2 Annals of the South African Museum. 



connected the western and eastern extremities of the Old World. 

 All these discoveries were the results of attempts to discover a 

 sea-road to India. Even at his death, Columbus was persuaded 

 that he had reached Asia. 



Bent upon discovering this sea-way, the Portuguese navigators, 

 mostly hugging closely the coast of Africa, had persistently proceeded 

 southwards, thus gradually going beyond Liberia, the extreme limit 

 reached by -the Carthaginian Hanno in his celebrated voyage of 

 discovery or settlement along the north-west coast of Africa, about 

 five hundred years before the Christian era. His fleet is said to 

 have consisted of sixty large vessels, on which were embarked thirty 

 thousand persons of both sexes. 



But nearly a century before the Portuguese entered upon their 

 grand career of discovery a chartered company of Dieppe and 

 Rouen merchants did, between 1364 and 1413, in the reign of 

 Charles the Fifth of France, send expeditions to the Gold Coast. 



When John the Second, King of Portugal, ascended the throne 

 the efforts to reach this goal, India, were not relaxed. Diogo Cao 

 and Affonso d'Aveiro were commissioned to go farther south ; Cao 

 reached the Eiver Congo, or Zaire, and ultimately Cape Negro 

 (Cape Cross) in 21 41' S. There he erected a padrao, which, 

 however, unlike those put up later on by Bartholomeu Diaz, seems 

 to have had no special name. The scanty records of the period left 

 it doubtful where this last pillar of Cao had been set ; but in 1893 

 the captain of the German man-of-war Falke discovered this relic 

 on Cape Cross. It bore two inscriptions in a sufficiently good state 

 of preservation not to offer any difficulty in deciphering ; and 

 according to L. Cordeiro the two inscriptions are as follows : 



" (A)mundi creatione fluxerunt anni 6684 et (a)Christi nativitate 

 148; ? 9(uum) (e)xcelenti(ss)imus (s)erenissi(mus)que Rex d. Johannes 

 secundus portugal (iae) per ia(co) bum canum ejus militem colu(m) 

 nam hie situari jus (s)it." 



(Six thousand six hundred and eighty-four years had elapsed since 

 the world was created, and 148? since the birth of Christ, when the 

 most excellent and most serene King, D. Joao the Second of 

 Portugal, ordered this column to be set up by Jacobus Canus, 

 his knight.) 



The second inscription, which follows the turn of the upper 

 cylindrical part of the column, is in Portuguese 



