Bartolomeu Dias

Bartolomeu Dias, a Portuguese explorer and mariner, died on 29 May 1500. He is best known for being the first European to sail around the southern tip of Africa, which he accomplished in February 1488. During this voyage, he also proved that the most efficient southward route for ships was to steer diagonally southwest into the open ocean, far west of the African coastline. Vasco da Gama later used these discoveries to open a sea route from Europe to Asia.

Early life

Dias came from a maritime family. An ancestor, Dinis Dias, had explored the African coast in the 1440s and discovered the Cap-Vert peninsula in present-day Senegal in 1445.

Sorting out Dias’s biography is tricky because several Portuguese sailors with the same name were active at the same time. In 1481, he joined an expedition led by Diogo de Azambuja to build a fortress and trading post called São Jorge da Mina in the Gulf of Guinea. There is indirect evidence that he may have also taken part in Diogo Cão’s first expedition (1482–1484) down the African coast to the Congo River.

Voyage around Africa

By 1486, Dias appears to have been a cavalier in the king’s household and superintendent of the royal warehouses. On 10 October 1486, King John II of Portugal granted him an annuity of 6,000 reis for “services to come.” Sometime after that—likely around July or August 1487, not July 1486 as traditionally thought—he left Lisbon with three ships to continue the African exploration that Diogo Cão had advanced.

Dias was also tasked with finding Prester John, a legendary Christian ruler believed to live somewhere beyond Europe, possibly in Africa. He commanded two caravels of about 50 tons each, the São Cristóvão and São Pantaleão, plus a square-rigged supply ship captained by his brother Diogo. He recruited top pilots, including Pero de Alenquer and João de Santiago, both of whom had sailed with Cão.

No original documents from this historic voyage survive, because nearly all maritime records were destroyed in the 1755 Lisbon earthquake and tsunami. Most of what we know comes from the sixteenth-century historian João de Barros, who wrote about the voyage sixty years later.

The small fleet left Lisbon around July 1487. Like Cão, Dias carried carved stone pillars called padrões to mark his progress at important landfalls. He also brought six Africans who had been kidnapped by Cão and taught Portuguese.