Cape Verde Islands, A.D. 1446, and Azores, A.D. 1449.
Equator crossed, A.D. 1471.
From this commercial alliance the Portuguese derived large profits, while the crown received a considerable revenue from the ivory and gold the natives offered in abundance in exchange for trinkets and baubles of European manufacture. The greatest precautions were necessary to preserve in their own hands the valuable trade they had discovered, as other nations had indistinctly heard of the enormous profits the Portuguese were deriving from their commercial intercourse with some distant and hitherto unknown lands. They were, however, successful in keeping this secret for a good many years.[724]
John II. of Portugal.
First attempt to reach India by the Cape of Good Hope, A.D. 1487.
The reign of Dom John II.[725] was likewise conspicuous for the still wider extension of this spirit of maritime enterprise. Second only to Prince Henry, this monarch displayed the greatest anxiety to foster discoveries by sea. He had been taught to believe that, by coasting along the African continent, a passage to the East Indies might be discovered; and he not only equipped two small squadrons expressly for this purpose, but despatched two of his subjects into India and Abyssinia to find out the route to and between these vast regions, and to ascertain what advantages the trade of his country might derive from the knowledge thus acquired. These researches ultimately led to the discovery of the Cape of Good Hope, in 1487, by Bartholomew Dias. The rude winds and mountainous waves which assailed that now well-known promontory led Dias to call it the Cape of Storms; but the king, sanguine that beyond its rugged shores there would be found the rich lands of India, gave it the name it now bears. Dias ventured only a short distance beyond the promontory,[726] and ten years more elapsed before it was doubled by Vasco de Gama, another still more celebrated Portuguese navigator.
Ancient dread of the Atlantic.
While the Portuguese were striving to reach India by the eastern route, another navigator, greater than any the world had hitherto produced, was maturing his plans for endeavouring to reach that cherished land by a voyage to the West. Hitherto the Atlantic Ocean had been regarded with wonder and awe. It seemed to bound the then known world with an impenetrable chaos, a chaos into which the most daring adventurers had feared to penetrate. “No one,” says Edrisi, an Arabian writer, whose countrymen for many ages had been the boldest of navigators, “has been able to verify anything concerning it (the Atlantic Ocean), on account of its difficult and perilous navigation, its great obscurity, its profound depth, and frequent tempests; through fear of its mighty fishes and its haughty winds; yet there are many islands in it, some peopled, others uninhabited. There is no mariner who dares to enter into its deep waters; or if any have done so, they have merely kept along its coasts, fearful of departing from them. The waves of this ocean, although they roll as high as mountains, yet maintain themselves without breaking, for if they broke, it would be impossible for ship to plough them.”[727]
Christopher Columbus.
One man was, however, at last found bold enough to brave the dangers of the broad Atlantic and to force a passage across its troubled waters. Only a few years before Vasco de Gama started on his voyage of discovery in the East, a greater and better man had set sail to the West, in the hopes of thus reaching the fabled land of “Cathay.” Christopher Columbus, a Genoese, who had been trained from boyhood to the sea, had long cherished the idea that if he could only penetrate the mysterious waters of the Atlantic, he would find beyond them and at less distance than was then supposed, the shores of India, whence Europe had been so long supplied with its spices and numerous luxuries. From the translations of the works of Ptolemy, Pliny, and Strabo, then but recently made known, Columbus obtained all the knowledge the ancients possessed of geography, a knowledge which, though happily preserved, had lain buried amid the darkness and tumults of the Middle Ages, and had been only brought again to light on the revival of science and letters during the fifteenth century.