Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 28, 2025
On the 16th of January 1832 we anchored at Porto Praya, in St. Jago, the chief island of the Cape de Verd archipelago. The neighbourhood of Porto Praya, viewed from the sea, wears a desolate aspect. The volcanic fires of a past age, and the scorching heat of a tropical sun, have in most places rendered the soil unfit for vegetation.
In the course of the voyage the vessel touched at Madeira; and in ten weeks after quitting Cape Verd Islands arrived at that of Hinzuan or Joanna, of which he has left a very lively and pleasing description.
Next year, 1462, Antonio de Noli, a Genoese, sent by the republic to Portugal, entered into the service of Don Henry, and in a voyage to the coast of Africa, discovered the islands which are known by the name of the Cape de Verd Islands, though they lie 100 leagues to the westward of that Cape.
And what a trade it was which the United Provinces were thus called upon to renounce! The foreign commerce of no other nation could be compared in magnitude to that of their commonwealth. Twenty ships traded regularly to Guinea, eighty to the Cape de Verd Islands, twenty to America, and forty to the East Indies.
They passed through a covered passage into a little garden overgrown with laurels and gnarled old pepper trees; there was a fountain with gold fish, and green arums were springing up about a broken faun's head set on a pedestal of verd' antico. Some men were standing together in the path, a pretty dark-eyed peasant girl with them.
The conclusion here arrived at was still further verified by another sirocco-storm in May 1846, which extended to Genoa, and bore with it a dust that 'covered the roofs of the city in great abundance. This, as was clearly ascertained, contained formations identical with those which had been collected off the Cape de Verd; and it was shewn that the dust-showers of the Atlantic, and those of Malta and Genoa, were 'always of a yellow ochre-like colour not gray, like those of the kamsin, in North Africa. The peculiar colour of the dust was found to be caused by iron-oxide; and from one-sixth to one-third of the whole proved to consist 'of determinable organic parts. In the following year, 1847, Ehrenberg had another opportunity of testing his conclusions, in specimens of dust which had fallen in Italy and Sicily in 1802 and 1813; the same result came out on examination; 'several species peculiar to South America, and none peculiar to Africa.
The members of the band, some ten or twelve in number, who had nothing to do but keep their instruments polished, and play a lively air now and then, to stir the stagnant current in our poor old Commodore's torpid veins, were the most gleeful set of fellows you ever saw. They were Portuguese, who had been shipped at the Cape De Verd islands, on the passage out.
A Portuguese station in the Bissago Archipelago had been attacked by the negroes, and when reinforcements had been asked for, the government at Lisbon had answered by sending two transports to fetch troops from the Cape Verd Islands, from Porto-Praya, where we had anchored, in particular, and to convey them to the threatened spot.
After remaining some time at Cape Verd waiting in vain for the missing ships, Cabral proceeded on his voyage, and arrived safe at Lisbon on the last day of July, in the year 1501. Soon after his arrival, the ship which had separated in a storm off the Cape of Good Hope, came in; and shortly after that, Sancho de Toar arrived from Sofala.
In 1443 they reached southward beyond the sands of the Sahara and saw Cape Verd, discovered that Africa was not all burning desert, that heat would not forever increase as they went southward.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking