What If Vasco da Gama's Voyage to India Had Failed?

Portugal had spent most of the 15th century incrementally pushing exploration further down the West African coast under the sponsorship of Prince Henry the Navigator and his successors, driven by the ambition to find a direct sea route to the lucrative Asian spice trade, currently controlled by an intermediary chain running through Arab traders in the Indian Ocean and Venetian merchants in the Mediterranean, both of whom took substantial cuts that made spices extraordinarily expensive by the time they reached Northern Europe. Bartolomeu Dias's 1488 voyage rounding the Cape of Good Hope proved the African continent could be sailed around, but it was Vasco da Gama, departing Lisbon in July 1497 with four ships, who completed the full route to India.

The voyage was punishing in the extreme. Da Gama's fleet spent months out of sight of any coast crossing the South Atlantic on a wide arc to catch favorable winds, and scurvy — a disease then not understood to be caused by vitamin C deficiency — devastated the crew, killing roughly two-thirds of the men who departed Portugal before the fleet even reached India. Da Gama reached Calicut on India's Malabar coast in May 1498, and although his initial trading efforts were only modestly successful (Indian merchants were unimpressed by the low-value trade goods the Portuguese offered), the voyage proved the sea route was navigable. Da Gama returned to Portugal in 1499 with only two of his original four ships and a fraction of his original crew, but the cargo of spices he did bring back sold for many times the cost of the entire expedition, triggering a massive Portuguese push to establish a permanent, fortified trading and military presence throughout the Indian Ocean over the following decades.

Given how close the voyage came to catastrophe as it actually happened — the extreme scurvy mortality alone made it a near-run thing — a modestly worse outcome is easy to imagine: a storm scattering or sinking a larger portion of the fleet during the long, exposed South Atlantic crossing, or a slightly higher scurvy mortality rate that leaves too few healthy sailors to crew even the surviving ships back to Portugal. Either way, the fleet is lost or fails to return with proof that the route was viable and profitable.

A failed or lost da Gama expedition wouldn't end Portuguese ambitions toward India outright — the strategic logic for finding a direct spice route remained compelling — but it would very plausibly delay a second serious attempt by years, given the enormous cost and the psychological blow of losing an entire royally sponsored fleet. Portugal's Manuel I, who had personally backed the expedition, would face difficult questions about whether the risk was worth continuing to pursue, particularly if a rival power showed interest in the same route in the interim.

The Arab and Venetian intermediaries who controlled the existing spice trade route through the Red Sea, Egypt, and the Mediterranean would gain a reprieve of unknown but potentially significant length, continuing to extract the same substantial middleman profits that a successful all-sea route would otherwise have bypassed entirely, delaying the relative economic decline that Venice in particular experienced once Portuguese and later Dutch and English ships began bypassing Mediterranean intermediaries.

The entire subsequent structure of European overseas empire-building was shaped by which nation established maritime dominance in Asian trade first, and a delayed or failed Portuguese breakthrough opens meaningful space for a different power — Spain, already busy with American colonization but not exclusively so, or another sailing power — to potentially claim the first successful direct sea route instead, with substantial downstream consequences for which European nation built the earliest and most extensive Indian Ocean trading empire, and by extension for the balance of European colonial competition over the following two centuries.