SOUTH AFRICA

SOUTH AFRICA / SUID-AFRIKA.

500th Anniversary of Discovery of Cape of Good Hope by Bartolomeu Dias.
Africa, fragment of  the map of Henricus Martellus (1491).
Last stamp in a set of 4, issued on 03.02.1988.
Face value: 50 cents of South African rand.
Printing: Offset lithography.
Size: 38 x 29 mm.

Catalogues
- Michel No. 724.
- Scott No. 709.
- South African No. 646.
- StampWorld No. 763.
- Stanley Gibbons No. 634.
- Yvert et Tellier No. 641.

The Portuguese navigator Bartolomeu Dias (Algarve, ca. 1450 - at sea, May 29, 1500) was the first European explorer to round the southern tip of Africa in early 1488, reaching the Indian Ocean from the Atlantic. His expedition, made up of two caravels (São Cristóvão and São Pantaleão) and a supply ship, left Lisbon in late July or early August 1487, and in late December reached a place near the mouth of the Orange River. After several incidents, sailing out to sea, on February 3, 1488 he reached today’s Mossel Bay, and On March 12, continuing east, the expedition reached its furthest point in the Indian Ocean, the mouth of the Bushman River, but the crew refused to go any further. On their return to Portugal they discovered Cape Agulhas, the southernmost point of the continent, and Cape das Tormentas, which the Portuguese king, John II, named Cabo da Boa Esperança (Cape of Good Hope) because it was the place where opened the rout to reach to India. Bartolomé Dias died on May 29, 1500 on a subsequent voyage when the ship in which he was sailing was sunk near the Cape in the middle of a storm.

Henricus Martellus Germanus (Nuremberg? Ca. 1440 - ?) was a German geographer and cartographer, named Heinrich Hammer, who lived and worked in Florence from 1480 to 1496. Between 1489 and 1491 he produced at least one map of the world showing novel adaptations of the model existing Ptolemaic, opening a passage to southern Africa and creating a huge new peninsula east of the Golden Chersonese (Malaysia). It is possibly based on maps created around 1485 in Lisbon by Bartholomew Columbus.