Vasco da Gama’s first voyage to India, 1497-99 Da Gama and his crew spent six months at sea, enduring illness and starvation.
They had little trouble down the west coast of Africa and rounded the Cape of Good Hope, anchoring at Mossel Bay in South Africa for a month before setting out into Muslim-Arab controlled waters in the Indian Ocean. Vasco de Gama set sail in 1497 with four vessels and about 170 men. However, Estĕvão died before he could make the journey, and the task was re-assigned to his son. King Manuel I began to seek out a direct trade route to India and appointed Vasco da Gama’s father, Estĕvão da Gama, to discover one. When da Gama was a teenager, Bartolomeu Dias discovered that the Atlantic and Indian Oceans were connected. He grew up the third son of a Portuguese noble and probably received advanced education in mathematics and navigation.
Vasco da Gama was a Portuguese sailor, navigator, and the first European to reach India by sailing around Africa. Episode #4 of the course “Europe’s greatest explorers”
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