"The land here," he tells us, "is all low and full of fine, large trees, which are continually green. The trees never wither like those in Europe; they grow so near the shore that they seem to drink, as it were, the water of the sea. The coast is most beautiful. Many countries have I been in, to East and West, but never did I see a prettier sight." But the negroes here--big, comely men--were lawless and impossible to approach, shooting at the Portuguese explorers with poisoned arrows. They discovered that the capital of the country was called Gambra, where lived a king, but the negroes of the Gambra were unfriendly; there was little gold to be had; his crews fell sick and ill, and Cadamosto turned home again. But he had reached a point beyond all other explorers of the time, a point where "only once did we see the North Star, which was so low that it seemed almost to touch the sea." We know that he must have been to within eleven degrees of the Equator, and it is disappointing to find the promising young Italian disappearing from the pages of history. [Illustration: A PORTION OF AFRICA FROM FRA MAURO'S MAP ILLUSTRATING CADAMOSTO'S VOYAGE BEYOND CAPE BLANCO.] And now we come to the last voyage planned by Prince Henry, that of Diego Gomez, his own faithful servant. It followed close on Cadamosto's return. No long time after, the Prince equipped a ship called the _Wren_ and set over it Diego Gomez, with two other ships, of which he was commander-in-chief. Their orders were to go as far as they could. Gomez wrote his own travels, and his adventures are best told in his own words. We take up his story from the far side of Cape Blanco.