1497 — da Gama's Voyage Begins

On July 8, 1497, Vasco da Gama led four ships and about 170 men out of Lisbon on the voyage that would open the first European sea route to India, around Africa. After hugging the continent's Atlantic coast to Sierra Leone, he swung into the open ocean for a 10,000-kilometre crossing.

It was the longest out-of-sight-of-land voyage ever made at the time. That November his fleet rounded the Cape of Good Hope, reaching Mozambique, Mombasa, and Malindi before landing at Calicut, India, in May 1498. The route broke the old spice-trade monopoly and launched two centuries of European colonial expansion along Africa's coasts.