In 1498 the work of exploration begun by Diaz was completed by another famous navigator, Vasco da Gama. National hopes of wealth and glory were centred in his task, and when he and his company marched forth to their ships a large crowd went with them to the shore, carrying candles, and singing a solemn litany. Then the sails of his four vessels dipped below the horizon and were not seen for two years and eight months, but when at last men and women had begun to despair at the great silence, their hero reappeared amongst them, bringing news more wonderful and glorious than anything that Portugal had dared to hope. There is little space to tell in this chapter the adventures that Vasco da Gama related to the King and his court. He and his crews, it seemed, had sailed for weeks amid ‘a lonely dreary waste of seas and boundless sky’: they had skirmished with Hottentots and ‘doubled the Cape’, caught in such a whirl of breakers and stormy winds that the walls of the wooden ships had oozed water, and despair and sickness had seized upon all. Vasco da Gama, even when ill and depressed, was not to be turned from his purpose. Eastwards and northwards he set his sails, in the teeth of laments and threats from his sailors, and so on Christmas Day landed on a part of the coast to which in memory of the most famous _Dies Natalis_ he gave the name of Natal. From Natal, battling the dread disease of scurvy brought on by a prolonged diet of salt meat, the Portuguese commander pursued his way, attacked, as often as he landed for water and fresh food, by fierce Mahometan tribes, until at last, guided by an Arabian pilot whom he had picked up, he came to the harbours of Calicut in India, where was a Christian king. The new route to Asia had been discovered. ‘A lucky venture--plenty of emeralds.... You owe great thanks to God for having brought you to a country holding such riches,’ declared the natives, and loud was the rejoicing of the Portuguese at this glorious national prospect. The likely effects of Vasco da Gama’s voyage did not pass unnoticed elsewhere in Europe. ‘Soon,’ exclaimed a Venetian merchant in deep gloom, ‘it will be cheaper to buy goods in Lisbon than in Venice.’ The death-knell of the great Republic’s commercial prosperity sounded in these words. [Sidenote: Christopher Columbus]