Portuguese Begin African Exploration

In the early fifteenth century, Portugal began sending ships steadily down the Atlantic coast of Africa, an effort traditionally linked with Prince Henry, known as "the Navigator." The venture eventually carried Europeans around the continent and into the Indian Ocean, opening the age of European oceanic empires and reshaping the economies, politics, and populations of Africa, Europe, and the Americas. The date of 1418 is a conventional marker rather than a precise starting point.

Portugal's motives grew out of its circumstances. A small kingdom on the edge of Europe, it had secured its borders and finished its Reconquista earlier than its Iberian neighbors. In 1415 Portuguese forces captured the North African port of Ceuta, giving Henry, a younger son of King João I, a taste of the wealth of the trans-Saharan trade in gold and other goods. Portuguese leaders hoped to reach the sources of that gold directly, find Christian allies, spread their faith, and gain a share of the trade in goods that reached Europe through Muslim and Italian intermediaries.

The popular image of Henry founding a formal "school of navigation" at Sagres is largely a later embellishment, and historians debate how much such an institution ever existed. What is better established is that Henry sponsored and organized expeditions from the 1410s and 1420s onward, drawing on mapmakers, sailors, and shipbuilders. Portuguese mariners developed the caravel, a light, maneuverable ship well suited to coastal exploration and sailing against prevailing winds, and they refined techniques such as the volta do mar, a wide loop into the Atlantic to catch favorable winds home.

Progress was slow at first. Cape Bojador, on the northwest African coast, was a psychological barrier until Gil Eanes passed it in 1434. Expeditions then pushed farther south, reaching the Senegal region and Cape Verde in the 1440s. Portugal also settled Madeira and the Azores, where it developed sugar plantations. Early voyages included raiding, and in the 1440s Portuguese traders began bringing enslaved Africans to Europe, the start of a long and brutal involvement in the Atlantic slave trade.

Henry died in 1460, but exploration continued under later Portuguese rulers. Bartolomeu Dias rounded the southern tip of Africa in 1488, and Vasco da Gama reached India in 1498. Portugal built a chain of fortified trading posts along African and Asian coasts. The legacy is deeply mixed: advances in navigation and global contact, alongside the growth of the slave trade and colonial exploitation whose effects lasted for centuries.