Vasco Da Gama Quotes

You read me,” Myron said, “like Vasco da Gama reads a map.” Dimonte

When Vasco da Gama breached the Indian Ocean, the playing field had just been vacated by the one force capable of repelling him.

Vasco da Gama on a cruise to India and back encouraged his men to rinse their mouths with urine, which did nothing for their scurvy and can’t have done much for their spirits either.

Vasco da Gama, on a cruise to India and back, encouraged his men to rinse their mouths with urine, which did nothing for their scurvy and can’t have done much for their spirits either.

it could be argued that it actually began thousands of years ago. Long before the Marxists came. Before the British took Malabar, before the Dutch Ascendency, before Vasco da Gama arrived, before the Zamorin’s conquest of Calicut. Before three purple-robed Syrian Bishops murdered by the Portuguese were found floating in the sea, with coiled sea serpents riding on their chests and oysters knotted in their tangled beards. It could be argued that it began long before Christianity arrived in a boat and seeped into Kerala like tea from a teabag. That it really began in the days when the Love Laws were made. The laws that lay down who should be loved, and how. And how much. HOWEVER, for practical purposes, in a hopelessly practical world . .

Pepper it was that brought Vasco da Gama's tall ships across the ocean, from Lisbon's Tower of Belem to the Malabar Coast: first to Calicut and later, for its lagoony harbour, to Cochin. English and French sailed in the wake of that first-arrived Portugee, so that in the period called Discovery-of-India — but how could we be discovered when we were not covered before? — we were 'not so much sub-continent as sub-condiment', as my distinguished mother had it.

Christianity and Islam are sister religions, and in Iberia they long lived side by side. If you are about to hunt your sister out of your home, you need to work yourselves into a much more self-righteous frenzy than if you were expelling a stranger.

It was Islam’s armies and the empire they spread across three continents that reduced Christianity, with a few scattered exceptions, to a European faith.

It was in a swampy village on the lagoon river behind the Turner Peninsula that Pollock's first encounter with the Porroh man occurred. The women of that country are famous for their good looks - they are Gallinas with a dash of European blood that dates from the days of Vasco da Gama and the English slave-traders, and the Porroh man, too, was possibly inspired by a faint Caucasian taint in his composition. (It's a curious thing to think that some of us may have distant cousins eating men on Sherboro Island or raiding with the Sofas.) At any rate, the Porroh man stabbed the woman to the heart as though he had been a mere low-class Italian, and very narrowly missed Pollock. But Pollock, using his revolver to parry the lightning stab which was aimed at his deltoid muscle, sent the iron dagger flying, and, firing, hit the man in the hand. He fired again and missed, knocking a sudden window out of the wall of the hut. The Porroh man stooped in the doorway, glancing under his arm at Pollock. Pollock caught a glimpse of his inverted face in the sunlight, and then the Englishman was alone, sick and trembling with the excitement of the affair, in the twilight of the place. It had all happened in less time than it takes to read about it. ("Pollock And The Porroh Man")

Whilst the food we eat nowadays has much to be grateful to the likes of Marco Polo, Alexander the Great and Vasco De Gama, who would have introduced the tangy flavours of South Africa’s Rainbow Cuisine on his way around the Cape of Good Hope to India, Arabic cuisine, with spices of cinnamon, cloves, saffron and ginger was a lot more enterprising than Western cooking at the time. The medley of colours that the spices offered the food had mystical meanings to the Arabs

James Cook was not the first explorer to think this way. The Portuguese and Spanish voyagers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries already did. Prince Henry the Navigator and Vasco da Gama explored the coasts of Africa and, while doing so, seized control of islands and harbours. Christopher Columbus ‘discovered’ America and immediately claimed sovereignty over the new lands for the kings of Spain. Ferdinand Magellan found a way around the world, and simultaneously laid the foundation for the Spanish conquest of the Philippines.

A bare two years after Vasco da Gama’s voyage a Portuguese fleet led by Pedro Alvarez Cabral arrived on the Malabar coast. Cabral delivered a letter from the king of Portugal to the Samudri (Samudra-raja or Sea-king), the Hindu ruler of the city-state of Calicut, demanding that he expel all Muslims from his kingdom as they were enemies of the ‘Holy Faith’. He met with a blank refusal; then afterwards the Samudra steadfastly maintained that Calicut had always been open to everyone who wished to trade there… During those early years the people who had traditionally participated in the Indian Ocean trade were taken completely by surprise. In all the centuries in which it had flourished and grown, no state or kings or ruling power had ever before tried to gain control of the Indian Ocean trade by force of arms. The territorial and dynastic ambitions that were pursued with such determination on land were generally not allowed to spill over into the sea. Within the Western historiographical record the unarmed character of the Indian Ocean trade is often represented as a lack, or failure, one that invited the intervention of Europe, with its increasing proficiency in war. When a defeat is as complete as was that of the trading cultures of the Indian Ocean, it is hard to allow the vanquished the dignity of nuances of choice and preference. Yet it is worth allowing for the possibility that the peaceful traditions of the oceanic trade may have been, in a quiet and inarticulate way, the product of a rare cultural choice — one that may have owed a great deal to the pacifist customs and beliefs of the Gujarati Jains and Vanias who played such an important part in it. At the time, at least one European was moved to bewilderment by the unfamiliar mores of the region; a response more honest perhaps than the trust in historical inevitability that has supplanted it since. ‘The heathen [of Gujarat]’, wrote Tomé Pires, early in the sixteenth century, ‘held that they must never kill anyone, nor must they have armed men in their company. If they were captured and [their captors] wanted to kill them all, they did not resist. This is the Gujarat law among the heathen.’ It was because of those singular traditions, perhaps, that the rulers of the Indian Ocean ports were utterly confounded by the demands and actions of the Portuguese. Having long been accustomed to the tradesmen’s rules of bargaining and compromise they tried time and time again to reach an understanding with the Europeans — only to discover, as one historian has put it, that the choice was ‘between resistance and submission; co-operation was not offered.’ Unable to compete in the Indian Ocean trade by purely commercial means, the Europeans were bent on taking control of it by aggression, pure and distilled, by unleashing violence on a scale unprecedented on those shores.

Still, to say that it all began when Sophie Mol came to Ayemenem is only one way of looking at it. Equally, it could be argued that it actually began thousands of years ago. Long before Marxists came. Before the British took Malabar, before the Dutch Ascendency, before Vasco da Gama arrived, before the Zamorin's conquest of Calicut. Before three purple-robed Syrian Bishops murdered by the Portugese were found floating in the sea, with coiled sea serpents riding on their chests and oysters knotted in their tangled beards. It could be argued that it began long before Christianity arrived in a boat and seeped into Kerala like tea from a teabag. That it really began in the days when the Love Laws were made. The laws that lay down who should be loved, and how. And how much.

Death had always stalked the explorers, but in an age that held life cheap the risk had been worth the reward. Men who lived in hope of heaven and fear of hell had been eager to serve as Crusaders; men born into poverty had hungered to touch the wealth of the East. Yet the wealth had stuck to the fingers of the elite, and faith had proved a poor defense against disease, famine, and storms.

In 1498, Vasco da Gama the Portuguese navigator explored this eastern coast of Africa flanking the Indian Ocean. This led him to open a trade route to Asia and occupy Mozambique to the Portuguese colony. In 1840, it came under the control of the Sultan of Zanzibar and became a British protectorate in 1895, with Mombasa as its capital. Nairobi, lying 300 miles to the northwest of Mombasa is the largest city in Kenya. It became the capital in 1907 and is the fastest growing urban area in the Republic having become independent of the United Kingdom on December 12, 1963 and declared a republic the following year on December 12, 1964. Kenya is divided by the 38th meridian of longitude into two very different halves. The eastern half of Kenya slopes towards the coral-backed seashore of the Indian Ocean while the western side rises through a series of hills to the African Shear Zone or Central Rift. West of the Rift, the lowest part of a westward-sloping plateau contains Lake Victoria. This, the largest lake in Africa, receives most of its water from rain, the Kagera River and countless small streams. Its only outlet is the White Nile River which is part of the longest river on Earth. Combined, the Blue Nile and the White Nile, stretches 4,160 miles before emptying into the Mediterranean Sea.

The newly formed Christian kingdoms of Spain and Portugal saw it worthwhile to send Columbus westward and Vasco da Gama southward in search of a naval route to India that would bypass the Muslim-dominated land routes. Spain and Portugal found themselves suddenly with trading options all along the African and Asian coasts, as well as vast and rich new territories in the New World. From the 16th century onwards, international trade offered prospects of wealth far superior to the grain produced by the small feudal fiefs of Europe.

In July 1969 hundreds of millions of people on Earth huddled around television screens to witness a new world come within reach, a pinnacle of human achievement. When Christopher Columbus or Vasco da Gama set off on their respective voyages to explore new worlds, there were likely no more than a few dozen spectators waving them farewell. But the moon landing was a collective journey, made awe inspiring with live images from outer space transmitted through television, putting much of humanity in a collective trance. It was so momentous that the entire first section of the New York Times was dedicated to the smallest details and broadest implications of this most highly anticipated event of the space age. At the time, people expected the moon to be settled, at the very least in some minimal way, in the not-too-distant future. Optimistic speculations suggested that shuttle services for passengers were just a decade away.

In July 1969 hundreds of millions of people on Earth huddled around television screens to witness a new world come within reach, a pinnacle of human achievement. When Christopher Columbus or Vasco da Gama set off on their respective voyages to explore new worlds, there were likely no more than a few dozen spectators waving them farewell. But the moon landing was a collective journey, made awe inspiring with live images from outer space transmitted through television, putting much of humanity in a collective trance. It was so momentous that the entire first section of the New York Times was dedicated to the smallest details and broadest implications of this most highly anticipated event of the space age. At the time, people expected the moon to be settled, at the very least in some minimal way, in the not-too-distant future. Optimistic speculations suggested that shuttle services for passengers were just a decade away. This

86 VASCO DA GAMA c. 1 4 6 0 - 1 5 2 4

My espionage travels took me once around the world, to all of the continents except Australia, over most of the great mountain ranges and across most of the great rivers. At various times I followed the routes of Captain Cook, Sinbad the Sailor, T.E. Lawrence, Magellan, Vasco da Gama, Marshal Lyautey, and Admiral Livy. In telling some of the stories of those years, I plead the precedent of the Author of the Old Testament in being security minded, and I hope to be excused for leaving a number of things untold and a number unexplained. Rome, March 1953.

Jewish intellectual and cultural activities also flourished under the monarchs. The Jewish astronomer Abraham Zacuto won an appointment to a chair in astronomy and astrology at the University of Salamanca, the oldest and most respected university in Spain and normally closed to Jews. His astronomical studies contributed to the voyages of discovery of Columbus and Vasco da Gama, among others. He personally consulted with Columbus and advised the monarchs on the advantages of the voyage. In 1497 Zacuto created the first mariner’s astrolabe. Astrolabes that allowed for measurements of latitude by sighting the pole star at night had long been in use. Such astrolabes, however, became ineffective near or below the equator and could not be used at night. Zacuto’s astrolabe allowed for measurements to be made using the position of the sun. The device he designed was the first one small and sturdy enough to be used abroad ships. He personally handed one to Vasco da Gama, who used it on his first voyage to India.5 After the expulsion Zacuto would become court astronomer to the king of Portugal. The twentieth-century Portuguese monarch Manoel II said of him: “Truly the great astrologer . . . gave grand, enormous service to Portugal, his knowledge. Zacuto’s science served not only the Portuguese, but also Spain, beginning with Columbus, who possessed a copy of Almanach Perpetuum.”6 Zacuto managed to evade the 1497 Portuguese mass conversions of Jews. He and his son escaped to North Africa, where they reached Tunis in 1504 after twice being imprisoned by pirates. He died in 1515 in Jerusalem, where he had taught in a rabbinical seminary.7

LXXXVI Que diriam Viriato e os Afonsinos, O grande Nuno e o sábio Infante, E tantos outros que com os seus desígnios Sempre se lançaram foram por adiante… Recorde-se os Montes Herminios, Recorde-se Aljubarrota e o Gigante, A odisseia do grande Vasco da Gama As lutas que tiveram pela sua fama!

Opening European Trade with Asia Marco Polo was an Italian merchant whose travels introduced Europeans to Central Asia and China. In the 13th century the traditional trade route leading to China was overland, traveling through the Middle East from the countries of Europe. Marco Polo established this trade route but it required ships to carry the heavy loads of silks and spices. Returning to Italy after 24 he found Venice at war with Genoa. In 1299, after having been imprisoned, his cell-mate recorded his experiences in the book “The Travels of Marco Polo.” Upon his release he became a wealthy merchant, married, and had three children. He died in 1324 and was buried in the church of San Lorenzo in Venice. Henry the Navigator charted the course from Portugal to the Cape of Good Hope on the southern tip of Africa and is given credit for having started the Age of Discoveries. During the first half of the 15th century he explored the coast of West Africa and the islands of the Atlantic Ocean, in search of better routes to Asia. Five years after Columbus discovered the West Indies, Vasco da Gama rounded the southern point of Africa and discovered a sea route to India. In 1497, on his first voyage he opened European trade with Asia by an ocean route. Because of the immense distance around Africa, this passage became the longest sea voyage made at the time.

I have found here a new world richer and greater than that of Vasco da Gama,” he wrote.

I would suggest adding one more category at the very top of the pyramid, even above self-actualization: imagination and exploration. The need to imagine new possibilities, the need to reach out beyond ourselves and understand the world around us. Wasn’t that need part of what propelled Marco Polo and Vasco da Gama and Einstein? Not only to help ourselves with physical survival or personal relationships or self-discovery, but to know and comprehend this strange cosmos we find ourselves in. The need to explore the really big questions asked by the quantum cosmologists. How did it all begin? Far beyond our own lives, far beyond our community or our nation or planet Earth or even our solar system. How did the universe begin? It is a luxury to be able to ask such questions. It is also a human necessity.

Vasco da Gama retraced Dias’s route around the tip of Africa and reached Mozambique on the southeastern coast;

Vasco da Gama came to believe that he had been inadequately rewarded for his service to the crown.

The mantle of progress shifted, however, in the early modern period as a result of two great maritime expeditions that took place at the end of the fifteenth century. In the course of six years in the 1490s, the foundations were laid for a major disruption to the rhythm of long-established systems of exchange. First Christopher Columbus crossed the Atlantic, paving the way for two great land masses that were hitherto untouched to connect to Europe and beyond; then, just a few years later, Vasco da Gama successfully navigated the southern tip of Africa, sailing on to India, opening new sea routes in the process. The discoveries changed patterns of interaction and trade, and effected a remarkable change in the world’s political and economic centre of gravity. Suddenly, western Europe was transformed from its position as a regional backwater into the fulcrum of a sprawling communication, transportation and trading system: at a stroke, it became the new mid-point between east and west.

Traditions, with all their folksy redolences, are relatively safe matters for scholars to speculate about. Maps and nautical charts on the other hand -- especially accurate, sophisticated maps of the kind used by Guzarate to chart Vasco da Gama's course from Malindi to Calicut in 1498 -- are quite another matter. If maps have indeed come down to us containing recognizable representations of Ice Age topography -- as arguably may be the case with the depictions of India and of the long-submerged Sundaland peninsula by Cantino and Reinal and with the depiction of the 'Golden Chersonese' by Ptolemy -- then prehistory cannot be as it has hitherto been presented to us. If they are what they seem, such maps mean a lost civilization. Nothing more. Nothing less.

Old writers have said that the Portuguese, when they settled anywhere, began by building a church, the Dutch by building a fort, and the English by building a tavern. In Cochin some years ago, the progress of deterioration was still in evidence. The old cathedral erected to the glory of God by Albuquerque, or Vasco da Gama, was turned into a fort by the Dutch, and later, a British public house was superimposed on both.

Within the time span of a single generation surrounding the year 1500, Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael created their many masterworks of the High Renaissance, revealing the birth of the new human as much in da Vinci's multiform genius and the godlike incarnations of the David and the Sistine Creation of Adam as in the new perspectival objectivity and poietic empowerment of the Renaissance artist; Columbus sailed west and reached America, Vasco da Gama sailed east and reached India, and the Magellan expedition circumnavigated the globe, opening the world forever to itself; Luther posted his theses on the door of the Wittenberg castle church and began the enormous convulsion of Europe and the Western psyche called the Reformation; and Copernicus conceived the heliocentric theory and began the even more momentous Scientific Revolution. From this instant, the human self, the known world, the cosmos, heaven and earth were all radically and irrevocably transformed. All this happened within a period of time briefer than that which has passed since Woodstock and the Moon landing. (p. 4)

VASCO DA GAMA

Who discovered India? Vasco da Gama ... Dear India, Please discover something beyond that

European imperialism was entirely unlike all other imperial projects in history. Previous seekers of empire tended to assume that they already understood the world. Conquest merely utilised and spread their view of the world. The Arabs, to name one example, did not conquer Egypt, Spain or India in order to discover something they did not know. The Romans, Mongols and Aztecs voraciously conquered new lands in search of power and wealth – not of knowledge. In contrast, European imperialists set out to distant shores in the hope of obtaining new knowledge along with new territories. James Cook was not the first explorer to think this way. The Portuguese and Spanish voyagers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries already did. Prince Henry the Navigator and Vasco da Gama explored the coasts of Africa and, while doing so, seized control of islands and harbours. Christopher Columbus ‘discovered’ America and immediately claimed sovereignty over the new lands for the kings of Spain. Ferdinand Magellan found a way around the world, and simultaneously laid the foundation for the Spanish conquest of the Philippines.

who wants to make it grand or fortify it for the coitus, must rub it before copulation with tepid water, until it gets red and extended by the blood flowing into it, in consequence of the heat; he must then anoint it with a mixture of honey and ginger, rubbing it in sedulously. Then let him join the woman; he will procure for her such pleasure that she objects to him getting off her again.

The standoff had already lasted five days. "It was a Monday, the 3rd of October 1502," wrote Tomé Lopes: "a date that I will remember every day of my life." By now Gama's soldiers had removed all the weapons they could find from the Arab ship. It was a sitting duck, and the admiral ordered his men into their boats. Their task was simple. They were to tow the Mîrî out to sea until it was safely away from the Portuguese fleet. Then they were to set it alight and burn it with everyone on board. The soldiers marched onto the Mîrî, set fires across the decks, and jumped back into the boats as the flames licked and the smoke billowed. Some of the Muslims rushed to smother the fires, and one by one they stamped them out. Others dragged out several small bombards they had managed to hide from the search party, and they hurriedly set them up. The pilgrims and merchants ran to grab anything that could serve as ammunition, including fist-sized stones from the piles of ballast in the hold. There was clearly no chance of surrender, and they were determined to die fighting rather than burn to death. When the soldiers in the boats saw the fires go out they rowed back to light them again. As they approached, women and men alike fired the bombards and hurled the stones. The Europeans cowered under the hail of missiles and beat a fast retreat. From a distance they tried to sink the Mîrî with their bombards, but the guns carried on the boats were too small to inflict real damage. The Muslim women tore off their jewelry, clutched the gold, silver, and precious stones in their fists, and shook them at the boats, screaming at their attackers to take everything they had. They held up their babies and little children and desperately pleaded with the Christians to take pity on the innocents. One last time, the merchants shouted and gestured that they would pay a great ransom if their lives were spared. Gama watched, hidden from sight, through a loophole in the side of his ship. Tomé Lopes was stunned: shocked by the admiral's refusal to relent, and amazed that he was willing to turn down such wealth. There was no doubt in his mind that the ransom would have been enough to buy the freedom of every Christian prisoner in Morocco and still leave great treasure for the king. Bergamo and his fellow factors were no doubt wondering just how much of their profit would go up in smoke. Yet there were plenty of zealous Christians among the crews who had no more qualms than their Crusader forebears about killing peaceful merchants and pilgrims. The dehumanizing notion that their enemies in faith were somehow not real people was too deeply ingrained to be shaken. Like holy warriors before and after, they avoided looking into the whites of their victims' eyes and got on with their godly business.

This was just four years before Vasco da Gama landed in, then bombarded, Calicut, initiating the age of European colonialism and seizing control of the spice trade which had once brought so much Roman wealth to India.