PRELUDE TO MY RESPONSE TO YOGESH MARATHE by N. Fernandes, London

I sincerely hope that some of the excerpts I am copying and pasting here will help Yogesh Marathe.   It is my understanding of History. It can be denied...but it cannot be re-written completely.  What the Portuguese did 450 years or 4 Centuries ago, and what the Indians never did, 4 centuries ago cannot be used as an excuse for current day problems.

History and Modernity cannot always live side by side in harmony. Democracy is part of the "NEW WORLD ORDER". History is what led to it. Democracy does exist in Goa...but who is it for?

We are not sure whether it is the Indians who wanted Goa, or, Goa who wanted the Indians. Regardless the debate will continue. From a "World perspective".....Indians have ruined Goa. It is what many Indians themselves think....except the fanatics. Goa for many Indians is no longer a Romantic notion.

Note:**** This is a prelude to my reply to Yogesh Marathe.

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Under the hegemony over Asia of the Mongol Empire (the so-called Pax Mongolica, or Mongol peace) Europeans had long enjoyed a safe land passage, the so-called "Silk Road", to China and India, which were sources of valuable goods such as silk, spices, and opiates. With the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, the land route to Asia became much more difficult and dangerous. Portuguese navigators, under the leadership of King John II, sought to reach Asia by sailing around Africa. Major progress in this quest was achieved in 1488, when Bartolomeu Dias reached the Cape of Good Hope, in what is now South Africa. Meanwhile, in the 1480s the Columbus brothers had developed a different plan to reach the Indies (then construed roughly as all of south and east Asia) by sailing west across the "Ocean Sea", i.e., the Atlantic.

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Where Columbus did differ from the view accepted by scholars in his day was in his estimate of the westward distance from Europe to Asia. Columbus's ideas in this regard were based on three factors: his low estimate of the size of the Earth, his high estimate of the size of the Eurasian landmass, and his belief that Japan and other inhabited islands lay far to the east of the coast of China. In all three of these issues Columbus was both wrong and at odds with the scholarly consensus of his day.

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It is unclear whether Columbus learned about the winds from his own sailing experience or if he had heard about it from others. The corresponding technique for efficient travel in the Atlantic appears to have been discovered first by the Portuguese, who referred to it as the Volta do Mar ("turn of the sea"). Columbus's knowledge of the Atlantic wind patterns was, however, imperfect at the time of his first voyage. By sailing directly due west from the Canary Islands during hurricane season, skirting the so-called horse latitudes of the mid-Atlantic, Columbus risked either being becalmed or running into a tropical cyclone, both of which he luckily avoided.[26]

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In 1485, Columbus presented his plans to John II, King of Portugal. He proposed the king equip three sturdy ships and grant Columbus one year's time to sail out into the Atlantic, search for a western route to the Orient, and return.

Columbus and Queen Isabella. Detail of the Columbus monument in Madrid (1885).Columbus also requested he be made "Great Admiral of the Ocean", appointed governor of any and all lands he discovered, and given one-tenth of all revenue from those lands. The king submitted the proposal to his experts, who rejected it. It was their considered opinion that Columbus's estimation of a travel distance of 2,400 miles (3,860 km) was, in fact, far too short.[26]

In 1488 Columbus appealed to the court of Portugal once again, and once again John invited him to an audience. It also proved unsuccessful, in part because not long afterwards Bartholomeu Dias returned to Portugal following a successful rounding of the southern tip of Africa. Now that it looked like Portugal could soon have the eastern sea route to Asia under its control, King John was no longer interested in Columbus's project.

Between 1492 and 1503, Columbus completed four round-trip voyages between Spain and the Americas, all of them under the sponsorship of the Crown of Castile. These voyages marked the beginning of the European exploration and colonization of the American continents, and are thus of enormous significance in Western history. Columbus himself always insisted, in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary, that the lands that he visited during those voyages were part of the Asian continent, as previously described by Marco Polo and other European travelers.[13] Columbus's refusal to accept that the lands he had visited and claimed for Spain were not part of Asia might explain, in part, why the American continent was named after the Florentine explorer Amerigo Vespucci and not after Columbus.[34]