Meanwhile, from one of the envoys of the native kings who visited the Portuguese Court, information was received that far to the east of the countries hitherto discovered there was a great Christian king.  This brought to mind the mediaeval tradition of Prester John, and accordingly the Portuguese determined to make a double attempt, both by sea and by land, to reach this monarch.  By sea the king sent two vessels under the command of Bartholomew Diaz, while by land he despatched, in the following year, two men acquainted with Arabic, Pedro di Covilham and Affonso de Payba.  Covilham reached Aden, and there took ship for Calicut, being the first Portuguese to sail the Indian Ocean.  He then returned to Sofala, and obtained news of the Island of the Moon, now known as Madagascar.  With this information he returned to Cairo, where he found ambassadors from Joao, two Jews, Abraham of Beja and Joseph of Lamejo.  These he sent back with the information that ships that sailed down the coast of Guinea would surely reach the end of Africa, and when they arrived in the Eastern Ocean they should ask for Sofala and the Island of the Moon.  Meanwhile Covilham returned to the Red Sea, and made his way into Abyssinia, where he married and settled down, transmitting from time to time information to Portugal which gave Europeans their first notions of Abyssinia.

The voyage by land in search of Prester John had thus been completely successful, while, at the same time, information had been obtained giving certain hopes of the voyage by sea.  This had, in its way, been almost as successful, for Diaz had rounded the cape now known as the Cape of Good Hope, but to which he proposed giving the title of Cabo Tormentoso, or “Stormy Cape.”  King Joao, however, recognising that Diaz’s voyage had put the seal upon the expectations with which Prince Henry had, seventy years before, started his series of explorations, gave it the more auspicious name by which it is now known.

For some reason which has not been adequately explained, no further attempt was made for nearly ten years to carry out the final consummation of Prince Henry’s plan by sending out another expedition.  In the meantime, as we shall see, Columbus had left Portugal, after a mean attempt had been made by the king to carry out his novel plan of reaching India without his aid; and, as a just result, the discovery of a western voyage to the Indies (as it was then thought) had been successfully accomplished by Columbus, in the service of the Catholic monarchs of Spain, in 1492.  This would naturally give pause to any attempt at reaching India by the more cumbersome route of coasting along Africa, which had turned out to be a longer process than Prince Henry had thought.  Three years after Columbus’s discovery King Joao died, and his son and successor Emmanuel did not take up the traditional Portuguese method of reaching India till the third year of his reign.