Gil Eanes

Gil Eanes sailed past Cape Bojador in 1434 and opened the Atlantic coast of Africa to European navigation. The cape, on the Western Sahara shore, was the practical limit of what Portuguese sailors would attempt: shallow water reddened by sediment, a persistent haze, heavy surf, and a current and wind that both ran south, so that a ship rounding it might not be able to beat back. What lay beyond it in the sailors' account was a sea of darkness where the water boiled and men turned black. Fifteen expeditions sent by Prince Henry had turned back. Eanes, a squire of Henry's household, turned back himself on his first attempt in 1433 and was sent again the following year with instructions not to return without having passed it. He did what nobody had tried: instead of hugging the shore he stood well out to sea, sailed south past the latitude of the cape, and came back to the coast beyond it, where he found ordinary water and gathered rosemary as proof. The technique of standing out into the open Atlantic to use the winds - the volta do mar - grew from that, and it is what eventually made the route to India possible. He made further voyages and reached the Senegal river. The town of Gil Eanes in Angola and a bay in the Azores carry his name. Nothing beyond the cape turned out to be dangerous, which is the useful part of the story: the barrier had been a belief, held firmly by experienced seamen, and one voyage dissolved it. Portuguese ships reached Sierra Leone within twenty years and the Cape of Good Hope within sixty. The first cargo of enslaved Africans landed at Lagos in the Algarve in 1444, a decade after he passed Bojador, and the two facts belong to the same sequence.

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