Bartolomeu Dias

11 Key excerpts on "Bartolomeu Dias"

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  Maritime Exploration in the Age of Discovery, 1415-1800

  • Ronald S. Love(Author)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • Greenwood

    (Publisher)

  For two weeks the small squadron sailed out of sight of land—a frightening experience in unknown waters—until it picked up westerly winds and resumed its course in expectation of reaching the African coast. When, however, Dias discovered that he could approach the mainland only by sailing northward, he realized that he had rounded the continent’s southern end. Ahead lay the Indian Ocean and the wealth of Asia. The captain then traveled eastward for several hundred more miles, going ashore briefly at Mossel Bay and a few other spots, before his exhausted crew compelled him to begin the homeward voyage. The country had little appeal, in any case. The natives of the region, recounted Duarte Pacheco Pereira in about 1565, were a ‘‘heathen, bestial people, [who] wear skins and sandals of raw hide. . . . There is no trade here, but there are many cows, goats and sheep and there is plenty of fish.’’ 9 On his way back to Portugal, meanwhile, Dias sighted a large promontory he dubbed the Cape of Storms—an accurate description of maritime conditions in the area—but which King John II later renamed the Cape of Good Hope, in anticipation of finding a sea route to India. Dias’s voyage had opened a gateway to that goal, for ‘‘at this promontory,’’ continued Pereira, ‘‘Africa comes to an end in the [Atlantic] Ocean, and is divided from Asia.’’ 10 Of equal importance, the explorer had helped to improve upon navigational techniques for use in the south Atlantic. Earlier in the fifteenth century, Portuguese mariners had difficulty finding winds and currents that moved in the direction they wanted to go. In an age of sail, their vessels had to contend with both forces of nature, for even in a landlocked sea such as the Mediterranean it was almost impossible to travel directly from one port to another. These difficulties help to explain many of the navigational hazards and related fears the Portuguese had earlier 20 MARITIME EXPLORATION IN THE AGE OF DISCOVERY

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  Museum Times

  Changing Histories in South Africa

  • Leslie Witz(Author)
  • 2026(Publication Date)
  • Berghahn Books

    (Publisher)

  43 This is a world history of exploration and discovery where Portugal appears as innovator. Almost totally obliterated is its extensive participation in the Atlantic system of slavery. There is a brief mention in relation to Brazil: ‘From the middle of 16 th century onwards sugar produc- tion constituted the basis of the development of this territory, attracting thousands of settlers and traders, apart from African slaves, the majority of them acquired through the slave trade with Angola’. 44 The transactional violence of procurement through ‘the way of death’ 45 does not appear when Remaking a Museum of Eventless History 113 Portuguese ‘discovery’ becomes cast as a ‘meeting of civilizations’ on the whitewashed walls alongside the caravel in the Dias Museum. Bartolomeu Dias hardly features either. On the museum’s website he is proclaimed as ‘the master mariner after which the Mossel Bay Museum Complex is named’ and ‘the first explorer to set foot on South African soil here in Mossel Bay on 3 February 1488’. 46 In the museum itself there is extraordinarily little attempt to provide any sort of biographical rendition. There is a statue of him in the museum’s garden precinct donated by the Portuguese government and a brief allusion in the National Commission exhibition to his rounding the Cape of Good Hope in 1488. 47 A school- type information poster prepared for the 1988 festival by the insurance company Old Mutual, largely devoted to the journey in 1488 and the caravel, is affixed to a board and exhibited. Similarly, a much older-type display follows the route around Africa and appears to be a remnant of the local history museum in the town. In contrast Vasco da Gama appears much more throughout the Dias Museum, in elaborate dioramas and var- ious text/image displays. Some of these Da Gama exhibitions were later additions to the museum to coincide with the quincentenary of his voyage in 1997.

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  The Longest Voyage

  Circumnavigators in the Age of Discovery

  • Robert Silverberg(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Ohio University Press

    (Publisher)

  Freed of the burden of this war, Prince João was able to pursue an energetic expansionist policy when he came to the Portuguese throne as João II in 1481. He built Portuguese fortresses on the Guinea coast, sent ambassadors to Ethiopia to confer with Prester John, and revived Prince Henry’s practice of encouraging advances in the science and art of navigation. A pair of Jewish astronomers, Joseph Vizinho and Abraham Zacuto, calculated elaborate and extremely valuable tables for finding positions at sea; improvements were made in the design of caravels; new charts were drawn.

  Once again, for the first time in more than twenty years, expeditions went forth in caravels equipped only for exploration, not for trade. João II, not a patient man, wanted the sea route to India found swiftly, and he urged his captains southward eagerly and aggressively, reacting with poor grace when they returned to tell him that still more of Africa kept them from turning east. In 1483 Diogo Cão reached the mouth of the Congo, explored the river to some extent, and continued along the coast to 13°S. before turning back. King João knighted him and gave him a pension, but almost immediately sent him on a second voyage. This time he got nearly to the Tropic of Capricorn, attaining 22°S. without finding the desired eastward route. The king was keenly disappointed when the Cão expedition returned to Lisbon in 1487 with no news of success. Cão, who had explored 1,450 miles of unknown coast, working against the current and the winds much of the time, disappeared from view, his career broken by his failure to find India. (One contemporary source says he died on the return voyage, another that he returned and was forced into retirement.)

  Cão’s successor, Bartholomeu Dias, brought the king happier tidings. Setting out in 1487, Dias traveled down the coast far beyond the most southerly point visited by Cão; after provisioning at Lüderitz in what is now South-West Africa, Dias’ caravels were beset by storms and driven far into the Atlantic. On a great arc they swept around the Cape of Good Hope without sighting it, and by the time they could regain the coast, in the vicinity of Mossel Bay in the Union of South Africa, they had unwittingly crossed from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean. This became only gradually apparent as the land trended eastward: Dias had amputated one great lobe of the vast supposed southern continent and had attained Africa’s terminal point. The gateway to the Indies was open. But provisions were low and his men were exhausted by the rough weather; reluctantly Dias agreed to turn back. On the return voyage, the great southern cape came into view. He named it Cabo Tormentoso, “Cape of Storms”; but after Dias’ arrival in Portugal at the end of 1488, King João rechristened it optimistically the Cape of Good Hope.

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  Navigations

  The Portuguese Discoveries and the Renaissance

  • Malyn Newitt(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Reaktion Books

    (Publisher)

  São Gabriel, to João de Sá and remained in the Azores, where his brother Paulo died. João de Sá reached Lisbon early in August and Vasco da Gama himself arrived on another ship early in September 1499.

  Da Gama’s Voyage in Perspective

  Da Gama’s voyage was not one that opened up hitherto unexplored lands or seas to any significant extent. The Indian Ocean navigation was very well known to Asian sailors and merchants, whose voyages extended as far south as the monsoon winds blew. This included northern Madagascar and the coast of modern Mozambique as far south as the present town of Inhambane. What, however, was achieved by da Gama’s voyage was the linking of the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans, each of which had already been separately explored and charted. Once and for all the Ptolemaic idea that the Indian Ocean was entirely enclosed by land was shown to be false. Now, for the first time, a way was found of sailing from one maritime world to the other and a new and more direct route had been opened for trade and also for cultural exchange. It also became possible for the first time to make a realistic map of Africa and its relationship with the other known parts of the world.

  Da Gama’s fleet may have been the first to include large square-rigged naus. His voyage was also the first to exploit the wind systems of the southern Atlantic and to show how important it was not to sail down the African coast, battling against headwinds, as Cão and Dias had done, but to sail southwestwards to avoid the doldrums and to pick up the winds that would blow the ships round the south of Africa. The three months that da Gama’s ships spent out of sight of land after leaving the Cape Verde islands – navigating the South Atlantic with very little guidance except the experience of their pilots and the tables of the declination of the Sun that they carried with them to establish their latitude – is arguably the greatest contribution that this voyage made to science. It was a contribution that should really make famous the names of da Gama’s pilots rather than the commander himself. There were other feats of seamanship that one should also pause to acknowledge. Trying to sail beyond the point where Dias had turned back, da Gama’s ships found they were swept backwards by the current until they were ‘60 leagues behind our previous position’.13

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  History of the World

  • (Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Learning Press

    (Publisher)

  Previous travels of Pêro da Covilhã (orange) and Afonso de Paiva (blue), and their common route (green) Protected from direct Spanish competition by the treaty of Tordesillas, Portuguese eastward exploration and colonization continued apace. Twice, in 1485 and 1488, Portugal officially rejected Christopher Columbus's idea of reaching India by sailing westwards. King John II of Portugal's experts rejected it, for they held the opinion that Columbus's estimation of a travel distance of 2,400 miles (3,860 km) was undervalued, and in part because Bartolomeu Dias departed in 1487 trying the rounding of the southern tip of Africa, therefore they believed that sailing east would require a far shorter journey. Dias's return from the Cape of Good Hope in 1488, and Pêro da Covilhã travel to Ethiopia overland indicated that the richness of the Indian Sea was accessible from the Atlantic. A long-overdue expedition was prepared. Under new king Manuel I of Portugal, on July 1497 a small exploratory fleet of four ships and about 170 men left Lisbon under command of Vasco da Gama. By December the fleet passed the Great Fish River—where Dias had turned back—and sailed into unknown waters. On 20 May 1498, they arrived at Calicut. The efforts of Vasco da Gama to get favorable trading conditions were hampered by the low value of their goods, compared with the valuable goods traded there. Two years after departure, Gama and a survivor crew of 55 men returned in glory to Portugal as the first ships to sail directly from Europe to India. ___________________________ WORLD TECHNOLOGIES ___________________________ In 1500, a second larger fleet of thirteen ships and about 1500 men was sent to India. Under command of Pedro Álvares Cabral they made a first landfall on the Brazilian coast; later, in the Indian Ocean, one of Cabral's ships reached Madagascar (1501), which was partly explored by Tristão da Cunha in 1507; Mauritius was discovered in 1507, Socotra occupied in 1506.

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  Spices, Scents and Silk

  Catalysts of World Trade

  • James F Hancock(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • CAB International

    (Publisher)

  And so Henrique’s navigators began down the African coast. They first discovered Madeira, the Azores and the Canary Islands. As Henrique’s expeditions continued, the goal of each was simply to go further south, towards the ultimate goal to round the tip of Africa and sail to India. In 1455, Alvise Cadamosto reached the Gambia River and explored the Cape Verde Islands. Next, Diego Gomez went further south, exploring what is today the Senegal coast. As the Portuguese caravels moved down the coast of Africa, gold, jewels and spices flowed into Lisbon making it a busy commercial centre.

  Henrique died in 1460 before his ultimate goal was reached, but his dream was carried on by his great nephew King João II, who took the throne in 1481. Under João’s direction, Diego Cam in 1482 crossed the equator and explored the Congo River. In another mission, Cam reached Cape Cross in today’s Namibia, about three-quarters of the way down the continent. In 1487, João sent another sailor, Bartolomeu Dias, down the coast, but this time rather than making incremental gains in distance by hugging down the coastline he decided to swing due west at mid-continent and see where the winds would take him. It is not known why he undertook this strategy, but it proved to be the breakthrough that made future travel possible from Western Europe to the Indian Ocean. After a long scary journey west out into the uncharted Atlantic Ocean he was rewarded by return winds that flung his ship around the Cape of Good Hope to the other side of the continent in stormy cold seas.

  The crew of Dias spotted land on 3 February 1488, about 300 miles east of the Cape of Good Hope and they settled in a bay they named São Bras (today Mossel Bay). Here they met and tussled with the local Khoikhoi people but were able to take on fresh water and some provisions. Dias continued up the coast for about another 200 miles until his increasingly anxious crew forced him to turn back and head home. He returned on 12 March 1488, knowing full well that he had discovered the route to the Indian Ocean!

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  The Age of Discovery, 1400-1600

  • David Arnold(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The economic drive behind expansion was not therefore (as it became in the nineteenth century as a result of industrialization) a search for markets for European goods. In Africa and Asia in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries European merchants experienced great difficulty in trying to sell their own textiles and other products, as the Portuguese rapidly discovered when they tried to sell crude woollen cloth in Asian markets accustomed to fine silks and calicoes. Europe's quest overseas was for trade goods and resources that could become assimilated into a European system of trade. But the argument that expansionism was an outcome of burgeoning commercial capitalism confronts us with an apparent contradiction. If economic aspirations were of such importance, why did Italy, economically the most advanced region of Europe, seemingly fail to play a significant part in the overseas expansionism of this period? Why instead did the economically more backward Portugal and Spain pioneer exploration and become the first European states to establish empires overseas? The answer is a complex one, for several factors are involved. But it is important to note first of all that Italy did in fact make a major contribution to Europe's Age of Discovery

  Italy

  Though the Portuguese were in several respects the pioneers of Western maritime expansion, the movement was virtually a Europe-wide phenomenon, to which different countries and their citizens made different contributions. Not all were empire-builders, at least not in any formal sense. Partly because national identities and state boundaries were so fluid and uncertain in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, individual explorers and scholars, as well as traders, soldiers and seamen were able to move with relative freedom from the service of one country to another. This personal mobility, combined with the newly invented printing press, was important in disseminating information about the first voyages of discovery throughout Europe, despite some attempts, by the Portuguese in particular, to keep their findings secret. Indeed, the Portuguese as the first systematic ocean-voyagers stood to lose most by the loss of information and personnel to other countries. By contrast, Spain partly owed its rapid entry into the field of exploration in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries to outsiders, notably the Portuguese Magellan and the Genoese Columbus.

  Christopher Columbus is a prime example of the importance of mobility among the early explorers and of Italy's distinctive contribution to the Age of Discovery. Born in Genoa in about 1451, he subsequently settled in Portugal, where he married a Portuguese woman from an influential family. He participated in at least one Portuguese trading and slave-raiding expedition down the West African coast and may possibly have travelled to Iceland. He first offered his scheme for sailing westwards to China to the Portuguese court. Rejected there, he sought French and English support before eventually finding a royal patron in Queen Isabella of Castile. The career of John Cabot (or Giovanni Caboto to give him his Italian name) had many similarities. He, too, was Genoese by birth, though naturalized in Venice and by the 1490s resident in Bristol. Like Columbus he tried in vain to interest several monarchs in his proposals for exploration in the western ocean until, following news of Columbus's return, Henry VII of England agreed to sponsor an expedition in 1496. This had as its aim reaching the spice islands of the Indies by a trans-Atlantic route, but one more northerly than Columbus had followed. Cabot's voyage of 1497 took him (like the Vikings before him) to the inhospitable shores of Newfoundland, but in the process this led to the discovery (if it were not already secretly known to Basque, Portuguese and English fishermen) of the cod-rich fishing grounds of the Grand Banks. Cabot perished on a second north Atlantic expedition, but his ambitious scheme of finding an alternative route to the Indies was taken up by his son Sebastian in 1508 (who later also worked in the service of Spain), as well as by later generations of English mariners searching for an elusive ‘Northwest Passage’ and by the Frenchman Jacques Cartier, who in three expeditions between 1534 and 1541 sailed up the St Lawrence River and helped create a French presence in Canada. But it was the Italian navigators Columbus and Cabot who were most responsible for pioneering the early trans-Atlantic routes.

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  Merchants and Rulers in Gujarat

  The Response to the Portuguese in the Sixteenth Century

  • M. N. Pearson(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • University of California Press

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER II THE PORTUGUESE The slow Portuguese progress down the west African coast in the fifteenth century, the rounding of the Cape of Good Hope by Dias, and da Gama's triumphant arrival near Calicut in 1498, were inspired by many motives, as with any great human enterprise; and during these decades of effort different motives predominated at different times. The desire of D. Manuel (1495-1521) and his predecessors to open a direct sea route to India was primarily economic, and second- arily religious, in origin. The latter provided a sacral coating for the former, more important, motivation. The two were, however, closely intertwined. Portugal was in some respects still a crusading nation, thrusting across into north Africa from 1415 in continuation of the effort which had freed her from the Muslims. D. Manuel expected that once Portugal found the way to the Arabian Sea the mythical, but hopefully Christian, Prester John would be discovered and made into an ally for a strike at the Muslim rear. Possibly other Christians would be found around the Cape, and if they were not found they should certainly be created. A strike at the Muslim rear would be a good and holy effort in itself, but more important it could very well combine profit with the laying up of eternal merit, for it was known that the spice trade to Europe was in Muslim hands up to Alexandria. D. Manuel himself put it neatly soon after da Gama's return, when he said: "for our ancestors the main basis of this enterprise was always the service of God our Lord and our own profit." 1 By 1515 the Portuguese had established formal naval dominance in Indian seas, and seized several strategic ports. There were several stages in this considerable military achievement. In 1503 their first fort was built, at Cochin. (They thus wasted no time in moving to the third of the four stages describing European expansion in Asia.) In east Africa Sofala became a tributary of Portugal in 1505, and Mozam- 'ANTTSV, III, 513.

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  Western Civilization

  A Brief History, Volume II: Since 1500

  • Jackson Spielvogel(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  The publi-cation of these letters led to the use of the name Amer-ica (after Amerigo ) for the new lands. The first two decades of the sixteenth century wit-nessed numerous overseas voyages that explored the eastern coasts of both North and South America. Per-haps the most dramatic of all these expeditions was the journey of Ferdinand Magellan (1480–1521) in 1519. After passing through the strait named after him at the southern tip of South America, he sailed across the Pacific Ocean. Although Magellan himself was killed in the Philippines and only one of his fleet of five ships completed the return voyage to Spain, his name is still associated with the first known circumnavigation of the earth. The Europeans referred to the newly discovered territories as the New World, even though they held flourishing civilizations populated by millions of peo-ple. But the Americas were indeed new to the Euro-peans, who quickly saw opportunities for conquest and exploitation. The Spanish, in particular, were interested because in 1494 the Treaty of Tordesillas ( tor-day-SEE-yass ) had divided up the newly discov-ered world into separate Portuguese and Spanish spheres of influence, and it turned out that most of South America (except for the eastern hump) fell within the Spanish sphere. Hereafter the route east around the Cape of Good Hope was to be reserved for the Portuguese, while the route across the Atlantic was assigned to Spain. Christopher Columbus. Columbus was an Italian explorer who worked for the queen of Spain. He has become a symbol for two entirely different perspectives. To some, he was a great and heroic explorer who discovered the New World; to others, especially in Latin America, he was responsible for beginning a process of invasion that led to the destruction of an entire way of life. Because Columbus was never painted during his lifetime, the numerous portraits of him are more fanciful than accurate.

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  History Of Mathematical Sciences: Portugal And East Asia Ii - Scientific Practices And The Portuguese Expansion In Asia (1498-1759)

  Portugal and East Asia II

  • Luis M R Saraiva(Author)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • World Scientific

    (Publisher)

  NEWS FROM CHINA IN SIXTEENTH CENTURY EUROPE: THE PORTUGUESE CONNECTION Rui Manuel LOUREIRO Universidade Lusbfona, Portim80 Before the discovery of the Cape route to India in 1498 by Vasco da Gama, little was known in Portugal, or indeed in Europe, about East Asia. European literary circles had some knowledge of those distant places, of course, based on information collected and spread by mediaeval travellers like Marco Polo who had crossed Asia or by compilers like John de Mandeville who had gathered all the material available on the non-European world. But this literary information, which reached only a small number of people, presented a somewhat vague and sometimes fantastic image of the real East Asian world. The cartographic representation of Asian lands available to the learned European public in mediaeval maps was also rather imaginative and symbolic, bearing little or no relation to the real world, as a quick glance at the Catalan Atlas, prepared around 1375 by Abraham Cresques, will show. After Vasco da Gama arrived in Western India by the sea-route, in the last years of the fifteenth century - almost exactly five hundred years ago - everything suddenly began to change. Portuguese ships rapidly came into contact with most of Asia’s maritime shores, from the Red Sea, visited as early as 1503, to the remote islands of Japan, where they anchored for the first time about forty years later. In the course of the sixteenth century, Portuguese navigators were responsible for the establishment of direct and regular relations between East and West, and also for the spread all over Europe of accurate and detailed geographic and ethnographic information about the distant and previously unknown, or little known, lands of Asia.

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  The Life of Prince Henry of Portugal

  Surnamed the Nabigator and its Results

  • Richard Henry Major(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter XX. Results Eastward. 1487-1517. M EANWHILE great things had been doing in the East. The grand discovery of Bartholomeu Dias was not to remain fruitless, although it may fairly be wondered at that so long an interval should have been allowed to elapse between that discovery in 1487 and the realisation of its advantages by Yasco da Gama ten years later. Some have even added to the reasonable inquiry, an unreasonable insinuation that the success of Columbus proved to be the effective stimulus to the second important expedition. No chimera was ever more untenable when examined by the light of facts and dates. Indeed the interval of five years between the two grand discoveries of Columbus and Da Gama is in itself sufficient to show that we must look elsewhere for an explanation of the delay. It will be remembered that before Dias had returned at the close of 1487, Payva and Covilham had been sent by land to Eastern Africa, and that from Cairo, in 1490, Covilham had sent home word to the King confirmatory of the fact that India was to be reached by the south of Africa. It happened, however, that in this same year, 1490, King John was seized with an illness so severe that his life was in the utmost jeopardy. This was supposed to have been caused by his drinking the water of a fountain near Evora, which was thought to have been poisoned, inasmuch as two Portuguese gentlemen who had drunk of it, died. Through great care, and the pure air and tranquillity of his pleasure-palaces of Santarem and Almerino, the King recovered; but though his life was saved, the vigour of his constitution was irreparably impaired. Shortly after this partial restoration to health, the King, by order of his physicians, stayed at Santarem during the summer months for the sake of bathing in the Tagus, when one day he sent for his son Affonso to join him in the bath

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