Empire of the Winds Introduction

From Empire of the Winds: The Global Role of Asia’s Great Archipelago, by Philip Bowring (I.B. Tauris, 2018), Kindle pp. 27-29: In 1498 the crew of the ships of Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama became the first people known to sail between Europe and India, landing at Calicut on the south-west coast of India. By 1512, the long arm of Portuguese merchant adventurism had reached almost 5,000 kilometres further, to its ultimate eastern destination, the Banda archipelago, most distant of the fabled Spice Islands. But this historically crucial surge of European expansion was a minor navigational achievement compared with those of the maritime peoples whose lives the Portuguese were now disrupting. Some 1,500 years earlier sailors from this region had pioneered voyages which linked the Spice Islands to India and China and on to the coasts of Arabia and Africa. These were the pioneers who settled Madagascar, traded along the African coast and may well have sailed around the Cape of Good…