During the Age of Exploration, Portuguese Navigators’ reports of the exploration of the African coast were closely guarded state secrets, to keep the information out of the hands of other European powers. In the Lisbon earthquake in 1755, the repository of all those reports, the Casa da India, collapsed and burned, so destroying all those documents. A couple of years ago, I wrote a series of poems to try to re-create them by writing poems about how various places on the African coast might have got their Portuguese names.

This is one of the poems…

Cabo Frio, Namibia
© Garth Dutton 2010

The Portuguese Navigators
reached Cabo Frio, (Cold Cape),
where the full force of
the icy Benguela Current
sweeps up from the south
and begins to merge
with tropical seas,
so confirming to the Navigators
that the world was round.

Reaching that Cape
may have been
the most important event
in maritime history,
for it marked
the beginning of the end
of all sailors’ greatest fear,
namely the fear of
sailing off the edge of the world…
A fear that had paralysed
open ocean navigation
for millennia.

This is possibly
why Columbus knew it was safe
to cross the Atlantic.