Note Back to Main Text — Chapter VI · THE FINDING OF STRANGE COASTS.

An added sting was given to such taunts by a great event that happened about this time. In the summer of Gama's voyage to Hindustan, 1497. 1497, Vasco da Gama started from Lisbon for the Cape of Good Hope, and in the summer of 1499 he returned, after having doubled the cape and crossed the Indian ocean to Calicut on the Malabar coast of Hindustan. His voyage was the next Portuguese step sequent upon that of Bartholomew Dias. There was nothing questionable or dubious about Gama's triumph. He had seen splendid cities, talked with a powerful Rajah, and met with Arab vessels, their crews madly jealous at the unprecedented sight of Christian ships in those waters; and he brought back with him to Lisbon nutmegs and cloves, pepper and ginger, rubies and emeralds, damask robes with satin linings, bronze chairs with cushions, trumpets of carved ivory, a sunshade of crimson satin, a sword in a silver scabbard, and no end of such gear.[599] An old civilization had been found and a route of commerce discovered, and a factory was to be set up at once on that Indian coast. What a contrast to the miserable performance of Columbus, who had started with the flower of Spain's chivalry for rich Cipango, and had only led them to a land where they must either starve or do work fit for peasants, while he spent his time in cruising among wild islands! The king of Portugal could now snap his fingers at Ferdinand and Isabella, and if a doubt should have sometimes crossed the minds of those chagrined sovereigns, as to whether this plausible Genoese mariner might not, after all, be a humbug or a crazy enthusiast, we can hardly wonder at it.