Excerpt from Vasco Da Gama: And His Successors, 1460-1580 My intention, in this book, has been to outline the biographies of certain representative Portuguese of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, giving some account of the society in which they lived and the history which they made. The most momentous incident in that history is Vasco da Gama's first voyage to India in 1497-1499; not only because it closed the main period of the Portuguese discoveries and ushered in a period of conquest and empire; but also because it made an epoch in the history of civilization by establishing direct and permanent contact between Europe and the Far East. Vasco da Gama was the instrument by which Portugal rendered her chief service to humanity. But he was also a true type of the national character at its best and worst. He had what a seventeenth-century writer calls its "mortal staidness" - courage, loyalty, endurance; he had its ignorant ferocity. His achievement and personality single him out as the most representative Portuguese of his time, and as such Camoes has made him the hero of The Lusiads. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.