Indian Ocean: Did you mean...?

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...

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...

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...

Clove, nutmeg, and mace are native to only a handful of tiny islands in the middle of the vast Indonesian archipelago – cloves on five Maluku Islands (the Moluccas) about 1250 km (778 mi) west of New Guinea, and nutmeg on the ten Banda Islands...

The Kon-Tiki expedition of 1947, led by the Norwegian Thor Heyerdahl (1914-2002), successfully crossed 8,000 km (5,000 miles) of the Pacific Ocean from Peru to the Tuamotu Islands on a balsa-wood raft. The aim of the expedition was to demonstrate...

This relief depicts an ancient Indian ship likely to have been used by Indian adventurers sailing to Java, Indonesia. Location: Borobudur temple, Magelang, Central Java, Indonesia

This Ajanta mural depicts an ancient Indian ship with high stem and stern and three oblong sails attached to three masts. Steering-oars can also be seen. Location: Cave No. 2, Ajanta Caves, Aurangabad District, Maharashtra state, India

The 13 April 1919 Jallianwala Bagh Massacre (aka Amritsar Massacre) was an infamous episode of brutality which saw General Dyer order his troops to open fire on an unarmed crowd of men, women, and children trapped in an abandoned walled garden...