Page:Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile - In the Years 1768, 1769, 1770, 1771, 1772, and 1773 volume 2.djvu/124

108 greatly in the favour of several succeeding princes, and was preferred to the principal offices, in which, there is no doubt, he appeared with all the advantage a polished and instructed mind has over an ignorant and barbarous one. Frequent dispatches from him came to the king of Portugal, who, on his part, spared no expence to keep open the correspondence. In his journal, Covillan described the several ports in India which he had seen; the temper and disposition of the princes; the situation and riches of the mines of Sofala: He reported that the country was very populous, full of cities both powerful and rich; and he exhorted the king to pursue, with unremitting vigour, the passage round Africa, which he declared to be attended with very little danger; and that the Cape itself was well known in India. He accompanied this description with a chart, or map, which he had received from the hands of a Moor in India, where the Cape, and cities all around the coast, were exactly represented.

this intelligence the king fitted out three ships under Bartholomew Dias, who had orders to inquire after the king of Abyssinia on the western ocean. Dias passed on to lat. 24½ deg. south, and there set up the arms of the king of Portugal in token of possession. He then sailed for the harbour of the Herdsmen, so called from the multitude of cows seen on land; and, as it should seem, not knowing whither he was going, came to a river which he called Del Infants, from the captain's name that first discovered it, having, without dreaming of it, passed that formidable Cape, the object so much desired by the Portuguese. Here he was tossed for many days by violent storms as he came near land, being more and more in the course of variable winds, but,