[1415 - 1580] Masters of the Sea: The Age of Discovery

In the early 15th century, Portugal was a sliver of a kingdom, clinging to the western edge of Europe. Its back was to a rival, Castile, and its face was to the vast, terrifying emptiness of the Atlantic Ocean—the ‘Sea of Darkness.’ To the south, the great Islamic powers of North Africa controlled the lucrative trade routes for gold, ivory, and spices that trickled into Europe at exorbitant prices through Venetian and Genoese middlemen. For Portugal, a poor nation with a population barely exceeding one million, the future seemed hemmed in. But it is often from the edge of the known world that the greatest leaps into the unknown are made. The catalyst for this leap was a man who, ironically, was not a great sailor himself: Infante Dom Henrique, better known to history as Prince Henry the Navigator. A devout and complex man, Henry was driven by a potent mix of medieval crusading zeal and Renaissance curiosity. From his villa in the sun-bleached Algarve region, he sponsored a systematic, generation-long assault on the Atlantic. He gathered the finest cartographers, astronomers, and instrument makers, fostering an environment of innovation. The result was the vessel that would become the icon of the age: the caravel. Small, nimble, and averaging just 50 to 70 tons, the caravel was a marvel. Its triangular lateen sails allowed it to sail against the wind, a crucial advantage for exploring unfamiliar coastlines, while its shallow draft let it probe coastal inlets and rivers. This was the key that would unlock the African coast. For years, Portuguese sailors crept south, but a great psychological barrier loomed: Cape Bojador. To the mariners of the day, this was a point of no return, a place of monstrous currents, ship-swallowing fogs, and waters that boiled under the tropical sun. It took more than a dozen attempts over 12 years before one of Henry’s squires, Gil Eanes, finally steeled his nerve. In 1434, he sailed his caravel far out into the Atlantic, bypassed the treacherous coastal currents, and rounded the cape. He found not monsters, but calm waters and a sandy shore. The barrier was broken. This single act of courage was monumental, proving that fear, not nature, had been the primary obstacle. The way south was now open. What followed was a slow, methodical crawl down the coastline of West Africa. With each voyage, Portuguese pilots mapped the winds and currents, erecting stone pillars, or ‘padrões,’ to claim the land for their king. They established trading posts, known as ‘feitorias,’ fortified factories to trade European goods like cloth and metalware for African gold and ivory. But this commerce had a dark and enduring consequence. In 1444, the first large consignment of enslaved Africans, some 235 men, women, and children captured in raids, was brought to the town of Lagos to be sold in a public market. It marked the horrifying beginning of the transatlantic slave trade, a brutal enterprise that would finance much of Portugal’s imperial expansion and inflict suffering on an unimaginable scale for centuries to come. By the 1480s, the ultimate goal had crystallized. King John II, an astute and ambitious monarch, no longer sought just African gold; he sought the source of the spice trade itself—India. Circumventing the hostile Mamluk Sultanate and the Venetian monopoly was a strategic imperative that promised unimaginable wealth. In 1487, he dispatched Bartolomeu Dias with a small fleet of three ships. Sailing further south than any European before, Dias was caught in a vicious storm that blew his ships out to sea for thirteen days. When the winds finally subsided and he turned back towards land, there was none to be found. Unknowingly, he had been blown completely around the southern tip of Africa. As he sailed north up the eastern coast, the crew, exhausted and terrified, mutinied and forced him to turn back. On the return journey, they sighted the magnificent, towering headland he had missed. Dias, remembering his ordeal, named it the ‘Cabo das Tormentas’—the Cape of Storms. King John, with a brilliant sense of public relations and a vision for the future, overruled him. This would be known as the ‘Cabo da Boa Esperança’—the Cape of Good Hope. The path was now clear. A decade later, in the summer of 1497, four ships under the command of a stern and determined nobleman named Vasco da Gama departed from the shores of Lisbon. This was no mere exploratory voyage; it was a heavily armed trade mission meant to kick open the door to the Indian Ocean. Da Gama’s journey was an epic of endurance. He used Dias’s discovery of the Atlantic winds to make a great, sweeping arc far into the western Atlantic, a ninety-six-day voyage out of sight of land, the longest such journey in history to that point. Sickness ravaged his crew; scurvy, the bane of sailors, caused men’s gums to swell over their teeth, their joints to ache, and their spirits to break. After tense encounters and skirmishes along the East African coast, he secured a pilot in Malindi (in modern-day Kenya) who could navigate the monsoon winds of the Indian Ocean. On May 20, 1498, after a voyage of ten and a half months covering over 24,000 miles, Vasco da Gama’s fleet dropped anchor off the coast of Calicut, India. The Portuguese had arrived. The world had irrevocably shrunk. The initial encounter was almost farcical. The Portuguese, accustomed to the tribal chieftains of Africa, presented the fabulously wealthy Hindu ruler of Calicut, the Zamorin, with paltry gifts of striped cloth, hats, and washbasins. The Zamorin’s courtiers laughed. But da Gama’s famous declaration—'We came in search of Christians and spices'—belied a ruthless intent. When he returned to Lisbon in 1499, with only two ships and 55 of his original 170 men remaining, the cargo of pepper, cinnamon, and cloves he carried was worth sixty times the cost of the entire expedition. Portugal did not return to India as peaceful merchants. They returned as crusaders and conquerors. Under the brilliant and brutal command of Afonso de Albuquerque, the second governor of Portuguese India, they implemented a strategy of total maritime dominance. Instead of conquering vast territories, Albuquerque seized and fortified the choke points of the Indian Ocean trade network. He captured Goa in 1510, making it the opulent capital of the Portuguese State of India; he conquered Malacca in 1511, controlling the gateway to the Spice Islands; and he took Hormuz in 1515, dominating the entrance to the Persian Gulf. Through sheer naval superiority and unbridled violence, Portugal shattered the old trade networks and established a maritime empire, the first truly global empire in history. Lisbon transformed into the richest, most vibrant city in Europe. The air in the Ribeira das Naus, the royal shipyard, was thick with the smell of sawdust, tar, and exotic spices being unloaded onto the docks. The wealth funded a unique and flamboyant architectural style, the Manueline, which celebrated the sea. Carved stone at the Jerónimos Monastery and the Tower of Belém coiled into representations of nautical ropes, armillary spheres, and sea coral, a permanent testament to the source of Portugal’s riches. Yet this golden age came at a staggering human price. The population of the small nation was stretched to its breaking point. It is estimated that for every 100 people who left for India, only 50 would ever return, the rest lost to shipwreck, disease, and conflict. The empire was run on a demographic shoestring, a magnificent but fragile enterprise. The end of this distinct era came swiftly and tragically. In 1578, the young, messianic King Sebastian led a disastrous crusade into Morocco. At the Battle of Alcácer Quibir, the Portuguese army was annihilated, and the king was killed, his body never definitively recovered. With no direct heir, Portugal plunged into a succession crisis. Two years later, in 1580, Philip II of Spain, who had a legitimate claim through his mother, marched his troops into Lisbon and claimed the throne. The Age of Discovery, Portugal’s singular and spectacular century, was over. But in just over 150 years, this small nation on the Atlantic fringe had connected the planet, initiated the first era of globalization, and forever altered the course of human history.