Vasco da Gama reaches India by sea around Africa
On this day · 20 May 1498
A Portuguese fleet rounded Africa and crossed the Indian Ocean, opening a sea route that reshaped world trade.
On 20 May 1498, the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama anchored off Calicut (today Kozhikode) on India’s Malabar Coast, completing the first sea voyage from Europe to India. His small fleet had sailed from Lisbon the previous July, rounded the Cape of Good Hope, and, after a 23-day open-ocean run guided across the Indian Ocean from East Africa, sighted the Western Ghats and made landfall.
The achievement, documented by The Mariners’ Museum, broke the long Venetian and Middle Eastern monopoly on the overland spice trade.
Da Gama planted a padrão, a stone pillar, to mark that a European had reached India by sea.
The diplomacy went poorly. The local ruler, the Zamorin, was unimpressed by gifts better suited to West African ports than a wealthy Indian court. Yet the route itself endured, drawing Portugal, and soon all of Europe, into Asian commerce and empire.
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