After ten months at sea and the loss of two ships' worth of crew to scurvy, da Gama's small Portuguese fleet reached the spice-trading port of Calicut. The voyage shattered the Arab and Venetian monopoly on the spice trade, rerouting global commerce around Africa and setting off centuries of European colonial expansion into Asia and the Indian Ocean world.
Da Gama's four ships had left Lisbon the previous July, following a route pioneered by Bartolomeu Dias around the Cape of Good Hope but pushing further, guided in the final stretch by an Arab navigator picked up on the East African coast. Scurvy ravaged the crews so badly that by the time they reached Malindi, barely enough sailors remained to work the ships.
Calicut's Hindu ruler, the Zamorin, received da Gama with wary courtesy, though Portuguese trade goods—mostly cheap cloth and trinkets—unimpressed merchants used to the luxury trade with Arabia and China. Da Gama left with only a modest cargo of pepper and cinnamon, but the achievement mattered more than the profit: Europeans now had a direct sea road to Asian wealth, bypassing the overland routes controlled by Ottoman and Venetian middlemen.
The voyage's true legacy arrived in blood and cannon fire over the following decades, as Portugal built a violent trading empire across the Indian Ocean. Da Gama himself returned to India twice more, the second time bombarding Calicut into submission. What began as a triumph of navigation became the opening chapter of European colonial dominance in Asia.