Dias Circles South Africa

By the late fifteenth century Portugal had spent decades pushing its explorers ever further down the West African coast in search of a sea route to the riches of India and the East. King Joao II commissioned Bartolomeu Dias to lead an expedition to find the southern limit of Africa.

Setting out in 1487, Dias sailed south along the coast and, caught by storms, was driven far out to sea. When he turned back toward land he found that the coast now trended eastward, realizing he had rounded the southern tip of the continent without sighting it. He thus became the first European known to sail around the Cape of Good Hope.

Dias initially named the headland the Cape of Storms, but King Joao II renamed it the Cape of Good Hope for the promise it held of reaching India. His crew, exhausted and fearful, compelled him to turn back, but his voyage proved that the Indian Ocean was accessible by sea and directly enabled Vasco da Gama's successful passage to India a decade later in 1498.