Page 12 - Bulletin 20 2016

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Hope as recorded on June 6 , 1488. The Portuguese chronicler Francisco López de Gómara
in the dedication to Emperor Charles V of his General History of the Indies in 1552 declared
the discovery of the Cape of Good Hope to be:
“the greatest event since the creation of the world, apart from the incarnation and
death of Him who created it” (10) .

High praise indeed, which before being dismissed as yet another example of hyperbole on the
part of a Portuguese chronicler trying to win favour in the eyes of his sovereign, one might
also consider together with the words of that leading figure of the Scottish enlightenment,
Adam Smith. Regarded as the founder of the modern science of economics, Smith’s theories
on international free-trade and tariffs have influenced the field of global economics to this
day and in his seminal work, The Wealth of Nations (1776), was led to conclude that:

“The discovery of America and that of the passage to the East Indies by the Cape of
Good Hope are the two greatest and most important events in the history of
mankind” (11).

The discovery of the Cape of Good Hope by Bartolomeu Dias not only pioneered the way for
the voyage of Vasco da Gama - which ten years later established the Cape sea-route/
Carriera da India - but set off nothing less than a realignment of the existing global
geopolitical order. The Oriental / Eastern world would no longer be seen to meet the
Occidental / Western world along the shores of the Levant and Black Sea but rather at the
Cape of Good Hope. This discovery can also be argued to have been the final prod needed to
spur King Ferdinand and Queen Isabelle of Spain (Portugal’s archrival) to at last acquiesce to
the entreaties of Christopher Columbus and sponsor his expedition westward in search of
what - for the rest of his life – Columbus believed was not a new world of North and South
America but the eastern shores of Asia. In fact, for the next twenty years - while the spices
and luxury trade goods of the orient flowed to Portugal making it one of the wealthiest
nations in Europe - Spain found little of immediate material wealth in the ‘New World’ other
than fertile land and slave labour to work it. It was not until the looting of the Aztec Empire
began under Hérnán Cortez in 1520 - followed by that of the Inca Empire by Francisco
Pizarro in the 1530s - that the truly fantastic and before only imagined mineral wealth of the
new world, began flowing to Spain. (Fig. 2.4.)

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