Content area
Full Text
In 1482, the Portuguese navigator Diego Cao set sail from Lisbon harbor in search of a passage to the Indies. In a three-masted caravel, Cao traveled in a broad arc past the Canary, Savage, Madeira and Cape Verde Islands; rounded Cape St. Vincent and Cape Nao in the Maghreb; suffered his sailors' puns-"He who reaches Cape Nao will return or nao (not)"; revictualed at Arguin, a slave entrepot above the Senegal River, at Fort Mina, an armed post flush with gold dust from the trans-Saharan trade, and at Cape Santa Catarina below Africa's bulge, until then the outer limit of the known world. Then, trimming his lateen sails to navigate against the prevailing headwinds, he sailed into the Southern Hemisphere, in whose unfamiliar skies neither his astrolabe nor his almanacs availed him further. Soon he came to the effluence of a river whose discharge sent sweet red water and clumps of grass and bamboo for miles into the Atlantic, so he named it the Powerful River, or Rio Poderoso. Thinking it might lead him to the fabled realm of Prester John, he coasted into its mouth on an afternoon breeze. Crocodiles and hippopotamuses lay stunned by heat on banks of brilliant orchids. Flocks of parrots chattered at sunset from tangles of mangrove. Eagles wheeled overhead.
Like crabs crawling along a coastline, the Portuguese had been exploring the African littoral and the Atlantic islands for decades before Cao reached the Kingdom of Kongo. The Canaries were mentioned by the intrepid Roman geographer Pliny, who called them the "Fortunate Isles," and died observing the eruption of Vesuvius in A.D. 79. The Canaries lingered in the European imagination, "patches of twilight in the Sea of Darkness," but it wasn't until 1339 that they were rediscovered and settled by the Portuguese. Thereafter, the pace of exploration quickened. In 1415, Prince Henry the Navigator, spurred on by his astrologer, skimmed the profits from his Lusophone soap monopoly, equipped an expedition, and seized the town of Ceuta, opposite Gibraltar. In 1419, a Genoan captain in the pay of Prince Henry struck Madeira. Settlers named the first children born there Adam and Eve. The Azores and the Cape Verdes were discovered in mid-century as navigators inched down Africa's bulge. Everywhere they went,...