Cape Route
Vasco da Gama's passage around the Cape of Good Hope that linked Europe directly to Asia by sea from 1498.
Overview
Da Gama reached Calicut in 1498 with help from a pilot at Malindi, breaking the Venice and Mamluk controlled Red Sea axis and moving the pepper trade's gate to Lisbon. The route worked by wide Atlantic swings to catch favorable winds, and it made the Cape a mandatory watering stop, the reason Cape Colony existed. Dutch and English East Indiamen took over the lane in the 17th century. Suez absorbed it after 1869, but the Cape returned whenever canal economics failed, for supertankers in the 1970s and again for container ships avoiding Red Sea attacks in 2024.
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