The skirmish ended after Dias himself killed one of the natives with an arrow from his crossbow. On the way back the Portuguese went ashore at Mossel Bay and were attacked by natives with stones. It read: "With as much sorrow and feeling as though he were taking his last leave of a son condemned to exile forever, recalling with what danger to his own person and to all his men they had come such a long distance with this sole aim, and then God would not grant it to him to reach his goal." "Weary, and terrified by the great seas through which they had passed, all with one voice began to murmur, and demand that they proceed no further."Īfter turning around Dias left a note on the stone cross that marked their discovery. Dias wanted to continue into the Indian Ocean, but his crew forced him to turn back after a traveling only a short distance past the Cape of Good Hope. He then turned north and after traveling about 450 miles north he spotted high mountains and anchored in what is now Mossel Bay, about 230 miles east of present-day Capetown, on February 5, 1488.įollowing the African coast, which now trended northeastward, Dias he realized he had rounded Africa and traveled another 300 miles up the southeast coast of Africa to the mouth of the Great Fish River and Algoa Bay. "And as the ships were tiny, and the seas colder and not such as they were in the land of Guinea.they gave themselves up for dead." After the storm Dias headed west but failed to sight land for several days. Īfter dropping off the last of his African emissaries, Dias's expedition was caught in a storm that carried his ships southwards for thirteen days in the rough open sea. Finally, fighting fearsome tempests, he raised land. In 1487 ," wrote historian Merle Severy, "checked by wind and current, he took a great leap southwesterly into the unknown in hope of favorable winds. Some historians credit Dias with being one of the first navigators to intentionally stay away from the coast. With him he brought six Africans dressed in European clothes and samples of gold, silver, spices and other desired African products so that the natives would know what the Europeans wanted. Dias's success made Columbus's project seem superfluous.īartolomeu Dias’s Expedition Around Africaĭias's expedition consisted of two 50-ton caravals and a store ship. When Dias returned, Columbus was in Lisbon trying to convince King John II into bankrolling his expedition across the Atlantic. Partly because of Dias's success the Portuguese king decided not finance Christopher Columbus's voyage to the west. He died in 1500 on an expedition to Brazil when his ship was trapped by a hurricane "casting them into the abyss of that great ocean sea.human bodies as food for the fish of those waters, which bodies we can believe were the first, since they were navigating in unknown regions." He supervised the building of Vasco de Gama's ships but he was not on de Gama's historic voyage to India. According to Boorstin, "Dias was never properly rewarded by his sovereign, and he became the forgotten man of Portugal's Age of Discovery.
BARTOLOMEU DIAS, FIRST TO ROUND THE CAPE OF GOOD HOPEīarthlomeu Dias, a former superintendent of the royal warehouses in Lisbon and captain of a caravel that went down the African coast, was the first man to round the Cape of Good Hope at southern tip of Africa.ĭias had been selected to head an expedition to India by King John II and was seen somewhat as a failure even though he surmounted the biggest obstacle between Europe and Asia.
0 kommentar(er)
