It’s not clear why U.S. histories include people like Dias or Da Gama, who never got here, but clearly we are supposed to revere them. Instead, teachers need to get students to ask a crucial question: what did these men do after they arrived? Often this means looking at their second voyages.

On Da Gama’s second trip, he anchored off Calicut (Kozhikode), a city in southwestern India. He determined to stop the Muslim dominance of Europe’s trade with India. He demanded that the leaders of Calicut cut off their Arab trading partners, who practiced the “wrong” religion, and henceforth trade only with the Portuguese. Having had centuries of good relations with the Arabs, Calicut refused. So Da Gama shelled them broadside. They were defenseless to reply. Then he withdrew to let them think it over.

Into this situation, unknowingly, sailed a flotilla of eighteen Arab trading ships. A Portuguese historian tells what happened next:

[Da Gama] ordered the boats to go and plunder the small vessels, which were sixteen, and the two ships, in which they found rice and many jars of butter, and many bales of stuffs…. Then [he] commanded them to cut off the hands and ears and noses of all the crews, and put all that onto one of the small vessels…. He ordered their feet to be tied together, as they had no hands with which to untie them; and in order that they should not untie them with their teeth, he ordered them to strike upon their teeth with staves, and they knocked them down their throats; and they were thus put on board, heaped up upon the top of each other, mixed up with the blood which streamed from them; and he ordered mats and dry leaves to be spread over them, and the sails to be set for shore, and the vessel set on fire; and there were more than 800 Moors; and the small vessel … with all the hands and ears, was also sent on shore under sail, without being fired. These vessels went at once on shore, where many people flocked together to put out the fire and draw out those whom they found alive, upon which they made great lamentations.