Note 3 — I. Exploration by the Portuguese of the Western Coast of Africa and Discovery of the Cape of Good Hope, including a short Sketch of the early History of Portugal.

The Arabs, Persians, and Indians were found at the beginning of the sixteenth century of our era to be well acquainted with the eastern coast as far south as Cape Correntes, and the Arabs and Persians had settlements along the whole of that seaboard. But of this Europeans knew absolutely nothing. Beyond Cape Correntes, in latitude 24° 4´ south, the Asiatics did not venture in their coir-sewn vessels. Here the Mozambique current, from which the cape has its present name, ran southward with great velocity, usually from two to five kilometres an hour, according to the force and direction of the wind, but often much faster. The cape had the reputation also of being a place of storms, where the regular monsoons of the north could no longer be depended upon, and where violent gusts from every quarter would almost surely destroy the mariners who should be so foolhardy as to brave them. The vivid Arab imagination further pictured danger of another kind, for this was the chosen home of those mermaids—believed in also by the Greeks of old—who lured unfortunate men to their doom. There were legends of ships having been driven far beyond it in gales, and having been carried by the current onward to a great ocean in the west, from which they had only with the greatest difficulty returned. The perils the crews had gone through and the hardships they had suffered were magnified as a matter of course, and the dreadful sights that had met their eyes were such as to make the boldest shudder. Of the shore of that awful sea nothing was known, for no one had ever set foot upon it. So Cape Correntes, with its real and fictitious perils, was the terminus of Mohamedan enterprise to the south, though there were men in Kilwa who sometimes wondered what was beyond it and half made up their minds to go overland and ascertain. Had there been a Bantu settlement beyond Inhambane there can be no doubt that their eagerness to procure ivory would have led them on, but black men had replaced the wild aborigines there so shortly before the arrival of the Portuguese that there was not time to make the venture.