Some time in the next few years, another courtier, one Sueiro da
Costa followed Pedro de Cintra to Guinea, but without any new results;
when Cadamosto left Portugal (Feb. 1, 1463), he tells us "there were no
more voyages to the new-found parts."
The slave-trade nearer home was now, indeed, absorbing all energies and
Affonso's main relation with African voyaging is to be found in his
regulations for the security of this trade.
But in 1471 there was another move in the line of further discovery. For
exploring energy was not dead or worn out, but only waiting a leader.
Fernando Po now reached the island in the farthest inlet of the Gulf of
Guinea, which is still called after him, finding as he went on that the
eastern bend of Africa, which men had followed so confidently since
1445, the year of the rounding of Cape Verde, now ended with a sharp
turn to the south. It was a great disappointment. But in spite of this
discouragement, at the very same time two of the foremost of the
Portuguese pilots, Martin Fernandez and Alvaro Esteeves, passed the
whole of the Guinea Coast, the Bights of Benin and of Biafra, and
crossed the Equator, into a new Heaven and a new Earth, on the edge of
which the caravels of Portugal had long been hovering, as they saw like
Cadamosto, stars unknown in the Northern Hemisphere and more and more
nearly lost sight of the Northern Pole.
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