Vasco da Gama departed Lisbon commanding four vessels and roughly 170 men, tasked by King Manuel I with finding a direct maritime route to India, bypassing the overland Silk Road and Venetian-Arab trade monopolies. The voyage, which would round the Cape of Good Hope and reach Calicut in 1498, opened a direct European sea route to Asian spice markets and inaugurated an era of Portuguese colonial expansion.
Portugal's ambitions had been building for nearly a century, ever since Prince Henry the Navigator began sponsoring voyages down the West African coast in the 1420s. Bartolomeu Dias had rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1488, proving an Atlantic-Indian Ocean sea route existed, but no one had yet pushed on to reach India itself.
Vasco da Gama, a minor nobleman with naval experience but no prior long-distance command, was chosen by King Manuel I for this decisive push. He left Lisbon with four ships, including the São Gabriel and São Rafael, and a crew that included convicted criminals meant to be dropped off as expendable emissaries in hostile ports.
The voyage would take nearly two years round trip and prove brutal. Da Gama's ships spent 23 days out of sight of land crossing open ocean using a wide swing through the South Atlantic, longer than any European voyage before it, and scurvy killed roughly half his crew by the time he limped home in 1499. Yet the mission succeeded in reaching Calicut on India's Malabar Coast, and though the initial trading relationship was tense and unprofitable, da Gama had proven a route existed that would let Portugal bypass Ottoman and Venetian middlemen entirely, redirecting global trade and inaugurating the Portuguese maritime empire in Asia.