The Age of Discovery | From Lisbon to the Far East, a Route You Can Still Walk

Marmalade, molasses, veranda, cobra. English carries a scattering of words that came in from Portuguese, because five hundred years ago a small country on the western edge of Europe went to sea and its routes reached the far side of the world. This page follows the Age of Discovery through places you can still stand in today. The card under each chapter leads to the article for getting there.

1 Why the small country at the edge of the world went first

Fifteenth-century Portugal was a country of roughly a million people. The wealth of Europe ran through the Mediterranean, and spices came overland and by the Arabian Sea into the hands of Venetian and Genoese merchants. Portugal had only the Atlantic; it was outside that system, and going out into the outer sea was the one move available to it.

In 1415 Portugal took Ceuta, the Muslim-held port across the Strait of Gibraltar. One of the princes on that expedition would later be called Henry the Navigator, and from then on he kept sending ships down the west coast of Africa. Cape Bojador was feared as the point where the sea was said to boil; when the sailor Gil Eanes rounded it in 1434 the psychological wall broke, and the exploration went south one cape at a time.

2 One cape at a time — the road to India

India had been the destination from the start: to reach the spices — pepper, cinnamon, cloves — without paying Venice or the Arab traders. In 1488 Bartolomeu Dias rounded the southern tip of Africa, later named the Cape of Good Hope, and the door to the Indian Ocean stood open. In 1497 Vasco da Gama sailed from the beach at Belém in Lisbon, and reached Calicut in May of the following year.

How much that route was worth is legible today in the scale of the buildings at Belém. Jerónimos Monastery was paid for out of the spice trade, and ship ropes and sea creatures are carved into its stonework. Gama himself is buried inside it.

3 The year everything moved at once — 1492

Five years before Gama sailed, three things happened in neighboring Spain in a single year: the fall of Granada, the last Muslim kingdom in Iberia; the edict expelling the Jews; and the departure of Columbus. Columbus had first tried to sell the king of Portugal on sailing west to India and been turned down. Spain took the bet, and a route opened to another continent across the Atlantic — which he went on believing was India.

Two years later, in 1494, Spain and Portugal used the Treaty of Tordesillas to divide the globe along a meridian in the Atlantic. Land found west of the line was Spanish, east of it Portuguese. That line, drawn without asking anyone who lived on the other side of the world, is the distant reason Brazil speaks Portuguese and the Philippines became Spanish. And at the far eastern end of the line lay Japan.

4 At the eastern end of the line lay Japan

Working eastward through Goa in India and Malacca on the Malay Peninsula, Portuguese sailors were blown onto the island of Tanegashima in 1543. The firearms they were carrying changed warfare in a Japan then at war with itself, and six years later Francis Xavier of the Jesuits landed at Kagoshima. Guns came first; Christianity and Portuguese sweets followed on the same route. Several Japanese words for those sweets are Portuguese: castella, konpeitō from confeito, and tempura.

Macau, where the Portuguese were permitted to settle around 1557, was the hinge of that Japan trade. A regular run between Macau and Nagasaki carried Japanese silver and Chinese raw silk, at enormous profit. When Japan turned against Christianity, exiled Japanese Christians took refuge in Macau. The carved facade of St. Paul’s still shows a chrysanthemum motif that Japanese craftsmen are thought to have worked on.

5 The other way round: crossing the Pacific

Spain reached Asia going the other way. When Legazpi founded Manila in 1571, galleons began to run between Acapulco in Mexico and Manila. Mexican silver was exchanged in Manila for Chinese silk and porcelain: the moment a trading network first closed a circle around the world. In the walled city of Intramuros there was also a Japanese quarter, and the exiled Christian lord Takayama Ukon died there.

6 The lead changes hands

In the seventeenth century the lead moved north from Iberia. The Dutch East India Company, founded in 1602, raised money widely through shares — a new mechanism — then sent out fleets and took Portuguese posts one after another. In Japan, the Dutch became the only European partner permitted to trade under seclusion. Portuguese ships were barred in 1639, and the Dutch factory moved to Dejima in Nagasaki in 1641.

The traces left behind turn up in unexpected places. Essaouira, on the Atlantic coast of Morocco, is where a later sultan had a port town laid out on a site the Portuguese had fortified in 1506 and abandoned within a few years. From the gun platforms on its walls you look out on the Atlantic the Portuguese ships sailed down.

7 The empires left, and the taste stayed

Textbooks end the Age of Discovery with treaties and sea battles. But the surest trace you can meet while traveling may be food. The secret pastry of Jerónimos Monastery, built on spice money, passed to the shop next door when the monastery was dissolved in the nineteenth century, and the queue is still there. In Macau at the end of the twentieth century an Englishman remade that Portuguese pastry and sent it across Asia. The malasadas of Hawaii were left by Portuguese migrants who crossed to the sugar plantations in the nineteenth century.

Standing on the ground of this story

For the point of departure, Belém in Lisbon; for the eastern hinge, Macau; for the Pacific side, Manila. To walk the country as a whole, start from the Portugal travel guide. Other eras and other stories are in the history section, where the table pairs events with what you can still visit.

Sources for dates and names are behind the “Source” link on each event card.