For the 1497 voyage Subrahmanyam follows the anonymous account found in 1834 by Herculano for that of 1502, he draws on accounts by participants-an anonymous Fleming, the Italian Matteo Bergamo, and the Portuguese scrivener Tomé Lopes. He assiduously seeks evidence other than from these-Barros, Góis, Correia-and the account of Castanheda. Subrahmanyam provides new interpretations and critically evaluates the official chroniclers. The bulk of the documentation on Gama was known in the late nineteenth century. Beginning with why an obscure nobleman was chosen to command the 1497–99 expedition, Subrahmanyam traces the trajectory of Gama’s life and career: membership of the Order of Santiago the voyage that opened the Cape route from Lisbon to India royal recognition in the form of titles, admission to the Royal Council, and selection to command the 1502 fleet two decades of waiting in the wings (“the wilderness years”) and the triumphal climax of appointment as viceroy, captain-major, and governor of Portuguese India.

Subrahmanyam’s objectives are to reinterpret the career of Gama, reexamine the historical contexts of the first voyage, to place him in the broader historical environments of Portugal and Asia, and to “make an implicit plea for a rather more nuanced, indeed ironical, look at the history of European expansion, both of the inflation (thus, expansion) of European claims and pretensions, and the outward-looking processes by which Europeans sought to redefine the commercial and political networks of the early sixteenth century” (p. Subrahmanyam, author of studies on the political economy of southern India and on Portuguese trade and settlement in the Bay of Bengal, a political and economic history of the Portuguese in Asia, and a host of provocative essays, provides in The Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama a revisionist assessment of Gama based predominantly on published sources.

But, other than in the context of the voyage, Gama has been elusive.

No less than Columbus, Magellan, or Cook, Gama has been seen as emblematic of imperial aspirations and, as such, an object of reverence or opprobrium. In the pantheon of national heroes, Gama is unique in that, within half a century of his death (1524), this voyage was central to a major epic poem of western literature, Os Lusiadas, where he was mythified and the voyage divinized. Vasco da Gama is best known as commander of the Portuguese fleet that pioneered the exclusively sea route from Portugal to the west coast of India and, by doing so, undermined what has been portrayed as a Venetian monopoly on the supply of spices to Europe.

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