Vasco da Gama dies in Cochin, three months into his viceroyalty

In December 1524 the viceroy of Portuguese India lay in a house beside a church in Cochin, on the Malabar coast. He had moved there from the fortress when he felt death coming. For days his neck had been twisted with pain, and hard boils had risen on the nape that no remedy would bring to a head. By the end he could not speak.1 source1 source

He used his last days on paperwork. He made two officials swear to change nothing he had ordered until his successor arrived, and sealed the royal papers in a box for his son Estêvão to hand over. Then he confessed, took the sacrament and made his will. His sons were to sail home with the next ships; his silk clothes and furnishings went to the churches and the hospital.1 source1 source

The household kept the death quiet and the doors shut all day. Only at the evening Ave Maria did his sons and servants raise the lament. The body, dressed in silk under the mantle of the Order of Christ, with sword, gilt spurs and a dark cap, was carried by gentlemen of the order to the Franciscan friary church of Santo António and buried in its main chapel. The man was Vasco da Gama, Count of Vidigueira and Admiral of India.1 source1 source

Gama was born in Sines, a fishing town on the Alentejo coast, where his father Estêvão da Gama was alcaide-mor, the royal commander of the castle. His mother was Isabel Sodré. The year usually given is 1469, but it rests on the word of the priest and geographer António Carvalho da Costa, writing two centuries later, that he was 28 in 1497. Ravenstein called that unsupported: in 1478 Queen Isabella of Castile gave a safe-conduct to Vasco da Gama and Fernão de Lemos to pass through Castile to Tangier, and if that was him, he was born around 1460.3 sources3 sources

Little is known of his early career. Royal letters of 1484 and 1496 show him as a knight of the king's household with minor posts and property at Olivença, on the border with Castile, and the chronicler Garcia de Resende says King João II had employed him at sea. In 1497 King Manuel I gave him command of the fleet that was to sail round Africa to India, the goal Portuguese captains had been working towards along the African coast for most of the century.3 sources3 sources

“We left Restello on Saturday, July 8, 1497,” begins the only surviving journal of the voyage, written by an unnamed man aboard the São Rafael. There were four ships: the flagship São Gabriel, the São Rafael under Gama's brother Paulo, the caravel Berrio under Nicolau Coelho and a store-ship. After the Cape Verde islands they swung far out into the South Atlantic and were out of sight of land for 93 days.1 source1 source

Contrary winds held them off the Cape of Good Hope for days. “At last, on Wednesday, at noon, having the wind astern, we succeeded in doubling the Cape,” the journal records; Ravenstein dates that Wednesday to 22 November 1497. The store-ship was emptied and broken up in the bay of São Brás, and the three remaining ships worked up the east coast of Africa to Mozambique Island and Mombasa, where the welcome turned hostile.1 source1 source

At Malindi, a rival of Mombasa, the ruler gave them a pilot. The Portuguese chroniclers called him Malemo Cana or Canaqua and said he came from Gujarat; Malemo comes from the Arabic mu'allim, a ship's master. With the monsoon behind them they left on 24 April 1498 and sighted the Indian coast on 18 May. On 20 May they anchored a few miles north of Calicut, at a place the chroniclers call Capocate.1 source1 source

The stay at Calicut went badly. The Zamorin received Gama, but the presents he had brought were poor, the Muslim merchants worked against him and trade came to little. The fleet left at the end of August and sailed from the Anjediva islands on 5 October, weeks before the north-east monsoon set in. The crossing back to Africa took until 2 January 1499. Scurvy killed 30 men, after as many had died earlier, and only seven or eight in each ship could still work.1 source1 source

Short of hands, they burned the São Rafael off the African coast in January 1499. Coelho's Berrio reached Lisbon on 10 July. Gama turned aside to Terceira in the Azores, where Paulo died, and reached Lisbon himself later in the summer.1 source1 source

Barros, Góis and Barreto de Resende give 29 August, Castanheda 8 September and a manuscript in the Torre do Tombo 18 September; Ravenstein thought he arrived on 29 August and made his formal entry on 8 September. How many came home is unknown, because the sources disagree on how many left.1 source1 source

Manuel made him Admiral of India and gave him the title of Dom and incomes from Sines. The king also promised him the lordship of Sines itself, but the town belonged to the Order of Santiago and the exchange never happened; from 1501 he was paid 1,000 cruzados a year instead. Meanwhile Pedro Álvares Cabral's fleet of 1500 had left a trading post at Calicut, which was attacked; the factor, Aires Correia, and a number of his men were killed.2 sources2 sources

Gama sailed again in 1502, on 10 February according to Barros and Osório (Correia says 25 March), with about 20 ships. He forced the ruler of Kilwa, in today's Tanzania, to pay tribute; Barros and San Román say the gold was made into the monstrance Manuel gave to the monastery at Belém. Then he waited off Mount Eli, near Cannanore, for the ships coming back from the Red Sea.2 sources2 sources

On 29 September his ships took a large vessel returning from the pilgrimage to Mecca. Barros names her the Merim, usually written Miri today. Tomé Lopes, a clerk in one of the ships, wrote that a rich merchant aboard offered to load the whole fleet with spices in exchange for the ship and his passengers. Gama refused, took what valuables the passengers handed over and ordered the ship towed away and burned.2 sources2 sources

The passengers put the first fire out and fought with stones and the few weapons left to them. Lopes saw women on deck holding up gold, jewels and their small children, begging the admiral, who watched through a port, to spare them.1 source1 source

On Monday 3 October the passengers boarded Lopes's own ship and nearly took it. Gama's ships then chased the Miri for four days and nights, until a man swam over and offered, in return for his life, to tie a rope to her rudder so she could be fired. Before the end, Lopes says, the passengers threw their gold and jewels into the sea.1 source1 source

At Calicut, at the start of November, Gama demanded compensation for the trading post. When no answer came, Lopes says, 34 captured men were hanged from the yardarms in sight of the crowd on the beach. The ships fired into the crowd and kept up their fire on the town until dark. At nightfall the heads, hands and feet of the hanged were cut off and sent ashore in a boat with a letter, and on 2 November the bombardment began again. Correia's later version is worse, with more than 800 men mutilated and burned.2 sources2 sources

Gama loaded spices at Cochin and Cannanore, left a squadron under his maternal uncle Vicente Sodré to patrol the coast and was back in Lisbon in 1503, on 1 September according to Osório and 10 November according to Barros. Camões's epic Os Lusíadas leaves the burning of the Miri out; Stanley noted that Barros, Osório and San Román told it without a word of disapproval.2 sources2 sources

For the next 20 years Gama stayed in Portugal. By October 1501 he had married Catarina de Ataíde, and they lived mostly in Évora, in a house said to have been painted with Indian trees and animals. They had six sons. Correia says Gama drew up the instructions for the India fleets of 1505 and was consulted on everything to do with India.3 sources3 sources

He wanted more. A draft letter from Manuel survives in which the king tells his admiral that the title of count had been promised but that Gama had pursued it in ways he should not, and refuses him leave to go abroad before December, while saying he could then leave with his wife, children and property. Gama, in other words, had asked to quit the kingdom.2 sources2 sources

The Duke of Bragança, Jaime, solved it. He sold Gama his towns of Vidigueira and Vila de Frades, in the Alentejo, for 4,000 cruzados in cash and an annuity of 400,000 reais that Gama held. The deed was signed in Évora on 7 November 1519 and confirmed by the king on 17 December, and a royal letter of 29 December made Gama Count of Vidigueira. Manuel died in 1521; his son João III would send Gama back to India.3 sources3 sources

Portuguese India was in disorder under the governor Duarte de Meneses, with whom the king was furious. João III appointed Gama viceroy, only the second man to hold that title, by a letter that Teixeira de Aragão dates to 27 February 1524, and Gama swore homage on 28 February, signing himself “the count admiral”. He sailed on 9 April with 14 ships, about 3,000 men and his sons Estêvão and Paulo.3 sources3 sources

He took office at Chaul and reached Goa on 23 September, according to a letter from the city council to the king. The council counted nine ships with him and five missing. Correia describes a viceroy with a royal household, a guard of 200 men and a temper to match: “a very disdainful man, and ready to anger, very rash, much feared and respected”.2 sources2 sources

He set about the abuses with the same hardness. He reclaimed royal artillery that had passed into private hands, put the factors of Cochin under investigation and refused to let Duarte de Meneses land. Three women found aboard the fleet, against his orders, were publicly flogged in Goa, though the bishop, the friars and the Misericórdia begged for them; from his deathbed he sent each of them a dowry.1 source1 source

By the end of November he was ill in Cochin. Correia, whose account is the fullest, blames the pain in his neck and the boils on the nape, made worse by fits of anger and the weight of work, until he took to his bed and lost his voice. He still sent a ship home with his letters on 1 December and ordered the arrest of a captain accused of cutting off a man's arm in Ceylon.1 source1 source

He died on Christmas Eve. Castanheda, Barros and San Román agree on the date. He was succeeded by Henrique de Meneses, the captain of Goa, who had come out in the same fleet. Estêvão and Paulo da Gama sailed for Lisbon in a merchant's ship, as their father had ordered, and were received by the king with honour.1 source1 source

Even the first grave is uncertain. Correia names the Franciscan church of Santo António and Barros the church of St Francis, but Castanheda says the cathedral of Cochin. The British blew up most of Cochin's public buildings in 1806, and a visitor in 1857 was told the grave lay somewhere near the lost cathedral. The one Portuguese church spared is the one now called St Francis, where a railed slab marks the spot today.2 sources2 sources

Gama had asked for his bones to go home, and 14 years later they did. His son Pedro da Silva da Gama took them to the church of Nossa Senhora das Relíquias, a Carmelite convent near Vidigueira. Stanley, Ravenstein and José Manuel Garcia give the year as 1538; the 1539 found in some modern summaries has no support in these sources. The grave in the chancel had no epitaph at first, and later writers did not agree on which side of the altar it lay.4 sources4 sources

The convent was closed with the other religious houses in 1834. In 1840 the Gama vault was broken open by looters, the coffin forced and some bones smashed; in 1841 the state auctioned the building without a thought for who was buried in it. Teixeira de Aragão, writing in 1871, found the bones still lying where the district governor had had the vault resealed.1 source1 source

A decree of 24 February 1871 ordered them moved to the church of the Jerónimos at Belém, but nothing happened until 1880, when the remains of the poet Luís de Camões were being moved there for the 300th anniversary of his death. Gama's exhumation was recorded at Vidigueira on 7 June 1880, and on 8 July his urn was handed to the prior of Santa Maria de Belém. The monastery's own account gives 1880 as the year he came to the Jerónimos.3 sources3 sources

Doubts followed. The historian José Manuel Garcia says the bones taken in 1880 were not Gama's, and that the true remains were brought to the Jerónimos in 1898, the fourth centenary of the voyage, and placed in the tomb made in 1894. A popular account by Peter Booker, which gives no references, adds that when the tomb was opened again it held eight thighbones and two skulls, and that the family who now own the old convent estate believe the 1898 commission took the wrong Gama too.2 sources2 sources

Each centenary has brought Gama back. The fourth centenary of the voyage in 1898 produced paintings such as Veloso Salgado's at the top of this page and, if Garcia is right, the second transfer of his bones. On 25 December 1924, for the fourth centenary of his death, Sines laid the first stone of a monument to him.2 sources2 sources

For the 500th anniversary of his death the government announced a concert, lectures and publications, to open on 16 December 2024 with a wreath laid on his tomb by the prime minister, Luís Montenegro. In Fort Kochi the priest of the church that keeps his first grave said in 2023 that its own anniversary ceremonies would be agreed with the archaeology department.2 sources2 sources

The government said its programme would celebrate, study and “demystify” him. The chronicles that tell of the voyage of 1498 also tell of the Miri and the hanged men of Calicut. Even the bones in the Belém tomb rest on exhumation papers from 1880 and on one historian's word that those were the wrong ones.4 sources4 sources