DISCOVERY OF THE CAPE. 355 



Before dealing with these questions in detail it is as well 

 to notice briefly the authorities for the voyage. 



The received account, the only one which preserves a con- 

 nected record, is thart by de Barros, contained in his " Asia." This 

 account is full of interest, but is not particularly reliable. De 

 Barros wrote some 60 years after the event, and the facts as 

 he gives them are often in conflict with the evidence of earlier 

 writers. He has been well called " the Portuguese Livy," and 

 he has a share of both the merits and defects of the great Roman 

 histc rian : his style is magnificent, his narrative intensely real ; 

 he makes his readers hear the swish of the water along the sides 

 of the caravel and long to go sailing away on the track of 

 adventure. But with it all, he is inchned to be inaccurate with 

 regard to those facts which, pace Macaulay and others, are the 

 basis of all real history. In this connection, the remarks on 

 the classical historians of Portugal by Ian Colvin in his " Cape 

 of Adventure " are very much to the point : " Their vivid and 

 stately narratives tell the story of the rise of their country, the 

 deeds of its heroes, and the beginning of its decline, with a lofty 

 conception of the philosophy and the moral lessons of history 

 which shows that they sat at the feet of Livy and Plutarch. But 

 like Livy, they bad unhistorical ends in view : they desired to set 

 before the youth of a Portugal already past its first glory an 

 exhortation drawn from their country's prime, and to this end 

 they elevated men to the style of heroes and adorned their narra- 

 tives with lofty sentiments and shining examples." 



It is only fair to say that de Barros is neither as inaccurate 

 nor as careless as others, nor does he exaggerate to the same 

 extent as, for instance, Correa, but as an authority for the 

 voyage of Dias he can only be received with extreme caution. 



His weakness seems to lie in a tendency to write without 

 the careful verification of his facts, and possibly to trust too 

 much to the accepted story of the voyage current in his days; 

 such stories grow up very easily even in our own times, and find 

 their ways into the history books. It must not be forgotten 

 that de Barros was a contemporary of Holinshed. 



Fortunately, however, we have a certain amount of contem- 

 porary evidence on the subject of the voyage of Dias, and this 

 evidence has been carefully reproduced in Ravenstein's paper. 

 It is as follows : — 



(a) There is the record of the grant of an annuity to Dias 

 by Joao II, King of Portugal, " in consideration of services 

 which he hoped to receive." 



(b) A marginal note in a copy of Pierre d'Ailly, " Imago 

 Mundi," written in the handwriting of Christopher Columbus. 



(c) A similar, but less important, note by Christopher 

 Columbus in the margin of the " Historia rerum ubique ges- 

 tarum " of Pope Pius II. ,, ^^^ 



(d) A mention of the date of the voyage by Duarte Pacl^et^o^l C/^/ 



n A r<> 



