During the eight years that had now elapsed since the first voyage of the Admiral, a considerable number of navigators had already immortalized themselves by important discoveries and explorations. The Cabots, going out from Bristol, where they had doubtless learned of the projects and the success of Columbus, sailed westward by a more northerly route, and after reaching the continent a year before South America was touched by the Spanish navigator, explored the coast as far as from Newfoundland to Florida. As early as 1487, after seventy years of slow advances down the six thousand miles of western African coast, the Portuguese, under Bartholomew Diaz, as we have already noted, had reached the Cape of Good Hope; and ten years later, just as Columbus was preparing for his third voyage, Vasca da Gama doubled the Cape, and in the following spring cast anchor in the bay at Calicut. In the spring of 1499 Pedro Alonzo Nino, who had accompanied Columbus as a pilot in the voyage to Cuba and Paria, obtained a license, and not only explored the coast of Central America for several hundred miles, but traded his European goods to such advantage as to enable him to return after one of the most extensive and lucrative voyages yet accomplished. In the same year, Vincente Yanez Pinzon, who had commanded one of the ships in the first expedition of Columbus, pushed boldly to the southwest, and, crossing the equator, came finally to the great headland which is now known as Cape St. Augustine, and for their Catholic Majesties not only took possession of the territories called the Brazils, but discovered what was afterwards appropriately named the River of the Amazons. In the year 1500 Diego Lepe, fired with the zeal for discovery that had set the port of Palos aglow, went still farther to the south, and, turning Cape St. Augustine, ascertained that either the mainland or an enormous island ran far away to the southwest. Most important and significant of all, the fleet which, in the year 1500, was sent out from Portugal under Pedro Cabral, for the Cape of Good Hope, in striving, according to the advice of Da Gama, to avoid the dangers of the coast islands, drifted so far west that when it was caught in a violent easterly storm, it was driven upon the coast of Brazil, and thus proved that even if Columbus had not lived and sailed, America would have been made known to Europe in the very first year of the sixteenth century.