As King John's Senegal adventurers had been exploring the Niger, the
Sahara caravan routes, the city of Timbuctoo and the fancied western
Nile, so the Abyssinian travellers surveyed all the ground of Africa and
Malabar which the first fleet that could round the Cape of Storms must
come to. "Keep southward," Covilham wrote home from Cairo after his
first visit to Calicut on one side and to Mozambique on the other, "if
you persist, Africa must come to an end. And when ships come to the
Eastern Ocean let them ask for Sofala and the island of the Moon
(Madagascar), and they will find pilots to take them to Malabar."
Yet another chapter of discoveries was opened by King John's Cathay
fleet. He failed to get news of a North-east passage, but beyond the
north coast of Asia there was found a frozen island whose name of Novaia
Zemlaia or Nova Zembla still keeps the memory of the first Portuguese
attempts on the road where so many Dutch and English seamen perished in
after years.
The great voyage of Vasco da Gama (1497-9), the empire founded by
Albuquerque (1506-15) in the Indian seas, were the other steps in the
complete achievement of Prince Henry's ambition. When in the early
years of the sixteenth century a direct and permanent traffic was fairly
started between Malabar and Portugal, when European settlements and
forts controlled the whole eastern and western coasts of Africa from the
mouth of the Red Sea to the mouth of the Mediterranean, and the five
keys of the Indies--Malacca, Goa, Ormuz, Aden, and Ceylon--were all in
Christian hands, when the Moslem trade between east Africa and western
India had passed into a possession of the Kings of Lisbon, Don Henry
might see of the travail of his soul and be well satisfied.
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