Portuguese
Once they have discussed the influence of Marco Polo, accounts of European expansion and exploration tend to start with the Portuguese and the initial sponsor of their maritime exploration, the figure history has come to know as Henry the Navigator.
Despite the prominence the Infante Henrique, Duke of Viseu, is usually accorded, he did not begin a process that had been gradually unfolding since Mediterranean navigators began to frequent the Atlantic through the 13th century.
By the 1340s, Genoese ships had sailed to the Canary Islands. By the 1380s, maps show the Canaries, Madeira and what looks to be the Azores in what has been termed the 'Atlantic Mediterranean'.
After Gil Eanes became the first European known to have passed Cape Bojador in 1434, successive expeditions gradually took things further. By 1462, Portuguese exploration had stretched as far as Sierra Leone.
After Henry died in 1460, Portugal's royal family sold off the rights to the African enterprise to a Lisbon merchant consortium in return for an annual payment of 200,000 reals and an undertaking to explore one hundred leagues (480 kilometres) of coastline every year, the syndicate received a five-year monopoly of the trade in gold dust, Melegueta pepper, ivory and sub-Saharan slaves.
In the meantime, Portuguese seafarers had reached West Africa's Gold Coast (Ghana). They established Elmina ('the mine'), which delivered an annual yield of half a ton of gold.
When the monopoly came up for renewal in 1474, the future João II asked his father to pass the African charter to him.
Eight years later, Diogo Cão discovered the Congo River and continued as far as Angola. A second voyage (1484–1486) revisited the Congo and continued to the neighbourhood of Walvis Bay in Namibia.
Then, in 1487-88, Bartholomeu Dias identified a route to the east around Africa's southernmost tip. Eleven years later, Vasco da Gama reached India, completing a process that lasted almost a century.
