Kozhikode

That was Portugal's massive gamble.

In 1498, Vasco da Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope and dropped anchor off the coast of Calicut, India.

And I absolutely love the bluntness of his crew member.

When the local authorities in India asked what these weird European sailors wanted, the crew members simply said, "Christians and spices."

I am your host, Josh Linsk.

This show is part of History Podcasts, where you can discover more podcasts at historypodcasts.com. Today, we'll follow a silent W from Old English, track calico's journey from Calicut to our wardrobe, and see how the Hundred Years' War stitched a national identity into English spelling.

Let's dive in.

Let's start with a word that almost everyone says but never thinks about the letter inside it, two.

Why does the W stay when we never pronounce it? After our chat on silent letters, let me shift gears to something equally old and oddly still alive, the word calico.

It's not just a color pattern.

It's a textile that traces its roots straight back to Calicut in India.

And what makes it fascinating is how a city name turned into a global material.

Thus the Portuguese were left free to continue their own special work round the coast of Africa.

Vasco da Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1497, and having sailed by way of Mozambique and Mombasa, on May 20th, 1498, anchored in the Bay of Calicut on the Malabar coast of India, thus being the first to find an oversea route from Europe to India.

The Portuguese were not welcomed by the Arabs, who were at that time masters of all the eastern trade, and had one of their chief emporiums at Calicut, and future Portuguese expeditions met with much opposition from these traders.

Da Gama himself, after suffering imprisonment and almost assassination at the hands of the Moslem ruler of Calicut, returned home in 1499, taking with him rubies and other precious stones, pepper, ginger, cinnamon, cloves, and nutmegs, as well as much information about India, Malacca, and the East Indies.

His successor, Alfonso de Albuquerque, 1509-15, took Goa, Malacca, and Ormuz from the Arabs.

By 1514 the whole of the trade from India to Persia and through Mesopotamia to Syria was in the hands of the Portuguese, and the goods from the East were now sent to the West by way of the Cape.

They surrounded Africa, crossed the Indian Ocean, and after 23 days in the sea, they divided land, the mountains of India.

They arrived in Calicut on May 20, 1498.

When Daghama reached India, he had achieved something that people had been trying to do for years.

Había abierto una ruta marítima que permitiría a Portugal dominar el comercio del Océano Índico durante los siguientes 150 años.

Portuguese tried that, but they failed.

And Calicut was the only place where it stood against, it did not surrender to the Portuguese.

And that's why they went to Goa.

How did all this happen? Because the unity of people.