The first direct all-ocean route from western Europe to India around Africa, opened when the Portuguese captain Vasco da Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope and reached Calicut on the Indian coast in 1498 — loosening the chain of Arab, Indian, and Venetian middlemen who had carried Asian goods to Europe, and opening the era of armed European seaborne empire in Asia.
For centuries, pepper and cloves reached Europe only by passing through many hands: Indian merchants, Arab shippers, Egyptian and Venetian middlemen, each taking a cut along the way. In 1498, a Portuguese captain named Vasco da Gama sailed directly to one of the great spice markets of the Indian Ocean. He left Lisbon, rounded the bottom of Africa, crossed the Indian Ocean, and landed at Calicut on the coast of India. No European had ever done this by sea. The voyage did not cut out those middlemen overnight, but it tilted the world. Trade and power began their long drift away from the old land routes and the Mediterranean toward the ocean-facing powers of the Atlantic coast. Within a generation, Portuguese guns were forcing their way into Asian waters. The sea road to India had been found, and with it came European empire in Asia.