y vigour,
my skill are equal to any toil; above all, my passionate desire to
see the world and explore the unknown set me all on fire with
eagerness."

In 1455 Cadamosto sailed from Portugal for Madeira, now "thickly
peopled with Portuguese." From Madeira to the Canaries, from the
Canaries to Cape Blanco, "natives black as moles were dressed in white
flowing robes with turbans wound round their heads." Here was a great
market of Arab traders from the interior, here were camels laden with
brass, silver, and gold, as well as slaves innumerable.

But Cadamosto pushed on for some four hundred miles by the low, sandy
shore to the Senegal River. The Portuguese had already sailed by this
part of the coast, and the negroes had thought their ships to be great
birds from afar cleaving the air with their white wings. When the crews
furled their sails and drew into shore the natives changed their minds
and thought they were fishes, and all stood on the shore gazing stupidly
at this new wonder.

Cadamosto landed and pushed some two hundred and fifty miles up the
Senegal River, where he set up a market, exchanging cotton and cloth
for gold, while "the negroes came stupidly crowding round me,
wondering at our white colour, which they tried to wash off, our dress,
our garments of black silk and robes of blue cloth."

Joined by two other ships from Portugal, the Italian explorer now
sailed on to Cape Verde, so called from its green grass.

"The land here," he tells us, "is all low and full of fine, large trees,
which are continually green. The trees never wither like those in
Europe; they grow so near the shore that they seem to drink, as it
were, the water of the sea. The coast is most beautiful. Many countries
have I been in, to East and West, but never did I see a prettier sight."

But the negroes here--big, comely men--were lawless and impossible
to approach, shooting at the Portuguese explorers with poisoned arrows.
They discovered that the capital of the country was called Gambra,
where lived a king, but the negroes of the Gambra were unfriendly;
there was little gold to be had; his crews fell sick and ill, and
Cadamosto turned home again. But he had reached a point beyond all
other explorers of the time, a point where "only once did we see the
North Star, which was so low that it seemed almost to touch the sea."
We know that he must have been to within eleven degrees of the Equator,
and it is disappointing to find the prom