Thus were the Azores, the Canaries and Madeira rediscovered and settled, the pilots venturing with terror into that “Green Sea of Darkness” where sea monsters threatened their passage, and at last daring to sail farther into the southern waters where not only the water but the land boiled with the terrible heat, they said. Rounding Cape Bojador they found a coast populated with sturdy blacks, began the slave trade that demoralized half the world; in 1486 Bartholomeo Diaz rounded the “Cape of Storms” and proved that there was indeed as Henry, dead for a quarter of a century, had dreamed, a southern gateway to the Spice Isles of the East—the goal of adventurers ever since Marco Polo’s tale was spread abroad. By this discovery the whole imagination of seafaring Europe was awakened: small wonder that Columbus in the end got a hearing when he talked of a sea-path to the East by way of the West, or that, on his return with a story of rich lands, Spain should have been satisfied to believe the theory that the shores of Cathay had been found. Columbus, who became half demented towards the close of his life, never knew that he had found anything but lands on the edge of Cathay; he once forced his men to take an oath to this effect under the penalty of hanging them to the yards of his ship. To his obsession was chiefly due the lack of any clear conception in Europe of the existence of a great new continent until the Portuguese captain stumbled upon Brazil in 1500, although three years before Alonzo de Ojeda and Amerigo Vespucci had coasted the Caribbean, charting the north coast of Venezuela and Colombia as well as the east of Central America. That year of 1497 was the great year of discoveries, in sea adventure, for then began the series of voyages of the Cabot family, Labrador being discovered in that first scouring of the north seas by Europeans; from that year also dates that strange chapter of oriental history, Portuguese rule in India, when Vasco da Gama sailed past the Cape of Good Hope and reached Calicut. Early in 1500 Captain Pedro Alvares Cabral was despatched with a fleet of thirteen ships to follow up the conquests of da Gama; warned of the calms off the African coast which later became notorious among sailors as the “doldrums,” he stood far out to sea, was caught in strong currents, and found himself to his astonishment off an unknown coast. Sailing south until a safe landing place was reached (Porto Seguro, some twelve miles north of the little town on the Bahian coast that today bears the name) he landed on Good Friday morning, was received in a friendly manner by the South American natives to whom Europe was thus discovered, took possession of the territory in the name of the Portuguese King, sent a ship back to Lisbon under André Gonçalves to report the discovery, and sailed on again to India.