Vasco Da Gama Exploration

It was a New Christian degredado by the name of João Nunes sent to shore who uttered the famous phrase “We came to seek Christians and spices,” when the Portuguese sailor Vasco de Gama and his small expeditionary fleet anchored offshore near Calicut on May 21, 1498.

Where spices are concerned, there is little confusion as to its meaning. Both Spain and Portugal were interested in finding new maritime routes to the Orient in response to dealing with hefty taxes implemented by the middle men, the Ottomans and various Italian city states, of the spice trade. This profitable trade for spices called for an alternative route, one that was cheaper, faster and involved traveling east into the Atlantic Ocean or down and around Africa. While there is little debate to the meaning of spices, the potentially misleading term “Christians” in João Nunes’ quote requires further examination and a deeper analysis. In the following paper, I will discuss some of the similarities and differences between the motivations of Vasco da Gama’s expedition to that of Christopher Columbus’.

Certainly, Vasco de Gama's voyage was not launched as part of some missionary effort on the part of Portugal. There primary motive was finding an alternate route to East Asia and ultimately this motive was driven by profits. An anonymous source commenting on the beginning of the journey explicitly states that Dom Manuel himself authorized the expedition as a quest for spices. So when João Nunes declared “We came to seek Christians…,” he is referring to and in search of eastern Christians that may have existed in this region and “lost their way” but were nonetheless potential allies against the Dar al-Islam. The roots of this belief, by Vasco de Gama's voyage, stem back to ...

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...ginning of his voyages to the end that the conversion of the Grand Khan would enable the united Christians to embark on a dramatic Crusade before the end of the world.

In conclusion, the motivations of Vasco da Gama's and Christopher Columbus's voyages were in many ways similar but also different. While they both sought an efficient maritime route to East Asia and elements of religious duty factored into both their voyages, Gama set out to find Christians rather than convert as Columbus intended. Though this distinction doesn't alter the reality of the Spanish overseas empire's repurposing itself as an exploitative mining and agricultural operation when it became clear that there were neither spices nor a Grand Khan to be found, it is still a difference worth noting when considering what stimulated the establishment of these world-changing intercontinental empires.