Much is made of the famed 1498 voyage of Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama that secured a direct route from Europe to India by sea. This newly founded connection between the two continents subsequently transformed Portugal into Western Europe’s most prosperous nation. The direct access to the spices of the Moluccas – the most valued commodity of the era - shifted Europe’s spice capital from Venice to Lisbon. Meanwhile, in India the Portuguese rose to control the Indian Ocean, conducting a protection racket by requiring all vessels in the region to purchase a cartaz pass in order to travel unharmed. So effective were they at enforcing this that Indian vessels owned by Mughal royalty would also submit to the pass.

At da Gama’s successful voyage, his monarch Manuel I, with the characteristic modesty of a Western European colonial monarch, styled himself ‘Lord of Conquest, Navigation, and Commerce of Ethiopia, Arabia, Persia, and India’. It was an exaggeration of course, but audaciously so at that point. For da Gama’s first arrival in India was far from promising.

The Indian Ocean the Portuguese entered was a mature space; a vast cultural contact zone long navigated by the countless nations populating Asia. For the Portuguese, this was a territory into which they entered with the inexperience of newcomers attempting to forge a place by trial and error. Their ignorance was on abundant display from the outset; it took an experienced Gujarati pilot provided in Kenya to lead da Gama’s fleet to Calicut. Once there, the Portuguese misidentified the Indian residents as Christians, termed their temples churches and the artwork of Hindu deities ‘with teeth protruding an inch from the mouth, and four or five arms’ as saints.^[1] When the Portuguese produced the gifts intended for the local king – a motley collection of odds and ends comprising everything from hats to washbasins -  they were roundly laughed at.

Things did not improve in the marketplace where their poor-quality merchandise did not fare well, and they were only able to purchase small samples of spices and jewels. After a voyage of some eleven months, they remained in Calicut for just three months before leaving for Lisbon in August 1498, but not before engaging in skirmishes with local vessels. By the time they began their voyage home, however, it was the wrong season for travel resulting in a harrowing voyage that took the better part of a year.

The Portuguese had arrived in India with two clear aspirations: Christians and spices. The empire they eventually built did just that, coming to violently control the trade in spices and engaging in extensive and aggressive proselytising that saw many Indians converted. Their Iberian homeland grew rich from the proceeds of the Estada da India. As one North African in India exclaimed at the arrival of da Gama, "A lucky venture, a lucky venture! Plenty of rubies, plenty of emeralds! You owe great thanks to God, for having brought you to a country holding such riches!"^[2] The man was right, of course. But that first Portuguese sojourn in Calicut could hardly have predicted it.

[1] A Journal of the First Voyage of Vasco da Gama, P. 55

[2] A Journal of the First Voyage of Vasco da Gama (CUP, 2010), P. 49