Indian Ocean: Did you mean...?

The life and career of George Washington (1732-1799) were largely impacted by the French and Indian War (1754-1763). An officer of the Virginia Regiment, Washington's actions at the Battle of Fort Necessity and the Braddock Expedition helped...

Henry Every (b. 1653), also known as Henry Avery, Benjamin Bridgeman, ‘Long Ben’ and (incorrectly) John Avery, was one of the most savage and successful pirates in the Golden Age of Piracy. Capturing a treasure ship of the Mughal emperor...

Ferdinand Magellan, or Fernão de Magalhães (c. 1480-1521), was a Portuguese mariner whose expedition was the first to circumnavigate the globe in 1519-22 in the service of Spain. Magellan was killed on the voyage in what is today the Philippines...

The Greek poet Hesiod (c. 700 BCE) is most famous for his works Theogony and Works and Days. In this passage from Theogony, Hesiod relates the birth of the gods from cosmic Chaos and follows the lineage through the great Zeus, King of the...

Vasco da Gama (c. 1469-1524) was a Portuguese navigator who, in 1497-9, sailed around the Cape of Good Hope in southern Africa and arrived at Calicut (now Kozhikode) on the south-west coast of India. This was the first direct voyage from...

Myra is an ancient town in Lycia. The city has two necropoli of Lycian rock-cut tombs in the form of temple fronts carved into the vertical faces of cliffs at Myra: the river necropolis and the ocean necropolis. The ocean necropolis is...

Goa, located on the west coast of India, was a Portuguese colony from 1510 to 1961. The small coastal area was conquered by Afonso de Albuquerque (c. 1453-1515) and became an important trade hub for the Eastern spice trade. Goa was the capital...

Conquering the Ocean: The Roman Invasion of Britain by Richard Hingley

The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea is an eyewitness account of ancient travel to Africa and India via the Red Sea written by an unknown Greek-speaking Egyptian author in the 1st century CE. In this detailed account, the conditions of the...

The Estado da India (1505-1961) was the name the Portuguese gave to that part of their empire which stretched from India to East Asia. However, in its widest sense, the name includes all Portuguese colonies east of the Cape of Good Hope and...