paragraph_text: In Asia, the spread of Buddhism led to large-scale ongoing translation efforts spanning well over a thousand years. The Tangut Empire was especially efficient in such efforts; exploiting the then newly invented block printing, and with the full support of the government (contemporary sources describe the Emperor and his mother personally contributing to the translation effort, alongside sages of various nationalities), the Tanguts took mere decades to translate volumes that had taken the Chinese centuries to render.[citation needed]

paragraph_text: The plague struck various countries in the Middle East during the pandemic, leading to serious depopulation and permanent change in both economic and social structures. As it spread to western Europe, the disease entered the region from southern Russia also. By autumn 1347, the plague reached Alexandria in Egypt, probably through the port's trade with Constantinople, and ports on the Black Sea. During 1347, the disease travelled eastward to Gaza, and north along the eastern coast to cities in Lebanon, Syria and Palestine, including Ashkelon, Acre, Jerusalem, Sidon, Damascus, Homs, and Aleppo. In 1348–49, the disease reached Antioch. The city's residents fled to the north, most of them dying during the journey, but the infection had been spread to the people of Asia Minor.[citation needed]

paragraph_text: The Battle of Vescera (modern Biskra in Algeria) was fought in 682 or 683 between the Berbers of king Caecilius and their Byzantine allies from the Exarchate of Carthage against an Umayyad Arab army under Uqba ibn Nafi (the founder of Kairouan). Uqba ibn Nafi had led his men in an expedition across north Africa, eventually reaching the Atlantic Ocean and marching as far south as the Draa and Sous rivers. On his return, he was ambushed by the Berber-Byzantine coalition at Tehouda (Thabudeos) south Vescera, defeated and killed. As a result of this crushing defeat, the Arabs were expelled from the area of modern Tunisia for a decade.

paragraph_text: Vasco da Gama's father was Estêvão da Gama, who had served in the 1460s as a knight of the household of Infante Ferdinand, Duke of Viseu. He rose in the ranks of the military Order of Santiago. Estêvão da Gama was appointed "alcaide-mór" (civil governor) of Sines in the 1460s, a post he held until 1478; after that he continued as a receiver of taxes and holder of the Order's commendas in the region.

paragraph_text: The Portuguese Vasco da Gama, accompanied by Nicolau Coelho and Bartolomeu Dias, is the first European to reach India by an all - sea route from Europe.

paragraph_text: Portuguese discoveries (Portuguese: Descobrimentos portugueses) are the numerous territories and maritime routes discovered by the Portuguese as a result of their intensive maritime exploration during the 15th and 16th centuries. Portuguese sailors were at the vanguard of European overseas exploration, discovering and mapping the coasts of Africa, Canada, Asia and Brazil, in what became known as the Age of Discovery. Methodical expeditions started in 1419 along West Africa's coast under the sponsorship of prince Henry the Navigator, with Bartolomeu Dias reaching the Cape of Good Hope and entering the Indian Ocean in 1488. Ten years later, in 1498, Vasco da Gama led the first fleet around Africa to India, arriving in Calicut and starting a maritime route from Portugal to India. Portuguese explorations then proceeded to southeast Asia, where they reached Japan in 1542, forty - four years after their first arrival in India. In 1500, the Portuguese nobleman Pedro Álvares Cabral became the first European to discover Brazil.

paragraph_text: European colonization began in 1492, when a Spanish expedition headed by the Genoese explorer Christopher Columbus sailed west to find a new trade route to the Far East but inadvertently landed in what came to be known to Europeans as the ``New World ''. Running aground on the northern part of Hispaniola on 5 December 1492, which the Taino people had inhabited since the 7th century, the site became the first European settlement in the Americas. European conquest, large - scale exploration and colonization soon followed. Columbus's first two voyages (1492 -- 93) reached the Bahamas and various Caribbean islands, including Hispaniola, Puerto Rico and Cuba. In 1498, sailing from Bristol on behalf of England, John Cabot landed on the North American coast, and a year later, Columbus's third voyage reached the South American coast. As the sponsor of Christopher Columbus's voyages, Spain was the first European power to settle and colonize the largest areas, from North America and the Caribbean to the southern tip of South America.

paragraph_text: In the 2nd century CE, Mahayana Sutras spread to China, and then to Korea and Japan, and were translated into Chinese. During the Indian period of Esoteric Buddhism (from the 8th century onwards), Buddhism spread from India to Tibet and Mongolia.

paragraph_text: The Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (Russian SFSR or RSFSR; Russian: Российская Советская Федеративная Социалистическая Республика, tr. Rossiyskaya Sovetskaya Federativnaya Sotsialisticheskaya Respublika  listen (help·info)) commonly referred to as Soviet Russia or simply as Russia, was a sovereign state in 1917–22, the largest, most populous, and most economically developed republic of the Soviet Union in 1922–91 and a sovereign part of the Soviet Union with its own legislation in 1990–91. The Republic comprised sixteen autonomous republics, five autonomous oblasts, ten autonomous okrugs, six krais, and forty oblasts. Russians formed the largest ethnic group. To the west it bordered Finland, Norway and Poland; and to the south, China, Mongolia and North Korea whilst bordering the Arctic Ocean to the north, the Pacific Ocean to the east and the Black sea and Caspian Sea to the south. Within the USSR, it bordered the Baltic republics (Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia), the Byelorussian SSR and the Ukrainian SSR to the west. To the south it bordered the Georgian, Azerbaijan and Kazakh SSRs.

paragraph_text: The Kon - Tiki expedition was funded by private loans, along with donations of equipment from the United States Army. Heyerdahl and a small team went to Peru, where, with the help of dockyard facilities provided by the Peruvian authorities, they constructed the raft out of balsa logs and other native materials in an indigenous style as recorded in illustrations by Spanish conquistadores. The trip began on April 28, 1947. Heyerdahl and five companions sailed the raft for 101 days over 6,900 km (4,300 miles) across the Pacific Ocean before smashing into a reef at Raroia in the Tuamotus on August 7, 1947. The crew made successful landfall and all returned safely.

paragraph_text: Rodrigo de Jerez was one of the Spanish crewmen who sailed to the Americas on the Santa Maria as part of Christopher Columbus's first voyage across the Atlantic Ocean in 1492. He is credited with being the first European smoker.

paragraph_text: Pennell Coast is that portion of the coast of Antarctica between Cape Williams and Cape Adare. To the west of Cape Williams lies Oates Coast, and to the east and south of Cape Adare lies Borchgrevink Coast. Named by New Zealand Antarctic Place-Names Committee (NZ-APC) in 1961 after Lieutenant Harry Pennell, Royal Navy, commander of the Terra Nova, the expedition ship of the British Antarctic Expedition, 1910-13. Pennell engaged in oceanographic work in the Ross Sea during this period. In February 1911 he sailed along this coast in exploration and an endeavor to land the Northern Party led by Lieutenant Victor Campbell.

paragraph_text: Explorers flying the flag of Spain reached the New World beginning in 1492 with the discovery of America by Christopher Columbus. Spanish expeditions colonized and explored vast areas in North and South America following the grants of the Pope (contained in the 1493 papal bull Inter caetera) and rights contained in the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas and 1529 Treaty of Zaragoza. These formal acts gave Spain the exclusive rights to colonize the entire Western Hemisphere (excluding eastern Brazil), including all of the west coast of North America. The first European expedition to actually reach the west coast was led by the Spaniard Vasco Núñez de Balboa, who reached the Pacific coast of Panama in 1513. In an act of enduring historical importance, Balboa claimed the Pacific Ocean for the Spanish Crown, as well as all adjoining land and islands. This act gave Spain exclusive sovereignty and navigation rights over the entire west coast of North America.

paragraph_text: Soon after the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, London merchants presented a petition to Queen Elizabeth I for permission to sail to the Indian Ocean. The permission was granted, and despite the defeat of the English Armada in 1589, on 10 April 1591 three ships sailed from Torbay around the Cape of Good Hope to the Arabian Sea on one of the earliest English overseas Indian expeditions. One of them, Edward Bonventure, then sailed around Cape Comorin and on to the Malay Peninsula and subsequently returned to England in 1594.

paragraph_text: Vasco da Gama, 1st Count of Vidigueira (Portuguese pronunciation: (ˈvaʃku ðɐ ˈɣɐmɐ); c. 1460s -- 24 December 1524), was a Portuguese explorer and the first European to reach India by sea. His initial voyage to India (1497 -- 1499) was the first to link Europe and Asia by an ocean route, connecting the Atlantic and the Indian oceans and therefore, the West and the Orient.

paragraph_text: The Esmeraldas River is a 210 kilometers (130 miles) river in northwestern Ecuador that flows into the Pacific Ocean at the city of Esmeraldas. Among its tributaries is the Guayllabamba River which drains Quito. Charles Marie de la Condamine sailed up it and then climbed the Andes Mountains when on the Ecuadorian Expedition that left France in May 1735.

paragraph_text: The first single voyage of global circumnavigation was that of the ship Victoria, between 1519 and 1522, known as the Magellan -- Elcano expedition. It was a Castilian (Spanish) voyage of discovery, led initially by Ferdinand Magellan between 1519 and 1521, and then by the Basque Juan Sebastián Elcano from 1521 to 1522. The voyage started in Seville, crossed the Atlantic Ocean, and after several stopovers rounded the southern tip of South America where the expedition discovered the Strait of Magellan, named after the fleet's captain. It then continued across the Pacific discovering a number of islands on its way, including Guam before arriving in the Philippines. After Magellan's death in the Philippines in 1521, Elcano took command of the expedition and continued the journey across the Indian Ocean, round the Cape of Good Hope, north along the Atlantic Ocean, and back to Spain in 1522. Elcano and a small group of 18 men were actually the only members of the expedition to make the full circumnavigation.

paragraph_text: The voyage was commissioned by King George III and commanded by Lieutenant James Cook, a junior naval officer with good skills in cartography and mathematics. Departing from Plymouth - Dock (Devonport) in August 1768, the expedition crossed the Atlantic, rounded Cape Horn and reached Tahiti in time to observe the transit of Venus. Cook then set sail into the largely uncharted ocean to the south, stopping at the Pacific islands of Huahine, Borabora and Raiatea to claim them for Great Britain, and unsuccessfully attempting to land at Rurutu. In September 1769 the expedition reached New Zealand, being the second Europeans to visit there, following the first European discovery by Abel Tasman 127 years earlier. Cook and his crew spent the following six months charting the New Zealand coast, before resuming their voyage westward across open sea. In April 1770 they became the first Europeans to reach the east coast of Australia, making landfall at Point Hicks, and then proceeding to Botany Bay.

paragraph_text: The first expedition to reach the geographic South Pole was led by the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen. He and four others arrived at the pole on 14 December 1911, five weeks ahead of a British party led by Robert Falcon Scott as part of the Terra Nova Expedition. Amundsen and his team returned safely to their base, and later learned that Scott and his four companions had died on their return journey.

paragraph_text: Sometime during the joint reign of Ergica and Wittiza, a Byzantine fleet raided the coasts of southern Hispania and was driven off by Theudimer. The dating of this event is disputed: it may have occurred as part of Leontios' expedition to relieve Carthage in 697, perhaps later, around 702, or perhaps late in Wittiza's reign. A plague broke out at Constantinople in 698 and it spread westward across the Mediterranean reaching Hispania in 701. It was severe enough to force the two kings from their capital of Toledo and it might be that this was the period when Wittiza was sent by his father to rule in Tui in Gallaecia over the "regnum Suevorum", an event recorded by the "Chronicle of Alfonso III". Although often dismissed by scholars, there is numismatic evidence that suggests Wittiza's subkingdom was a reality.

Question: Who was the father of the person who led the first expedition to reach the continent Buddhism spread by sailing west across the ocean along eastern Russia?
Answer: Estêvão da Gama