Bartolomeu Dias

A statue of Bartolomeu Dias in Cape Town

Bartolomeu Dias, also known as Bartholomew Dias,(1450 - May 29, 1500) was a Portuguese explorer who was the first European to sail past the Cape of Good Hope.Bartholomew and his sailors sailed along the western coast of Africa.They got caught in a storm and landed at a cape in southern part of Africa and they could not sail beyond that point and named it "cape of storms" and later returned to Portugal.Then the king of Portugal who considered it as a victory gained by the Portuguese adventurers and named it as "cape of good hope". In 1487, King John II from Portugal asked Dias to search for the land of a Christian king named Prester John in the east. Because Prester John did not really exist, he did not find the land but instead found a route from the Atlantic Ocean to the Indian ocean leading to Asia in 1488. Commanding a ship in Pedro Álvares Cabral´s expedition to Brazil he died at sea in 1500 during a storm. There was a statue made for him later in Cape Town, South Africa.