DRAWN BY HENRY B. SNELL.
“THE SEA-ROAD TO INDIA AND CATHAY.”
In 1497 King Emmanuel’s expedition was ready to sail—the largest and best equipped, probably, that had ever been sent out by any government, and its commander was Vasco da Gama, a young naval officer of renown. His fleet consisted of four vessels,—small caravels, of course, one of which was commanded by Dias,—and left the Tagus, after ceremonious farewells, in July. Da Gama stopped at various places, but reached and safely rounded the stormy cape in November. He had with him the information (and some say an Arabic map) sent home by Covilho, but his business was not to verify this, but to reach India and establish new Portuguese possessions. Why, then, did he not strike straight across from Cape Agulhas, as East Indiamen have done ever since? For the good reason that he had no guide, no means of finding his way across the southern ocean, where all the stars were strange; for sun observations for latitude were then unknown to European navigators, and rarely used on land. Instead of this, he was obliged to turn northward and skirt the coast for a thousand miles, stopping here and there, until he had passed far enough north of the equator to bring above the horizon the familiar home stars, for which he had “tables.”
At last, from the Arab port of Melindi, near Mombasa, he turned east and sailed straight away to India, where he anchored before Calicut, then the most important port of southern India, on May 20. Returning the next year with ships richly laden, he was received with public rejoicings and given high honors; and he greatly astonished his friends of the navy by telling them that the Arabs used the compass, sea-charts, quadrants, and “had divers maritime mysteries not short of the Portugals.”
Da Gama lived many years, and sailed often to India and China after that; but chiefly on political expeditions, in which he disgraced his otherwise great name by inexcusable rapine and cruelty.
Meanwhile some exploration had been done toward the far north, as we shall see in the next chapter; and so the fifteenth century ended, with Europe understood as far as Nova Zembla, Africa circumnavigated, and the coasts of India, Malaya, southern China, and the larger Malayan islands fairly familiar to geographers. This is much, and yet it leaves unmentioned the greatest fact of all—the work of that grand, sad character, Christopher Columbus, upon whose grave near Seville has been written:
HE GAVE A NEW WORLD TO SPAIN.
ENGRAVED BY E. H. DEL’ORME.