olonial empire
and claims to dominion over half the seas of the world. Portuguese
ships carried her flag from Labrador (which reveals its discoverers
in its name) and Nova Zembla to the Malay Archipelago and Japan.

It is characteristic of the crusading spirit of the age that Prince
Henry's first ventures down the African coast were in pursuance of
a vague plan to ascend one of the African rivers and unite with
the legendary Christian monarch Prester John (Presbyter or Bishop
John, whose realm was then supposed to be located in Abyssinia) in
a campaign against the Turk. But crusading zeal changed to dreams
of wealth when his ships returned from the Senegal coast between
1440 and 1445 with elephants' tusks, gold, and negro slaves. The
Gold Coast was already reached; the fabled dangers of equatorial
waters--serpent rocks, whirlpools, liquid sun's rays and boiling
rivers--were soon proved unreal; and before 1480 the coast well
beyond the Congo was known.

The continental limits of Africa to southward, long clearly surmised,
were verified by the voyage of Bartolomeo Diaz, in 1487. Diaz rounded
the cape, sailed northward some 200 miles, and then, troubled by
food shortage and heavy weather, turned backward. But he had blazed
the trail. The cape he called _Tormentoso_ (tempestuous) was renamed
by his sovereign, Joao II, Cape _Bon Esperanto_--the Cape of Goad
Hope. The Florentine professor Politian wrote to congratulate the
king upon opening to Christianity "new lands, new seas, new worlds,
dragged from secular darkness into the light of day."

It was not until ten years later that Vasco da Gama set out to
complete the work of Diaz and establish contact between east and
west. The contour of the African coast was now so well understood
and the art of navigation so advanced that Vasco could steer a
direct course across the open sea from the Cape Verde Islands to
the southern extremity of Africa, a distance of 3770 miles (more
than a thousand miles greater than that of Columbus' voyage from
the Canaries to the Bahamas), which he covered in one hundred days.
After touching at Mozambique, he caught the steady monsoon winds
for Calicut, on the western coast of the peninsula of India, then a
great _entrepot_ where Mohammedan and Chinese fleets met each year
to exchange wares. Thwarted here by the intrigues of Mohammedan
traders, who were quick to realize the danger threatening their
commercial monopoly, he moved on to Cannanore,