Soon after he ascended the throne of Portugal in 1495, King Manuel I commissioned a fleet of four ships to attempt a voyage around Africa to the fabled land of India. King Manuel knew that India was the source of many spices which were scarce and costly in Europe. He knew that Muslim merchants carried these spices by caravan across the deserts of Arabia to the markets of Mediterranean ports. The king hoped that, by discovering a new sea route to India, he could import spices directly, bypassing the Muslim merchants who controlled the caravan routes.King Manuel believed old legends which described India as a rich Christian kingdom on the eastern rim of the Muslim world. Manuel hoped to contact the Christian King of India, and to negotiate with him an anti-Muslim military alliance.

It was not easy for King Manuel to choose a leader for the planned expedition to India. The most experienced man available was Captain Bartholomew Diaz, who had sailed all the way down the west coast of Africa in 1488, reaching the southern tip of that continent. Unfortunately, Diaz had proved incapable of suppressing a mutiny. After rounding the Cape of Good Hope, Diaz had ordered his sick and starving men to sail on to India, but they had refused to obey him, and he had reluctantly agreed to turn back. King Manuel, feeling that a more forceful commander was needed for his new expedition around Africa, selected Captain-Major Vasco da Gama, who seemed unlikely to tolerate any mutinies. Vasco da Gama was a grim, cynical man, notoriously merciless, an expert at torturing prisoners.

To make use of the experience of Bartholomew Diaz, King Manuel put him in charge of organizing and planning the new expedition. He ordered Diaz to spare no expense to make sure that Vasco da Gama would be properly equipped. Diaz oversaw the building of two new ships for the expedition to India, and he had two older ships refurbished. All the ships were armed with the improved cannon that had recently been developed in western Europe. Diaz made certain that the ships of the new expedition carried enough food to supply their crews for three years with generous rations of wine, salt beef, biscuits, lentils, sardines, plums, almonds, onions, garlic, mustard, salt, sugar, and honey. Diaz also made sure that the ships were supplied with the sort of goods that had proved useful to him in trading with the primitive natives who lived on the West Coast of Africa. These goods included glass beads, copper bowls, tin bells, tin rings, striped cotton cloth, olive oil, and sugar. Diaz apparently neglected to consider that such common items might not appeal to the rich and sophisticated people who were supposed to live in India. No gold, no silver, and no expensive trade goods were loaded aboard the expedition's four ships. When Vasco da Gama took command of the ships, he failed to notice Diaz's oversight.

To avoid unfavorable winds and currents near shore, Vasco da Gama set a course so far out to sea that his men did not see land for three months. Scurvy broke out on the ships, causing the men to suffer extreme weakness, bleeding gums and tooth loss. The disease, which is actually caused by lack of vitamin C in the diet, was then thought to be caused by excessive exposure to salty sea air. Hoping to force the expedition to turn back, some of the men mutinied, but they were quickly beaten into obedience. The ringleaders were confined in chains. Vasco da Gama finally turned toward the coast of Africa and landed near the southern tip of that continent. There the explorers met natives who wore no clothing at all. These natives were happy to trade an ox for glass beads and copper bracelets.

Finding limited varieties of fresh food ashore, the Portuguese seamen gained only temporary relief from scurvy. Men began to die of the disease when the expedition rounded the Cape of Good Hope in November of 1497. So many perished that, when one ship had to be abandoned after being damaged in a storm, there was plenty of room for the survivors on the remaining three ships.

As the sickly explorers sailed north up the east coast of Africa, they entered unknown territory. Suddenly they met civilization at Mozambique, where they found seagoing ships moored before stone warehouses.
Although the people of the town were black, the ships in the harbor were manned by light-skinned Arabs from the north. Like the Arabs, the local black people were Muslims.

Assuming that the natives would be hostile to Christians like himself, Vasco da Gama pretended to be a Muslim from Morocco. In this guise he introduced himself to the Sultan of Mozambique, and asked permission to trade there.

After the Portuguese had been in Mozambique for a few days, the natives began muttering that the newcomers were not really Muslims, but a gang of Christian pirates. Natives brawled in the marketplace with Portuguese seamen, and the Sultan ordered Vasco da Gama to leave the port. Before departing, Vasco da Gama vengefully fired several cannonballs into the town. Sailing north to what is now Kenya, the explorers began attacking and looting Arab merchant ships. Unlike Vasco da Gama's ships, the Arab dhows of the Indian Ocean were not armed with heavy cannon. The explorers were delighted to discover that they could easily intimidate and rob any ship they could outrun. After fighting a battle against the natives of Mombasa, the explorers sailed north to Malindi. This was another Muslim town, but among the Arab ships in the harbor were four ships of a different, exotic design. Aboard these unusual-looking ships were "strange, tawny men with long hair" who wore nothing but loincloths. Hoping that these tawny men might be the Indian Christians he was seeking, Vasco da Gama tried to make friends with them. He invited their officers aboard his ship, where he showed them an altar piece with a figure of the Virgin Mary. The tawny men bowed before the image and made an offering of cloves and pepper.

Vasco da Gama then confidently announced that these men must be Indian Christians. In reality, they were Indian Hindus. "These Indian Christians are very odd," one explorer wrote in his diary. "They do not eat beef."The Portuguese managed to avoid getting into a fight with the Muslims of Malindi. The local sultan offered to form an alliance with the Portuguese, and he provided a pilot to guide Vasco da Gama across the Indian Ocean to Calicut.

With the pilot's help, the Portuguese crossed the Indian Ocean in only twenty-seven days. On May 18, 1498, they reached the city of Calicut on the Malabar Coast of India. Small native boats came out to offer the Portuguese transportation to shore, but Vasco da Gama did not trust the native boatmen.

Ashore, Vasco da Gama was greeted by an honor guard of two hundred Indians holding muskets and unsheathed swords. They lifted him onto a palanquin and set off, with trumpets playing and muskets firing into the air, on a tour of the city.
The Portuguese were impressed by this extravagant welcome. "They treated us more respectfully than kings are treated in Europe," one wrote. The procession stopped at a Hindu temple that was "as tall as a mast," according to one Portuguese explorer. Vasco da Gama said that this temple must be a Christian cathedral. Inside the temple was an idol which, Vasco da Gama said, must be the Virgin. Indians pointed to the statue and repeated something that sounded like "Maria, Maria." Probably the idol represented Mari, a Hindu goddess.

During their homeward passage the explorers suffered another deadly outbreak of scurvy. Of the one hundred and seventy Portuguese who had set sail for Indian in 1497, only fifty-four were still alive when Vasco da Gama's two surviving ships returned to Lisbon in 1499.

Although the expedition had been a financial disaster, bringing home only tiny quantities of spices, King Manuel of Portugal was delighted by Vasco da Gama's claim that he had made contact with the "the Christians of India." The king built a new cathedral as a thanksgiving for Vasco da Gama's success, and struck new coins commemorating the voyage. King Manuel immediately organized a second expedition to Calicut under a new commander, Pedro Alvares Cabral.

Although King Manuel was pleased, he decided not to send Cabral back to India. Instead, the king promoted Vasco da Gama to the rank of admiral, and put him in charge of the next Portuguese expedition to India, which departed from Portugal in February of 1502. When Vasco da Gama reached India, he immediately launched a campaign of terror to avenge Cabral's men who had been killed by Muslim rioters in Calicut. Vasco da Gama's first act was to capture a passenger ship carrying Muslim families home to Calicut from a pilgrimage to Mecca. After looting the ship, Vasco da Gama set fire to it, deliberately burning to death hundreds of women and children.

He next sent an ultimatum to the Zamorin of Calicut, ordering him to kill all the Muslims in his city, or face retaliation. When the Zamorin offered to negotiate a compromise, Vasco da Gama began capturing Hindu fishermen from Calicut, and chopping off their hands, feet, and heads. He then bombarded the city, aiming to kill as many civilians as possible. By his aggressive actions, Vasco da Gama demonstrated that Portuguese ships, with their superior cannon, were able to dominate their competitors, the traditional Arab merchant ships of the Indian Ocean. Muslim merchant ships were frightened away from Calicut, disrupting the city's trade. Although Vasco da Gama returned to Portugal in 1503, other Portuguese commanders in India imitated his tactics of seaborne terror, with devastating results for the economy of Calicut. In 1513 the Zamorin of Calicut negotiated a trade agreement with the Portuguese.

Portugal established an empire in India, and Vasco da Gama became vice King of the Indian colonies. He was very rich when he died in Cochin, India, on Dec. 24, 1524.