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An important discovery in the year 1445 removed many erroneous conceptions. Dinas Diaz in that year sailed farther south than any navigator had gone before. He passed Cape Blanco, reached the southern line of the Great Desert, and found a region green with palms, and people with black skins. The spot he discovered was called the “Green Cape.” He proved that the theory that the tropics were uninhabitable was false. Aristotle had maintained that the tropical regions must be unpeopled because the overpowering heat of the sun’s rays would destroy all vegetation. Other scholars, among them Ptolemy, were of the same opinion. The theory indeed was so universally accepted at the beginning of the fifteenth century that many a bold adventurer was deterred from making explorations in that direction.

In the same year, however, the Senegal, which Diaz had passed unobserved, was discovered on a second voyage. The river was declared to be a branch of the Egyptian Nile. In the following year the Portuguese met with a serious disaster on the African coast. Two vessels, owing to the misplaced confidence of their commanders in the negroes, ventured too near and were greeted by a shower of poisoned arrows. The wounded explorers died after reaching Lisbon, two months later, without having seen anything but sky and water. This disaster, however, did not deter other brave navigators from undertaking further explorations beyond the Green Cape, though they dreaded the poisoned arrows of the natives more than any hardships or perils of the sea.