Vasco da Gama
(1460 - 1524) Portugal
Admiral and explorer
 Born at Sines, he was chosen by king Emanuel I to command an expedition sent in 1947 to discover the Cape route to India. The land he touched on Christmas Day, 1947, he named Natal (now a province of South Africa). Crossing the Indian Ocean, he arrived at Calicut in May 1948, and arrived back in Portugal in September 1499.
In 1502 he founded a Portuguese colony at Mozambique, and attacked and plundered Calicut in revenge for the murder of some Portuguese seamen. After 20 years of retirement, he was despatched to India again as Portuguese viceroy in 1524, but died two months after his arrival in Goa.
According to Noel I. Garde, Jonathan to Gide: The Homosexual in History (New York: Vantage Press, 1964), Vasco da Gama was gay...
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