Padrão

History

Diogo Cão was the first to place stone padrões during his voyage along the African coast in 1482–1484. These pillars were carved in Portugal and carried aboard his ship at the command of King João II. In August 1483 he placed one on the headlands of Angola at Cabo Negro, bearing an inscription. Excavations in the 1950s by Eric Axelson recovered fragments of several padrões, identifiable by their Portuguese limestone. Vasco da Gama erected a padrão at Malindi in East Africa in 1498 before crossing the Indian Ocean to Calicut; this pillar, known as the Vasco da Gama Pillar, retains its original Portuguese limestone cross. In 1522 Henrique Leme raised a padrão at Sunda Kalapa, the main port of the Sunda Kingdom, after negotiating a treaty; this Luso-Sundanese padrão was rediscovered in 1918 and now resides at the National Museum of Indonesia. Other explorers who erected padrões include Pero da Covilhã, Bartolomeu Dias, Goncalo Coelho, and Jorge Álvares. The Lisbon Geographic Society restored three padrões by Diogo Cão and one by Bartolomeu Dias in the 20th century. At the Dias Cross Memorial on South Africa's Eastern Cape coast, a replica padrón stands at Kwaaihoek, where Bartolomeu Dias placed the original in 1488 to mark his easternmost landfall after rounding the Cape of Good Hope. Eric Axelson discovered the original in the 1930s, fallen in pieces below the promontory; he recovered and reconstructed it, and it now stands in the William Cullen Library at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.