SOME POINTS CONNECTED WITH THE DISCOVERY 

 OE THE CAPE BY BARTHOLOMEU DIAS, 1488. 



By Rev. Caiion E. B. Ford, M.A. 



With I Map. 



Read July 11, 1919. 



To us, who have the privilege of belonging to the Union 

 of South Africa, the voyage of Bartholomeu Dias is of the 

 utmost interest, but in his own age this was not the case. The 

 Portuguese were single-minded folk, and so the discovery of 

 many leagues of coast and the stateliest Cape in all the world 

 interested them only in so far as it carried them a step nearer 

 to the realisation of their dreams of a sea-route to India or the 

 opening up of the treasuries of the elusive Prester-John. 



This dream, as regards the Indian part of it, materialised 

 for them some ten years later, when Vasco da Gama reached 

 Calicut, though Prester-John remains elusive to this day. Amid 

 the splendours of the Eastern trade thus opened to the Portu- 

 guese, the man who had found the road was so far forgotten 

 that Camoens. who in his Lusiad sings the praises of rnany 

 less deserving men, makes but the barest of references to the 

 voyage of Dias, and has not even preserved his name. 



This being the case, it is not to be wondered at that the 

 records of his voyage are few and imperfect, and that they have 

 left for our solution a number of difficult questions concerning 

 the voyage of our first discoverer, questions which were esteemed 

 of little importance in the days of Dias, but which are of the 

 greatest interest to us as South Africans. 



These records of the voyage, scanty as they are, have been 

 collected with painstaking diligence by A. G. Ravenstein, and 

 put together in a short paper, read before the Royal Geographical 

 Society in 1900. This paper is the result of such wide research 

 and the critical conclusions are so sound that it may be con- 

 sidered to establish the main facts of the voyage. There are, 

 however, still a few points on which Ravenstein did not pro- 

 nounce an opinion or on which some later light has been thrown. 



It is the object of this paper to deal with some of these 

 points, namely : — 



1. The connection of Dias with the island of S. Croix in 

 Algoa Bay. 



2. The position of the padrao of Sao Gregorio, the furthest 

 of the memorial pillars erected by Dias in South Africa. 



3. The identification of Dias' turning-point, the Rio do 

 Infante. 



4. The dates of the voyage. 



5. The identification of the islet known as the Penedo das 

 Pontes. 



