Strong prevailing winds made it almost impossible for a ship to return north of the cape once it had passed it, rendering the spot truly a point of no return—or, in the parlance of European sailors in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the "Green Sea of Darkness."
Impact
The story of Eannes (fl. 1433-1445), and his feat in passing Cape Bojador, is inextricably tied with that of Prince Henry the Navigator (1394-1460). A man who, more than any other individual, deserves the credit for initiating the Age of Exploration, Henry himself never traveled further from home than Tunis, and certainly never took part in any of the expeditions and voyages that he helped organize. Yet from his informal "school" in Sagres, on the extreme southwestern tip of Portugal, ships went out to what were then the edges of the known world: the Azores, the Madeiras, the Canaries—and beyond.
The first stop beyond the Canary Islands was Cape Bojador, which, in addition to posing a profound physical barrier, constituted an even more formidable psychological one.
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