Vasco da Gama: The Volta do Mar, the Miri Massacre, and a Viceroy's Death

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In May 1498 an exhausted Vasco da Gama knelt in a temple in Calicut, modern Kozhikode, and prayed before a statue he took for the Virgin Mary. It was the Hindu goddess Parvati. Born in Sines in the 1460s to a minor noble family tied to the Order of Santiago, da Gama was a naval enforcer, not a scholar, when Portugal chose him to break the Venetian and Mamluk grip on the spice trade. In July 1497 he left Lisbon with four ships and about 170 men, swung hundreds of miles west into the South Atlantic on the volta do mar, and spent over three months out of sight of land. At Malindi he gained a Gujarati pilot who rode the monsoon to India in 23 days, but his gifts of hats, cloaks, sugar, and honey drew mockery at the court of the Zamorin.

Leaving India against the monsoon turned a 23 day crossing into more than 90, and scurvy killed so many men that the São Rafael had to be burned. His brother Paulo died too. Yet the small spice cargo proved the route. In 1502 he returned with 15 warships, burned the pilgrim ship Miri with its passengers locked below, mutilated a Brahmin envoy, and shelled Calicut for two days. Sidelined for 20 years, he threatened to defect to Castile, became Count of Vidigueira in 1519, and was sent back as Viceroy by John III in 1524, only to die of malaria in Cochin on Christmas Eve.

• In Mozambique he tried to pass his crew off as Muslims, then fired his cannons into the city as he fled.
• His men told port officials they had come in search of Christians and spices, hoping to find the realm of Prester John.
• The Miri's passengers offered a ransom large enough to free every Christian captive in Fez, and he refused it.
• When an undersea earthquake shook his fleet near Dabhol in 1524, he told the crew that even the sea trembled before them.
• He rests in the Jerónimos Monastery in Lisbon, a building paid for by a tax on the spice trade he opened.