The Portuguese had a king in the early 15th century—King Henry
the Navigator—who founded a school for navigation and personally
sponsored voyages. The assumption was that any profi t made by
merchants is wealth coming into the country, and if you resell what
you bring in to other countries, that brings money in. The whole
idea is to reexport, but not buy from other nations, which causes
money to fl ow out.
The Portuguese were going down the west coast of Africa, where
they found gold, ivory, rare woods, melegueta pepper, and slaves.
The slaves were mostly used as household servants by nobles, but
they were just beginning to be used on sugar plantations on islands
like Madeira, Cape Verde, and the Azores.
The Portuguese kept heading south down the coast of Africa.
Bartholomew Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1488, so
they then knew where Africa ended. It then began to occur to them
that if they could go up the other side of Africa and across the Indian
Ocean, they could completely cut out the Venetian middlemen and
even the Arab tradesmen in the Middle East. In other words, they
could go directly to the source—to India and Indonesia—for spices.
It takes them about 10 years to fi nally follow up on this idea. They
sent Vasco da Gama with a fl otilla of four ships to try it, and he
succeeded, making it all the way to Calicut on the west coast, where
he came in contact with Asian ships from Malacca.
Europe is also now connected with Asia directly. Within a decade,
the Portuguese had conquered Calicut, destroyed rival Muslim
fl eets under Alfonso de Albuquerque, and set up a military post in
India. They would soon thereafter take Goa, too, which remained a
port colony until this century.
The Portuguese took over Malacca on the Malay Peninsula and
Macao in China, and they had a foothold in Japan for a while. Most
importantly, they set up posts in Java, Sumatra, and throughout
Indonesia—which is where the spices come from.