The ships being equipped and ready, one Sunday the King went with Queen Dona Maria to hear mass, which was said pontifically by the bishop Calcadilha, who also made a discourse in praise of the voyage, and holy design of the King in regard to the new discovery which he was commanding to be made and he called upon the people to pray to the Lord that the voyage might be for his holy service, and for the exalting of his holy faith, and for the increase of the good and honor of the kingdom of Portugal. The quaint narrative was written by the chronicler who accompanied the expedition in person. He was accompanied by his brother Paulo, who, with other of the celebrated navigator’s companions, appears in the following account of this great achievement. He sailed from Lisbon in July of that year, in November doubled the Cape of Good Hope, arrived at Calicut, on the Malabar coast of India, in May, 1498, and in September, 1499, returned to Lisbon. In 1497 Vasco da Gama was placed by King Emanuel I of Portugal in command of an expedition of three small ships sent to discover such a route. To Portuguese navigators the way to India by this route was soon made clear.
On his return voyage, 1487, he found the Cape of Good Hope, having before doubled it without knowing that he had done so. Nine years later the equator was passed, and in 1486 Bartholomew Dias sailed around the southern point of Africa, which he had been sent to discover. In 1462 an expedition reached Sierra Leone, almost half way down the continent. Before his death, 1460, his Portuguese mariners, in successive voyages, had worked their way well down the western coast of Africa. Soon afterward discoveries were undertaken by Prince Henry, called the Navigator," whose whole life was given to these enterprises. They began, therefore, to send out expeditions, and in 1410 discovered the island of Madeira.
Ia the early years of the fifteenth century the Portuguese, overshadowed by the Spanish kingdom, which almost enclosed their country, realized that they could extend their territory only by colonizing beyond seas. The same goal which attracted the Spaniards westward drew the Portuguese south, the desire to find a sea route to India, and thus garner the enormous profits of the trade in spices and other Indian wealth.
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