Vasco da Gama and the Early Modern Era

I Take History With My Coffee Podcast
Episode 1
Vasco da Gama and the Birth of the Early Modern Era

“On the following day, these same boats came alongside when the Captain-Major sent one of the convicts to Calicut, and those with whom he went took him to two Moors from Tunis who could speak Castilian and Genoese.  The first question that he received was in these words: “May the Devil take thee! What brought you hither.””

So marks the Portuguese arrival in India, and the world has not been the same.

[Music intro]

Welcome to the I Take History With My Coffee podcast.  In this inaugural episode, we begin to delve into Vasco da Gama’s groundbreaking voyage to India and how it relates to the rise of globalization.  

Select any product in your home, and more likely than not, it came from someplace outside the US.
Even if it was “Made in America,” chances are the parts, and raw materials were still imported from elsewhere.
We live in a highly connected world.
As we have seen, disruptions to the global marketplace can have severe consequences for worldwide economics.  
World events, natural disasters, geopolitics can affect supply chains, production, and obtaining raw materials.
Even domestic policies can have an effect well beyond a nation’s borders.
We are in what journalist Thomas Friedman, author of the NYT best-selling book The World is Flat, describes as third stage globalization, or Globalization 3.0.  
It is the stage that has dominated the post-Cold War world.
The second stage occurred with the industrial, transportation, and telecommunication revolutions of the mid-19th century.
The first stage of globalization is where our story starts, and it is what begins to distinguish the Early Modern age from the Medieval.

Not much is known about Vasco da Gama’s early life
There is little direct documentation, and what we know has been inferred from other sources
He was born sometime in the 1460s in the seaport town of Sines, Portugal.
He was the third son of Estevao da Gama and Isodore Sodre.
Estevao da Gama was a member of the military Order of Santiago, which allowed him to have connections to the royal court.  He was a knight of the lower nobility and employed in the household of Ferdinand, Duke of Viseu, and Beja, the third son of King Edward of Portugal.  Through these connections, he was appointed the civil governor and commander of the castle at Sines.
Sines was a bustling fishing port situated on the tip of Sines Cape, which juts out into the Atlantic. It is situated about 93 miles (150 km) south of Lisbon.  In the 14th century, King Pedro I recognized the importance of the location in protecting the coast from pirates.  Therefore Sines was granted a royal charter as an independent town in exchange for the construction of a defensive castle.  The castle was completed in the early half of the 15th century.  
Even though Estevao was moderately wealthy,  his position still afforded him to provide Vasco with a formal education, including math and navigation.  Vasco was probably exposed to other nautical arts by virtue of living in a port town and perhaps hanging out at the wharf in his free time.  
As a result of this experience,  Vasco da Gama joined the navy in 1480 and then the Order of Santiago like his father.
This proved to be an excellent choice since the head of the order was Prince John, who would become King John II in 1481.
In 1492, French ships captured a Portuguese caravel laden with gold from Sao Jorge da Mina.  Sao Jorge da Mina was a strategic Portuguese fort on the Ghana coast through which flowed gold mined in the interior.  King John II tapped Vasco to seize French ships near the port of Setubal, south of Lisbon, and along the Algarve coastline in southernmost Portugal.
Da Gama’s attack was rapid, effective, and successful.

It is not known why he was chosen in 1497 to lead an expedition to India.
Yet the idea did not come from nowhere – it was the culmination of a century-long strategy.
The Mamlukes in Egypt and the Ottomans in Asia Minor straddled the old east-west overland trade routes known as the Silk Roads.
Byzantium had ceded much of her economic power to Venice and Genoa, and by 1453 it would be conquered by the Ottomans.
Then there was the disintegration of the Mongol Empire in Central Asia.  This resulted in the increased isolationism of the Ming Dynasty in China.  
Both Spain and Portugal felt the need for direct trade.
Both set their sights on North Africa to start with.
Portugal of the 14th century was uniquely positioned.  
There was internal stability.  They completed their version of the Reconquista from the Moors nearly a century before Spain.
England and France were locked in the territorial and dynastic struggle of the 100 Years War.
Spain needed to contend with their own internal conflict – a power struggle between monarchy and nobility.
The Portuguese crown welcomed foreign merchants and encouraged them to use Portugal as a base of operations.

The first step in expansion was the taking of the city of Ceuta from the Muslims.
Ceuta is a port city on the coast of Morocco across the Straits of Gibraltar from Spain. It was a strategic stronghold and trading center into which came the Trans-Saharan caravans. King John I and his three sons easily captured Ceuta in 1415 and then successfully defended it in 1419.
Ceuta would be the foothold for the Portuguese in their exploration and expansion into the coast of West Africa.  

Dom Henrique of Portugal, Duke of Viseu, more commonly referred to as Prince Henry the Navigator.
He was the 3rd son of King John I.  He never married nor had any children.  He loved ceremony, followed the code of chivalry, and was always up for a good party.
In the thick of the attack at Ceuta, Henry proved himself capable and was knighted for his efforts.  As a result, he was appointed as the defender of the city.  It was here that he learned about the city of Timbuktu and the trans-Saharan trade with the Sudan. Using Ceuta as a base to challenge Islamic caliphates in Africa, Henry launched periodic attacks on Muslim settlements along the African coast.
The spirit of the Reconquista and a desire to rekindle the Crusades helped bring about a more militant Christianity peculiar to the Iberian Peninsula.  Henry, a devout Christian, wished to spread Christianity to west Africans and find allies against Muslims.  There were legends of a powerful Christian king thought to be located in East Africa, Prester John.  If one could find him, then it would be possible to recruit him as an ally against Islam.  One chronicle quotes Henry as saying: “I am undertaking these ventures in the service of God.” 
Yet a more secular drive compelled Henry as well: Capture trade networks and establish commercial contacts, thereby bringing wealth to Portugal.  The goal was to make the crown financially independent of nobility and thusly strengthen the monarchy and centralize the state, But Henry also hoped to personally reap the financial benefits.

Yet there might have been some curiosity – the interior of Africa was an unknown.  What knowledge Europeans had was a mixture of fact, half-truths, and myths.  Tales of a green sea of darkness and boiling waters.   Beyond Cape Bojador, it was said, there was no population, no plant life, just sandy desert.  Henry wished to ascertain the truth of these stories.
Prince Henry, therefore, became the driving force behind Portuguese exploration for half a century.
The moniker of “The Navigator” came in the 19th century, but there is no evidence he was exceptionally skilled at navigation or other sciences.  Some sources indicate he had an interest in the stars, but this could simply mean astrology rather than astronomy.  The popular notion is that he founded a formal navigational school at Sagres at the southwestern-most tip of Portugal.  This is most likely an exaggeration of later 17th and 18th-century writers who wished to create a national heroic figure.  Modern scholarship shows that no formal school probably existed.
At the very least, though, Henry acted as a compiler.  He sought out men deemed experts in seamanship, cartography, shipbuilding, mathematics, and astronomy and invited them into his household.  He might have created a small informal circle of people to exchange in a dialog of best practices, first-hand experiences, and practical knowledge gained from sailing the waters of the African coast.  He gleaned information from foreigners as well as Portuguese.   Jews and Arabs, as well as Christians
Regardless, what Henry did do was provide financial backing to any who wished to undertake any expeditions down the African coastline.

He began to reap benefits in 1419.  
Joao Goncalves Zarco fitted out an expedition in an attempt to round Cape Bojador.  Zarco had started as a knight in Prince Henry’s household, and he saw action at Ceuta.  Afterward, he became the commander of a fleet of caravels tasked with protecting the southern coastline from Muslim attacks.  Zarco set sail in a barcha, a type of vessel generally used for transport of cargo or fishing.  It had one or two masts with square sails and oars if necessary.  
The voyage proved to be a treacherous one, and before reaching the environs of the cape, the ship met with an easterly gale sending the vessel further out in the Atlantic.  The barcha was not adapted for the heavy seas of the open ocean, and the crew more than likely believed themselves lost.  But when the storm abated, Zarco found himself within sight of an island.
Zarco named the island Porto Santo - Holy Haven.  The Portuguese had inadvertently stumbled upon the Madeira Islands.  
The Madeira archipelago became an official possession of the crown, and Henry was made governor.  He wasted no time, and in 1420, he implemented a plantation system for growing sugar cane – a system that became the model for future colonies like Brazil.
The Azores were discovered by at least 1427, proving that the Portuguese now had the capability to navigate the more open ocean and had the knowledge to make the return trip back to Portugal.
The Portuguese attempted to take control of the Canary Islands – at the time claimed by the Kingdom of Castile – but this failed, and the islands would remain a Spanish possession.
Cape Bojador then became the major obstacle to further exploration along the coast.

The Portuguese were afraid to sail beyond Cape Bojador.  Generations of stories told about sea monsters and a green sea of darkness.  It was a point of no return, a place where one could travel beyond but never return home.  In Arabic, it was called Abu Khatar – father of danger
Located in what today is the territory of Western Sahara, the cape is not a prominent feature on most maps of the African coast – looking more like a slight bump in the coastline.  It can be missed depending from which direction one approaches.
The shore around the cape is mostly sand dunes, and long sand bars stretch out into the ocean.  These sand bars are hard to notice in the light of the morning and the evening creating deceptively shallow waters.  The cape is known for extreme tides and heavy breakers produced by the wide, slow-moving Canary Current about 2 miles offshore.
But its reputation most likely stems from the changes in the wind patterns that occur once the point is passed.
Between 28 N and 10 N, winds begin to blow strongly out of the northeast rather than the more familiar westerlies.

In 1433, after nearly twelve years of attempts, Henry commissioned a member of his household, Gil Eanes, to lead an expedition.  Eanes sailed along the coast but was driven toward the Canary Islands.  Succumbing to the usual fears, he gave up and returned to Portugal.  Prince Henry was not pleased with this result and reportedly greeted Eanes’s return with cold detachment.  Eanes, in an attempt to regain the prince’s favor, volunteered to make a second trip, promising either to succeed or perish in the attempt.  Henry agreed to a second expedition in 1434.   Eanes was successful on this second trip to push past Cape Bojador
A chronicler would note: “Disregarding all the danger, he turned the corner further, where he found the things quite the contrary to what he and the others far presumed.”
No sea monsters. No green sea of darkness.
The psychological barrier had been broken
From that point on, the Portuguese went down the west African coast in short time
1442 – Cape Blanco
1443 Arguin
1445 Senegal coast
1446 Guinea Bissau – formally Portuguese Guinea
1457 Cape Verde Islands
1460 Sierra Leone coast
1470 Sao Tome and Principe
1471 – Ghana coast
1475 Bight of Benin
1482 Mouth of the Congo River

In the next episode, we’ll explore the maritime revolution that not only allowed the Portuguese to push beyond Cape Bojador and Christopher Columbus to sail to the Americas but enabled them to return back home.  
 In the meantime, for more historical content, please visit the “I Take History With My Coffee” blog at itakehistory.com and also consider liking the I Take History With My Coffee Facebook page.  
[Music outro]