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Why Vasco da Gama Went to India

By ERIC ORMSBY Published: September 9, 2011

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The Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama set sail from Belm, a village at the mouth of the Tagus River now part of greater Lisbon, on July 8, 1497. An obscure but well-connected courtier, he had been chosen, much to everyones surprise, by King Manuel I to head the ambitious expedition to chart a new route to India. The king was not moved chiefly by a desire for plunder. He possessed a visionary cast of mind bordering on derangement; he saw himself spearheading a holy war to topple Islam, recover Jerusalem from the infidels and establish himself as the King of Jerusalem.
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Da Gama shared these dreams, but like his hard-bitten crew, rogues or criminals to a man, he coveted the fabled riches of the East not only gold and gems but spices, then the most precious of commodities. On this voyage, as on his two later ones, he proved a brilliant navigator and commander. But where courage could not bring him through violent storms, contrary seas and the machinations of hostile rulers, luck came to his rescue. He sailed blindly, virtually by instinct, without maps, charts or reliable pilots, into unknown oceans.

As Nigel Cliff, a historian and journalist, demonstrates in his lively and ambitious Holy War, da Gama was Mansell/Time & Life Pictures Getty Images An etching of Vasco da Gama. abetted as much by ignorance as by skill and daring. To discover the sea route to India, he deliberately set his HOLY WAR course in a different direction from Columbus, his great How Vasco da Gamas Epic seafaring rival. Instead of heading west, da Gama went Voyages Turned the Tide in a Centuries-Old Clash of south. His ships inched their way down the African coast, Civilizations voyaging thousands of miles farther than any previous By Nigel Cliff explorer. After months of sailing, he rounded the Cape of Illustrated. 547 pp. Good Hope. From there, creeping up the east coast of Harper/HarperCollins Publishers. $29.99. Africa, he embarked on the uncharted vastness of the Indian Ocean. Uncharted, that is, by European navigators. For at the time, the Indian Ocean was crisscrossed by Muslim vessels, and it was Muslim merchants, backed up by powerful local rulers, who controlled the trade routes and had done so for centuries. Da Gama sought to break this maritime dominance; even stronger was his ambition to discover the Christians of India and their long-lost Christian king, the legendary Prester John, and by forging an alliance with them, to unite Christianity and destroy Islam. The ambition was not entirely fanciful; there were Christian communities in India, founded according to legend by St. Thomas the Apostle. Da Gama couldnt tell an Indian Christian from a cassowary, but on this occasion, ignorance was truly bliss.

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Holy War By Nigel Cliff Book Review - NYTimes.com

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When his ships finally moored at Calicut, near the southern tip of the subcontinent, he and his crew rejoiced to learn that there were indeed many Christians long settled there. As Cliff recounts, the landing party had assumed that Hindu temples were Christian churches, they had misconstrued the Brahmins invocation of a local deity as veneration of the Virgin Mary and they had decided the Hindu figures on the temple walls were outlandish Christian saints. True, the temples were also crammed with animal gods and sacred phalluses, but these surely reflected exotic local Christian practices. What mattered to the Portuguese was that these long-lost Indian Christians permitted images in their churches. Thus, whatever their idiosyncrasies, they could not be Muslims. The Portuguese joined in the chants and invocations with gusto. When the Hindu priests chanted Krishna, the Portuguese heard it as Christ. Such farcical episodes recur throughout Cliffs account and add unexpected levity to what is otherwise a dismal record of greed, savagery and fanaticism, especially but not exclusively on the part of the European explorers. The Portuguese didnt know that Hinduism, let alone Buddhism or Jainism, existed. For them, the world was starkly divided between Christianity and Islam. They knew about Jews, of course; theyd been steadily persecuting them with renewed vigor in the 1490s by forced conversion, expulsion and massacre, but to them, Judaism was merely a forerunner of Christianity, not a faith in its own right.
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Eric Ormsbys latest book is Fine Incisions: Essays on Poetry and Place. This article has been revised to reflect the following correction: Correction: September 13, 2011 An earlier version of this review stated incorrectly that Vasco da Gama was the first European to round the Cape of Good Hope. But in fact it was another Portuguese explorer, Bartholomeu Dias, in 1488.
A version of this review appeared in print on September 11, 2011, on page BR22 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: The Last Crusader.

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