Gaspar da Gama

Origins and early life

Gaspar da Gama was born a Jew around 1444 — in Poznań, in Poland, according to the account he gave the Portuguese, though some sources say Alexandria — and reached India by the roads of the Jewish diaspora, through Palestine and Egypt, to become a trusted servant of the Muslim ruler of Goa; this fiche states plainly that he was a Jew by birth, forcibly baptized, and that his Hebrew name is unknown.

Work and career

When Vasco da Gama's ships anchored off Anjediva in 1498, on the first European voyage to India by sea, a bearded stranger came aboard speaking Venetian and claiming to be a Christian; suspected as a spy, he was seized, flogged and tortured until he admitted he was a Jew, and was carried back to Lisbon, where he was baptized with Vasco da Gama as his godfather and took his captor's name. King Manuel made him a knight and his adviser on the East, for he knew its languages, its coasts and its markets as no Portuguese did: he sailed with Pedro Álvares Cabral in 1500, was present when the fleet sighted Brazil and talked there with Amerigo Vespucci, who wrote of him with admiration — so that Gaspar is, by that chance, the first Jew known to have set foot in the Americas — and went on to Calicut and Cochin as the fleet's interpreter.

He returned to India with Vasco da Gama in 1502 and with the first viceroy, Francisco de Almeida, in 1505, advising on trade and diplomacy, and at Cochin he found and married a Jewish wife who refused, unlike him, to convert. He is last heard of around 1510, in Albuquerque's campaigns; the date of his death is unknown.