t to Cape Verde, and beyond as far as Sierra Leone. After 1443
the labors of the Navigator were no longer thought to be wasted; for
when the rich traffic in slaves and gold was opened up to Portugal, the
greed of gain was added to scientific interest as a motive for
exploration:--"Gold," says the chronicler, "made a recantation of former
Murmurings, and now Prince Henry was extolled."

When Prince Henry died in 1460 no ship had sailed beyond Sierra Leone;
but the nation had caught the spirit of the master, and in the next
generation the search for India replaced the exploration of the Gulf of
Guinea. Escobar crossed the Equator in 1471, and fourteen years later
Diego Cam sailed a thousand miles beyond the mouth of the Congo River.
It was in 1486 that Bartholomew Diaz, third of that family to forward
African exploration, left Lisbon determined to reach the Indian Ocean.
Having passed the farthest point reached by Diego Cam the year before,
he put out to sea and ran before the strong northern gale for fourteen
days. Turning eastward in search of the coast, and then north, land was
at last sighted to the west. The northerly trend of the coast, as they
pushed on four hundred miles farther, assured Diaz that he was, indeed,
in the Indian Ocean. The valiant captain would have gone on to India,
but the crew forced him to turn back. It was on the return voyage that
he first saw the southernmost point of Africa--object of so many notable
ventures: the Tempestuous Cape, as Diaz would have named it; but no,
replied the king, may it rather prove the Cape of Good Hope.

Among those for whom the voyage of Diaz was of vital importance was an
unknown Italian map-maker, already possessed with the one idea that was
to make him more famous than Diaz, but which as yet had brought him only
poverty and humiliation. Christopher Columbus, son of a Genoese
wool-comber, sailor and trader and student of men and of maps from the
age of fourteen, had come, about the year 1477, from London to Lisbon,
where he married in 1478 Felipe Moniz de Perestrello, whose father had
been a captain in the service of Prince Henry and first governor of
Porto Santo. Student of cartography and professional map-maker, expert
sailor himself, who had probably been to the Gold Coast, associating
with captains and sailors in this seaport town of Lisbon, Columbus must
have picked up all the common sailors' gossip of the age, and all the
best-known scientific speculation. W