10
LIFE A N D VOYAGES OF
[BOOK
VIII.
years. It will be recollected, that about the time of the admiral's departure from Portugal, he had commissioned Bartholomew to repair to England, and propose his project of discovery to King Henry VII. Of this application to the English court no precise particulars are known. Fernando Columbus states that his uncle, in the course of his voyage, was captured and plundered by a corsair, and reduced to such poverty, that he had for a long time to struggle for a mere subsistence by making sea-charts ; so that some years elapsed before he made his application to the English monarch. Las Casas thinks that he did not immediately proceed to England, having found a memorandum in his handwriting, by which it would appear that he accompanied Bartholomew Diaz in 1486, in his voyage along the coast of Africa, in the service of the king of Portugal, in the course of which voyage was discov足 ered the Cape of Good Hope.* * The memorandum cited by Las Casas (Hist. Ind. lib. i. cap. 7) is curi足 ous, though not conclusive. He says that he found it in an old book belonging to Christopher Columbus, containing the works of Pedro de Aliaco.
It was
written in the margin of a treatise on the form of the globe, in the handwriting of Bartholomew Columbus, which was well known to Las Casas, as he had many of his letters in his possession.
The memorandum was in a barbarous
mixture of Latin and Spanish, and to the following effect. In the year 1488, in December, arrived at Lisbon Bartholomew Diaz, cap足 tain of three caravels, which the king of Portugal sent to discover Guinea, and brought accounts that he had discovered six hundred leagues of territory, four hundred and fifty to the south and one hundred and fifty north, to a cape, named by him the Cape of Good Hope ; and that by the astrolabe he found the cape 45 degrees beyond the equinoctial line.
This cape was 3100 leagues
distant from Lisbon : the which the said captain says he set down, league by league, in a chart of navigation presented by him to the king of Portugal ; in all which, adds the writer, I was present (in quibus omnibus interfui).