Page:History of merchant shipping and ancient commerce (Volume 1).djvu/605

 *mately led to the discovery of the Cape of Good Hope, in 1487, by Bartholomew Dias. The rude winds and mountainous waves which assailed that now well-known promontory led Dias to call it the Cape of Storms; but the king, sanguine that beyond its rugged shores there would be found the rich lands of India, gave it the name it now bears. Dias ventured only a short distance beyond the promontory, and ten years more elapsed before it was doubled by Vasco de Gama, another still more celebrated Portuguese navigator.

While the Portuguese were striving to reach India by the eastern route, another navigator, greater than any the world had hitherto produced, was maturing his plans for endeavouring to reach that cherished land by a voyage to the West. Hitherto the Atlantic Ocean had been regarded with wonder and awe. It seemed to bound the then known world with an impenetrable chaos, a chaos into which the most daring adventurers had feared to penetrate. "No one," says Edrisi, an Arabian writer, whose countrymen for many ages had been the boldest of navigators, "has been able to verify anything concerning it (the Atlantic Ocean), on account of its difficult and perilous navigation, its great obscurity, its profound depth, and frequent tempests; through fear of its mighty fishes and its haughty winds; yet there are many islands in it, some peopled, others uninhabited. There is no mariner who dares to enter into its deep waters; or if any have done so, they have merely kept along its coasts, fearful of departing from them.