ABSTRACT
Though both the Mongols and Ming China (also Southern Sung China and the Arabs) projected power over long distances with sailing vessels, it was the Portuguese who really inaugurated the “Age of Sail,” with the explorations along the West African coast leading up to Vasco de Gama’s epic voyage to India, Albuquerque’s elaboration of a maritime empire in the Indian Ocean, and the extension of naval power to Taiwan and Japan, and also to Brazil.1 This new capacity for long-range power projection was much closer to a truly “global reach” than anything that had preceded it.
