Bartolomeu Dias Rounds Cape of Good Hope

In 1487 the Portuguese navigator Bartolomeu Dias set out with a small fleet down the African coast, and in the following months he became the first known European to sail around the southern tip of the continent. The voyage showed that the Atlantic and Indian Oceans were connected and that Africa could be bypassed by sea. That opened the way to a direct maritime route between Europe and Asia, with far-reaching consequences for trade, empire, and the movement of peoples.

The expedition grew out of decades of Portuguese exploration sponsored by the crown, notably under Prince Henry the Navigator and later King John II. Step by step, Portuguese ships had pushed farther south along the West African coast, setting up trading posts and gathering gold, ivory, and enslaved people. Portugal also wanted to reach the spice markets of Asia without paying the middlemen who controlled the overland and Red Sea routes. John II was further motivated by reports of a Christian ruler in the East, the legendary Prester John, whom he hoped to find as an ally. Improved ships, especially the maneuverable caravel, and better navigation methods made longer ocean voyages feasible.

Dias left Lisbon with two caravels and a supply ship. Sailing south past the furthest points reached by earlier Portuguese captains, his ships met strong storms and, according to the usual account, were driven far out to sea. When he turned east and then north, he found the coast running in the opposite direction, which meant he had already passed the southern extremity of Africa. He landed at Mossel Bay, on the southern coast of what is now South Africa, and pushed on as far as the area of the Great Fish River before his weary crew urged him to turn back. On the return trip he sighted the great cape, which tradition says he called the Cape of Storms. The name Cape of Good Hope is generally credited to John II, reflecting optimism about the route to India. Exact dates of the passage are uncertain, though the voyage ended in Lisbon in late 1488.

The payoff came a decade later, when Vasco da Gama followed Dias's route, rounded the Cape, and reached India in 1498. Dias himself helped plan da Gama's ships and later sailed in the 1500 fleet of Pedro Álvares Cabral, during which he died in a storm off the same cape.

The Cape route shifted the commercial center of gravity of Europe toward the Atlantic and helped Portugal build a far-flung trading empire in the Indian Ocean. It also brought European forces into long-established Asian and African trading networks, often violently, and the Cape later became a strategic stopover and the site of colonial settlement.