Bartolomeu Dias rounds the Cape

In August 1487, King João II of Portugal sent Bartolomeu Dias with two caravels and a storeship to find whether Africa could be rounded by sea toward the Indian Ocean. After working down the west coast beyond earlier Portuguese reach, the expedition left the coast—most likely near the Orange River region—in January 1488, stood far south into the westerlies, then turned east and north until land was regained on the south coast.

On 3 February 1488 the fleet entered Angra de São Brás, later Mossel Bay. There the Portuguese took water and encountered local inhabitants; according to the later Roteiro of Vasco da Gama’s voyage, people at São Brás had resisted Dias’s watering party with stones, and Dias killed one of them with a crossbow. The expedition continued east along the coast, raising stone padrões (notably fragments later recovered at Kwaaihoek) before the crews insisted on turning back short of a full run to the Swahili coast. On the homeward leg Dias sighted and named—according to Duarte Pacheco Pereira and a Columbus-family note—the Cabo da Boa Esperança, recognising that the coast now trended northeast toward the Indian Ocean. The caravels reached the Tagus in December 1488.

No shipboard journal of the voyage survives. Much popular detail still derives from João de Barros’s Décadas (1552), whose dating and storm-driven narrative later specialists have corrected. Even so, the voyage’s core result is secure: a European fleet had rounded southern Africa and shown that an Atlantic–Indian Ocean passage was navigable. Dias later advised on ship design and coastal knowledge used by Vasco da Gama’s 1497 expedition.

Significance

Marks the start of sustained European maritime reconnaissance of southern Africa and the later pattern of coastal contact.