Vasco da Gama
The Portuguese captain who reached India by sea in 1498 and then returned with cannon, attaching Europe to Asian trade by force rather than by competing in it.
Vasco da Gama left Lisbon on 8 July 1497 with four ships and about 170 men, and reached Calicut on the Malabar coast of India on 20 May 1498. It is one of the few voyages that genuinely changed the structure of the world economy, and almost nothing about it went the way the standard story implies.
The voyage
The seamanship was the impressive part. Instead of hugging the African coast against contrary winds, da Gama swung far out into the South Atlantic, almost to Brazil, and used the westerlies of the southern ocean to come back around the Cape of Good Hope, which he rounded on 22 November 1497. That maneuver, the volta do mar, is why the voyage was possible at all, and it took him ninety-odd days out of sight of land, far longer than Columbus.
North of the Cape he entered a world he had not expected. The Swahili coast was a chain of prosperous, cosmopolitan Muslim city-states, Mozambique, Mombasa, Malindi, trading with Arabia, Persia, Gujarat, and China, the same coast Zheng He's treasure fleets had visited two generations earlier. The Portuguese were not explorers arriving among primitives. They were provincials arriving in a rich neighborhood, and were treated as such. At Malindi he took on a pilot who knew the monsoon crossing, and twenty-three days later he was in India.
The humiliating part
Calicut was one of the great emporia of the Indian Ocean. Da Gama presented the Zamorin, its ruler, with the gifts he had brought from Portugal: striped cloth, hats, coral, sugar, honey, washbasins. The Zamorin's officials reportedly laughed. The poorest merchant from Mecca brought better. Portugal, on the edge of Europe, produced nothing Asia wanted.
He got a cargo of pepper and cinnamon, the goods of the spice trade, and left. The return crossing was mistimed against the monsoon and took months; scurvy killed most of the crew, including his brother, and two of the four ships were abandoned. Fewer than sixty men came home in 1499. The cargo still turned a large profit, which told Lisbon everything it needed to know.
The second voyage, and the real innovation
Da Gama returned in 1502 with twenty ships, and the character of the enterprise had changed completely. If Europe could not out-trade the Indian Ocean, it could out-shoot it. Ocean-going ships carrying heavy cannon were the one advantage the Portuguese had, and in a sea where trade had been essentially unarmed for centuries, it was decisive.
He bombarded Calicut. He intercepted the Miri, a ship returning from the pilgrimage to Mecca, and burned it with hundreds of people aboard, including women and children, after taking its cargo. And Portugal established the cartaz system, under which Asian merchants had to buy a Portuguese pass to sail waters Portugal had never previously entered, on pain of seizure.
Within fifteen years that logic produced the chain of fortified chokepoints, Goa in 1510, Malacca in 1511, Hormuz in 1515, that was Portugal's empire in Asia. Da Gama died at Cochin on 24 December 1524, having returned as viceroy.
The echo
Da Gama did not discover a route to India. Indians, Arabs, Persians, and Africans had been sailing these waters for a thousand years and one of them piloted him across. What he did was connect a peripheral European kingdom to the richest trading system on earth, and then demonstrate that the connection could be held by violence at sea rather than by having anything to sell.
That template outlasted Portugal by centuries. The Dutch and the English companies inherited it and refined it: armed entry into other people's commerce, fortified posts at the narrows, and control of the flow rather than production of the goods. The route around the Cape also began the long drain of revenue from the overland caravan and Red Sea routes that had made Venice, Egypt, and the Ottomans rich, which is a slower and larger consequence than any cargo of pepper.