Europe reaches India by sea

Vasco da Gama anchored off Calicut after ten months at sea and was asked, by a Tunisian merchant who spoke Castilian, what the devil had brought him there.

The last leg across the Arabian Sea was done with a pilot who knew the monsoon; the hard part had been the Atlantic, where da Gama swung far out to the west to pick up the winds and spent ninety-odd days out of sight of land. Navigators of that generation had no way to find longitude, so a voyage was dead reckoning plus latitude plus nerve.