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Secondary sourcePaintingcirca 1880

Vasco da Gama's Ship

Ernesto Casanova · circa 1880

A watercolour by Ernesto Casanova, made about 1880, showing a large sailing ship bearing Gama's name in the image of his voyage. It was painted long after the voyage.

Shows Gama's ship as imagined by a painter about four centuries after the voyage, showing how the explorer's story was later pictured.

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Watercolor painting of a large sailing ship with billowing sails marked with red crosses, on choppy green sea under a stormy, yellowish sky. Two smaller ships are at left. A nude female figure floats in clouds at upper left, and robed figures sit above.
Ernesto Casanova, Vasco da Gama's ship, c. 1880. Wikimedia Commons.

About this source

What it is

This is a watercolour painting by Ernesto Casanova, dated to about 1880. It shows a large sailing ship with billowing sails marked with red crosses, on a choppy green sea under a stormy sky. Two smaller ships are at left. A nude female figure floats in clouds at upper left, with robed figures seated above. The image is titled as Vasco da Gama's ship.

Why it matters

Casanova painted this scene nearly four centuries after Gama sailed. Images like this helped shape how the public pictured the Portuguese voyages to India. The painting says more about nineteenth-century ideas of exploration than about the ship's real appearance.

Look closer

  • What details of the ship, such as the sails and crosses, does the painter emphasise?
  • Why might a painter add figures in the clouds to a picture of a voyage?
  • What would a sailor who was on Gama's ship have seen that this painting does not show?

This painting is part of the curated material that grounds the AI version of Vasco da Gama on Humy.ai — when students ask about related events, the AI can quote it and cite it.

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Vasco da Gama, Livro de Lisuarte de Abreu

Livro de Lisuarte de Abreu (compiler unknown) · c. 1565

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Signature of Vasco da Gama

Vasco da Gama

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Vasco da Gama Pillar

1498 or 1499

Hand-painted portolan-style world map on parchment showing the Atlantic, Africa, and parts of Asia and the Americas, with compass roses, rhumb lines, colored flags, and Latin and Portuguese place labels.Document

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Cantino Planisphere

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