Diary of Vasco da Gama's First Voyage to India (1497–1499)

The Diary of Vasco da Gama’s first voyage to India, more correctly known as the Account of Vasco da Gama’s first voyage to India (1497–1499), is the only direct narrative, written by an eyewitness, of the voyage that opened the sea route between Europe and Asia. Preserved in a single copy — the codex MS-804 of the Porto Municipal Public Library — it was inscribed on UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register on 19 June 2013, in recognition of its documentary value for the history of humankind.

An eyewitness account

The fleet of four ships set sail from Lisbon on 8 July 1497 under the command of Vasco da Gama. After rounding the Cape of Good Hope on 22 November, it reached Calicut, on the Malabar coast, on 20 May 1498, fulfilling a project Portugal had pursued over nearly a century of Atlantic navigation. The return, however, was gruelling: the crossing of the Indian Ocean was made in adverse conditions, and scurvy decimated much of the crews, with only two of the ships returning to the kingdom.

The Account narrates this undertaking day by day, in a vivid and direct sixteenth-century Portuguese, attentive both to navigation and to the peoples, ports and goods encountered. It is this quality of immediate testimony that gives the text a place apart among the sources of the Age of Discovery, distinct from the later chronicles written by authors who did not take part in the events.

Unlike the great royal chronicles, composed with distance and a celebratory purpose, the Account speaks in the first person plural — “we went”, “we saw”, “we anchored” — and it is this collective voice of the seafaring folk that makes it a singular document.

Authorship and the manuscript’s journey

The text is anonymous. Scholarly tradition attributes it to Álvaro Velho, a native of Barreiro, although other researchers point to João de Sá, scrivener of the fleet. The copy that has come down to us is not the original — which is lost — but a contemporary, incomplete copy from the early sixteenth century, comprising about 45 leaves of common paper in folio format.

The codex belonged to the holdings of the Monastery of Santa Cruz in Coimbra, where it lay overlooked until the dissolution of the religious orders in 1834. It was then transferred to the Porto Municipal Public Library, in Porto, the institution that holds it to this day. The first printed edition appeared in Porto in 1838, by Diogo Kopke and António da Costa Paiva, making known to the public a text whose importance would only be fully measured much later.

Significance and recognition

The inscription on the Memory of the World Register places the Account alongside other founding documents of Portuguese expansion, such as the Letter of Pero Vaz de Caminha, announcing the discovery of Brazil, and the Treaty of Tordesillas, which divided the worlds yet to be discovered between the two Iberian crowns. Together, these documentary testimonies constitute an archive of global reach, for they record events that, in UNESCO’s own words, set in motion “a series of events that would transform the world”.

For Portugal, the Account is at once a historical source of the first order and a monument of the language, fixing, at a decisive moment, the concrete experience of those who made the voyage.