Two of the vessels were newly built for the voyage, possibly a caravel and a supply boat. It is not known for certain how many people were in each ship’s crew but approximately 55 returned, and two ships were lost. The navigators included Portugal’s most experienced, Pero de Alenquer, Pedro Escobar, João de Coimbra, and Afonso Gonçalves. The spices obtained were mostly pepper and cinnamon at first, but soon included other products, all new to Europe and leading to a commercial monopoly for several decades.ĭa Gama’s fleet of four ships had a crew of 170 men when it set out from Lisbon. Reaching the legendary Indian spice routes unopposed helped the Portuguese Empire improve its economy that, until da Gama’s discovery, was based mainly on trading along northern and coastal West Africa. One century after the discovery, European powers such as England, the Netherlands and France were finally able to challenge and break Portugal’s monopoly and naval supremacy in the Cape Route around Africa, the Indian Ocean and in the Far East, opening a new era of European imperialism in the East.Īfter decades of sailors trying to reach the Indies with thousands of lives and dozens of vessels lost in shipwrecks and attacks, da Gama landed in Calicut on.

The sum of the distances covered in the outward and return voyages made this expedition the longest ocean voyage ever made until then, far longer than a full voyage around the world by way of the Equator. The route meant that the Portuguese would not need to cross the highly disputed Mediterranean nor the dangerous Arabian Peninsula, because the whole voyage could be made by sea. On this date in 1497 Dom Vasco da Gama, 1st Count of Vidigueira, a Portuguese explorer, set out on his first voyage to India thus becoming the first European to reach India by sea, linking Europe and Asia for the first time by ocean route, as well as the Atlantic and the Indian oceans entirely and definitively, and in this way, the West and the Orient.ĭa Gama’s discovery was of major significance and opened the way for an age of global imperialism and for the Portuguese and others to establish long-lasting colonial empires in Asia (which you may consider fortunate or unfortunate).

What was vasco da gama famous for