Which Portuguese explorer first rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1488?

Bartolomeu Dias, who was blown round it in a storm without seeing it and only realised on the way back. His crew then refused to go further and he turned for home - so the man who opened the sea route to Asia did not use it.

The king renamed it. Dias reportedly called it the Cape of Storms, and John II changed it to the Cape of Good Hope because the point was to advertise a route to India, not to warn people off it. Vasco da Gama sailed it ten years later and reached Calicut; Dias accompanied part of that voyage and was later drowned off the same cape in 1500.

The route is what made Portugal briefly enormous. A century of methodical work down the African coast - each expedition going a little further, backed by the state, with navigation and shipbuilding improved deliberately - produced a sea route that bypassed the Venetian and Ottoman middlemen entirely and collapsed the price of pepper in Lisbon. It is one of the clearest cases of sustained state-funded research paying off, and Portugal had roughly a century of dominance before the Dutch took it.