Art. XXIV.—Vasco da Gama

Extract

Vasco da Gama, though not a man of words, was, as Camoens says, a man of strenuous deeds, and it is for the sake of his deeds, and of the results which during four centuries have flowed from them, that we are now commemorating him. We celebrate in him the man whose courage and perseverance gave India to Europe and to England, and who, all unknowingly, was, with Columbus and Magellan, one of the three men who saved the Europe of the Renaissance and of the Reformation from being laid in ruins by Turkish tyranny seconded by French treachery. Had not Columbus and Da Gama, twenty years before the battle of Mohacs and the successes of Barbarossa in the Mediterranean, bestowed upon Spain and Portugal the riches of Asia and America, Charles V could never have hurled back from the German frontiers and the Italian coasts the all but overwhelming inrush of the hordes of Suleiman the Magnificent. But what could the defenders of Christendom have done save for the coffers of the Fuggers and the Welsers, of the bankers of Antwerp and the bankers of Genoa? and whence did these derive their wealth but from the newly-opened Spice Islands of the East and the new-found gold-mines of the West? By discovering the sea road to India, Vasco da Gama made Lisbon and Antwerp the emporia of the world. In 1517 the Turks conquered Egypt, and thus closed the last of the roads along which the world's wealth had of old passed from East to West.