O qual Vasco da Gama era homem prudente e de bom saber e de grande animo para todo bom feito.—Gaspar Correa, Lendas da India.
King João II pressed on vigorously with the discovery of the west coast of Africa. The year of his accession was not ended before Diogo de Azambuja set out with ten ships (1481), and after his return the King assumed the title of “Lord of Guinea.” Diogo Cam in 1484 and 1485 carried the discovery still further, past the River of Crabs (Cameroons), past Congo and Angola to Walvisch Bay, and two years later Bartholomeu Diaz rounded the Cape, and with that the problem of the sea-route to India was practically solved, so that King John died (October 1495) in sight of the promised land. Indeed, the departure of the ships which Vasco de Gama was destined to command was only delayed by the King’s death. He had given “orders for such wood to be cut in wood and forest as the carpenters and builders should desire, and this was brought to Lisbon, where at once three small ships were begun.”
In appointing Vasco da Gama, a knight of his household, to the command King Manoel showed that he knew the value of the men who had grown up in the stern school of João II. The Gamas were a distinguished family of the south of Portugal; they had already rendered good service to the State—Vasco himself may have had a part in the work of discovering the coast of Africa—and if they were at times quarrelsome and unruly their loyalty and courage were never in doubt. In 1497 the meekest of them, Paulo, Vasco’s eldest brother, was in trouble for having wounded a judge at Setubal,[5] and received the King’s pardon before he sailed as captain of one of the ships.
Vasco, a man of medium height and knightly bearing, was bold and daring in enterprise, patient and determined in adversity, but harsher and more irascible than his brother. It is a curious instance of the continuous if often slight connection between the two nations of seafarers, the English and the Portuguese, that Vasco da Gama had English blood in his veins. The name of his mother, Isabel Sodré, which survives in Lisbon’s Caes do Sodré, was a corruption of Sudley, her grandfather having been Frederick Sudley, of the family of the Earls of Hereford. Vasco was born probably in 1460, in the little sea-town of Sines, of which his father was Alcaide Môr, and in honour of which Vasco later is said to have been in the habit of firing a salute as he passed.
The third captain appointed by King Manoel was Nicolao Coelho.
The three ships, of about a hundred tons, São Gabriel (Vasco da Gama), São Raphael (Paulo da Gama), and São Miguel[6] (Nicolao Coelho), after solemn procession and leave-taking of the King, on July 8, 1497, sailed down the Tagus from Belem and rounded Cape Espichel to the south. The crews averaged little over fifty men, being perhaps 170 in all, including six convicts in each ship to be cast ashore in order to spy out the land at different points. Bartholomeu Diaz, bound for the fortress of São Jorge da Mina, accompanied them as far as the Cape Verde Islands.
In November they reached the bay of St. Helena where Vasco da Gama was slightly wounded in an affray with the natives. Hitherto their voyage had been prosperous; but they encountered heavy storms both before and after rounding the Cape of Good Hope, and it required all Vasco’s resolution and Paulo’s persuasiveness to keep the crews to their voyage. The mutinous crew of the São Gabriel had counted without its host, and found Gama little less formidable than the storms of these unknown seas. Not if he were confronted with a hundred deaths, he said, and not if the ships were all filled with gold, would he go back a single yard; but he did not wholly disregard the murmurings of the men, for he clapped the mate and pilot of his ship in irons, to hold them as hostages, and, as they were the only persons who knew anything of the art of navigation, the crew was effectually cowed.
At Christmas they reached the land which to this day bears the Portuguese name, Natal, of the time of its discovery. Passing slowly north along the coast, they arrived towards the end of January at the Zambezi River, and in this shelter made a stay of several weeks; but scurvy among the crew forced them again to sea, and in the beginning of March they reached Mozambique. Here, as at Mombasa a month later, the natives received them with every appearance of friendship, but made a treacherous if rather courageous attempt to seize their ships. The King of Melinde, a little further north, was friendly and loyal, and here the Portuguese obtained pilots for the voyage to India.
The passage lasted less than a month, and on May 18 they sighted Asia, the end and object of their enterprise, and came to anchor off Calicut on the 21st. Calicut was a few miles distant, and Vasco da Gama, although implored by his brother not to risk his person by disembarking, started on the overland journey. It required some courage, for among the native sightseers who crowded round the Portuguese there were not a few armed and covertly hostile Moors.
In the minds of the Portuguese, the East had long been connected with the empire of the Christian Prester John, the half mythical ruler of Abyssinia, and they expected to find the majority of the natives Christians. Accordingly they were easily duped here (as indeed they had been in Africa) and Vasco da Gama and his companions on the way to Calicut worshipped in a Hindu pagoda. The images on the walls were unlike those of the saints to which they had been accustomed in Portugal. Some of them had four arms, the teeth of others protruded a whole inch from their mouths, and their faces were hideous as the faces of devils. Like Little Red Ridinghood, one of the Portuguese, João de Sá, was in the most serious doubt when he saw these figures, and, as he knelt down, in order to avoid any mistake, he said aloud “If this is a devil I worship the true God.” And Vasco da Gama looked across at him and smiled.