European-Asian sailing route

The European-Asian sea route, also known as the sea route to India or the Cape Route is a shipping route from European coast of the Atlantic Ocean to Asia's coast of the Indian Ocean passing by the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Agulhas at the southern edge of Africa. The first recorded completion of the route was made in 1498 by Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama. The route was important during the Age of Sail, but became partly obsolete as the Suez Canal opened in 1869.

Scholars of classical antiquity disagreed whether the Atlantic was connected to the Indian Ocean. There are anecdotes about circumnavigation of Africa in ancient times; according to Herodotus, a Phoenician expedition commissioned by Egyptian king Necho II completed a voyage from the Red Sea to the Nile delta around 600 BC. Eudoxus of Cyzicus explored the West African coast, but was forced to return. Ptolemy's world map, on which the geographic knowledge of medieval Europe was founded, displays the oceans as separated from each other.

In the late Middle Ages, the spice trade from India and the Silk Road from China were of economic importance, but the 1453 fall of Constantinople disrupted trade, and gave the Europeans incentives to find a sea route. Portuguese explorer Diogo Cão explored the African coast south to present-day Namibia, and Bartolomeu Dias found the Cape of Good hope in 1488. Vasco da Gama led an exhibition which led to the Portuguese discovery of the sea route to India in 1498, and a series of expeditions known as the Carreira da Índia. Since then, the Cape Route has been in use.

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