The king was not moved chiefly by a desire for plunder. An obscure but well-connected courtier, he had been chosen, much to everyone’s surprise, by King Manuel I to head the ambitious expedition to chart a new route to India.

The Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama set sail from Belém, a village at the mouth of the Tagus River now part of greater Lisbon, on July 8, 1497. When the Hindu priests chanted ‘Krishna,’ the Portuguese heard it as ‘Christ.'” – Eric Ormsby The Portuguese joined in the chants and invocations with gusto. What mattered to the Portuguese was that these long-lost Indian Christians permitted images in their ‘churches.’ Thus, whatever their idiosyncrasies, they could not be Muslims. “Vasco da Gama’s ‘landing party had assumed that Hindu temples were Christian churches, they had misconstrued the Brahmins’ invocation of a local deity as veneration of the Virgin Mary and they had decided the Hindu figures on the temple walls were outlandish Christian saints.’ True, ‘the temples were also crammed with animal gods and sacred phalluses,’ but these surely reflected exotic local Christian practices.

What did vasco da gama dis