São Gabriel (ship)

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Arrival da Gamas in Calicut; Painting by Ernesto Casanova, ca.1880

The São Gabriel (male saint name after the archangel Gabriel ), a Nau built in 1496/97 , was the flagship of Vasco da Gama . With her he left the port of Restelo in Belém on July 8, 1497 to find an eastern route to India . The pilot (helmsman and navigator) was the then very famous Pêro de Alenquer .

On May 20, 1498, Vasco da Gama, coming from East Africa, reached Calicut on the Malabar Coast (also known as the Pepper Coast) in Kerala after 2,700 nautical miles in 27 days . The return trip to Malindi (now Kenya) took more than three months. After a sailing detour over the Azores on the way back to Portugal, the traces of the ship are lost there in history. Da Gama came to Lisbon without her on September 9, 1499 with a small amount of Indian spices .

  • Size: 21.3 m length, 7 m width, 2.7 m draft
  • Rigging : 3 masts, 2 of them with square sails and a ladiner on the mizzen ; a second square sail on the foremast
  • Crew: 60 men, the armament existed u. a. from 20 cannons
  • Load capacity: approx. 100 to

The ship has a length-to-width ratio of 2.5: 1 and, despite its long quarter deck, which reached into the center of the ship, looked very round. The triangular structure on the bow is also striking . The ship model of a “Catalan Nau” (around 1450) in the naval museum “Prins-Hendrik-Schiffahrtsmuseum” in Rotterdam is an important comparison for the development of this type of ship . In his opinion, the Santa Maria of his “Spanish” competitor Columbus was also a Nao in terms of ship type.

See also

literature

  • Lutz Bunk: 50 classic ships. Collection Gerstenberg visuell, ISBN 978-3-8067-2548-3 , pp. 74-77
  • Gernot Giertz (Ed.): Vasco da Gama. The discovery of the sea route to India; An eyewitness account from 1497–1499 . Thienemann, Stuttgart 2002, ISBN 3-522-61070-9
  • Fernand Salentiny: The Spice Route. The discovery of the sea route to Asia; Portugal's rise to become the first European sea and trading power . DuMont, Cologne 1991, ISBN 3-7701-2743-9

Web links