lomeo, Pomponio, Estrabo,
Plinio, e quantos passaram, fui notorio:
Aqui toda a Africana costa acabo
Neste meu nunca vista promontorio,
Que para o polo Antarctico se estende,
A quem vossa ousadia tanto offende.
Camoens, _Os Lusiadas_, v. 50.]

[Sidenote: Some effects of the discovery.]

[Sidenote: Bartholomew Columbus.]

This voyage of Bartholomew Dias was longer and in many respects more
remarkable than any that is known to have been made before that time.
From Lisbon back to Lisbon, reckoning the sinuosities of the coast, but
making no allowance for tacking, the distance run by those tiny craft
was not less than thirteen thousand miles. This voyage completed the
overthrow of the fiery-zone doctrine, so far as Africa was concerned; it
penetrated far into the southern temperate zone where Mela had placed
his antipodal world; it dealt a staggering blow to the continental
theory of Ptolemy; and its success made men's minds readier for yet more
daring enterprises. Among the shipmates of Dias on this ever memorable
voyage was a well-trained and enthusiastic Italian mariner, none other
than Bartholomew, the younger brother of Christopher Columbus. There was
true dramatic propriety in the presence of that man at just this time;
for not only did all these later African voyages stand in a direct
causal relation to the discovery of America, but as an immediate
consequence of the doubling of the Cape of Good Hope we shall presently
find Bartholomew Columbus in the very next year on his way to England,
to enlist the aid of King Henry VII. in behalf of a scheme of
unprecedented boldness for which his elder brother had for some years
been seeking to obtain the needful funds. Not long after that
disappointing voyage of Santarem and Escobar in 1471, this original and
imaginative sailor, Christopher Columbus, had conceived (or adopted and
made his own) a new method of solving the problem of an ocean route to
Cathay. We have now to sketch the early career of this epoch-making man,
and to see how he came to be brought into close relations with the work
of the Portuguese explorers.

CHAPTER V.

THE SEARCH FOR THE INDIES.

_WESTWARD OR SPANISH ROUTE._

[Sidenote: Sources of information concerning the life of Columbus: Las
Casas and Ferdinand Columbus.]

[Sidenote: The Biblioteca Colombina at Seville.]

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