In 1488, however, a Portuguese captain called Bartholomew Diaz (Bartolomeu Dias) had provided tantalizing evidence that another route might exist. Diaz had been tasked by John II with going farther along the African coastline than any European sailor before him, and in the course of a battle with the seas that lasted nearly eighteen months, he succeeded. In February 1488 he rounded the Cape of Good Hope, which he originally dubbed the Cape of Storms, and went as far as Algoa Bay (the inlet east of Port Elizabeth in modern South Africa)
