrative of his first voyage (probably written by his crewmember Alvaro Velho), ”In the year 1497 King Dom Manuel, the first of that name in Portugal, dispatched four vessels to make discoveries and go in search of spices” (Ravenstein 1898, p. Motivations for the ”voyage of discovery” were mixed. Dom Jorge’s faction believed that the old enemy Castile, rather than India, should be the object of the state’s imperial activity, although Gama himself pragmatically came to see the value of India once his own fortunes became tied to the success of Portugal’s expeditions to the region. 1481-1495), Manuel’s predecessor on the throne. This group gathered around Dom Jorge (1481-1550), the illegitimate son of Joao II (r. 1495-1521) gave Gama command of the modest expedition of four ships to the pepper emporium of Calicut in the hope that, should the expedition fail, some of the disrepute would rub off on the political faction with which Gama was associated. Subrahmanyam argues that Manuel I (known as ”the Fortunate,” r. In the 1490s the orders were particularly tied up with contests over court influence and the ends and means of overseas expansion. He was a member of the Order of Santiago, one of the several military orders that played important political and social roles in medieval Portugal.
It is far from certain why Gama was chosen as the leader of the expedition that made his name and career. There are huge gaps in our knowledge and much disagreement among historians over many of the details. Much of what we know about Gama’s background and life are based on conjecture from notoriously inclusive and fragmentary surviving documents. Vasco da Gama was a minor Portuguese noble born in the 1460s (probably 1469, argues Sanjay Subrahmanyam in the most authoritative and scholarly biography of Gama), possibly in the southern Portuguese coastal town of Sines. Portugal’s national epic, The Lusiads (1572) by Luis Vaz de Camoes (1524-1580), is based on Gama’s activities, transforming a story of seamanship and poor diplomacy into one of endurance, adventure, and heroism in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles. Gama was a violent, ruthless, and ambitious man whose successes in forging a network of Portuguese footholds in Asia became, over the course of his lifetime and subsequent centuries, the stuff of Portuguese national legend.
Continuing the long-term Portuguese project of exploring the African coastline, he rounded the Cape of Good Hope and continued to Calicut, India, during a voyage that lasted from 1497 to 1499, ”an open-sea excursion of unprecedented duration for a European navigator …a demonstration of audacity rather than ability” (Fernandez-Armesto 2000a, p. The Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama discovered the sea route from Europe to India.