Bartolomeu Dias was born around 1450 into a Portuguese seafaring family: his ancestor Dinis Dias had reached the Cape Verde peninsula in the 1440s. Records place him at the building of São Jorge da Mina in 1481 and likely on Diogo Cão’s voyages to the Congo, and by 1486 he was a cavalier at King John II’s court and superintendent of the royal warehouses, paid an annuity for services to come. Around July 1487 he left Lisbon with the caravels São Cristóvão and São Pantaleão, a supply ship under his brother Diogo, and pilot Pero de Alenquer, carrying stone padrões and six Africans kidnapped on earlier voyages to act as emissaries. The goals were to find the bottom of Africa and intelligence on Prester John, an ally against the Ottoman and Venetian grip on the spice trade.

Fighting the cold northward Benguela Current, Dias turned away from the coast and sailed southwest into the open Atlantic for 30 days, catching westerlies in the maneuver later called the volta do mar. Turning east, he found no coast, and in February 1488 landed at what is now Mossel Bay, having rounded Africa without seeing it. At Kwaaihoek in March the crew forced a return, and only then, in May 1488, did he see the headland he named the Cape of Storms, which the king rebranded the Cape of Good Hope. He was sidelined for a decade, passed over for Vasco da Gama, and assigned to design da Gama’s ships. Sailing with Pedro Álvares Cabral’s fleet, which reached Brazil in April 1500, he died when a storm sank four ships near the same cape on May 29, 1500.

• The supply ship left in Angola was riddled with shipworms, and six of its nine guards had been killed.
• His fleet returned to Lisbon in December 1488 after 16 months, to a muted, secretive welcome.
• He designed the São Gabriel and São Rafael as sturdier square rigged naus for the Southern Ocean.
• The original logs of his voyage were destroyed with the Casa da Índia in the 1755 Lisbon earthquake.
• His grandson Paulo Dias de Novais founded Luanda, and Mossel Bay displays a life size replica of his caravel.