The first European vessels to navigate the Skeleton Coast were Portuguese caravels in the 1480s, sent by the Portuguese crown to find a sea route to the East Indies that would bypass the land-based Ottoman-controlled trade routes. The voyages of Diogo Cão and Bartolomeu Dias produced the first European maps of the Namibian coastline and left physical evidence, stone crosses called padrões, at the limits of each voyage.
Diogo Cão at Cape Cross (1486)
Cão’s second voyage (1485 to 1486) was the first to reach the Namibian coast in any documented way. He erected a padrão at Cape Cross, the cross that gives the location its name, marking the furthest point of his southward exploration. The inscription on the cross (reconstructed from documentation; the original is in Berlin) identified the Portuguese king and the date of erection.
Cão did not proceed further south on this voyage. He turned back at Cape Cross, having reached approximately 21°S latitude. The question of what was south of Cape Cross remained open for another decade.
Bartolomeu Dias and the Cape (1487 to 1488)
Dias’s voyage succeeded where Cão’s had turned back. Dias passed the Skeleton Coast, rounded the Cape of Good Hope, and established that the Indian Ocean was accessible from the Atlantic. The voyage was transformative for European geography; the Skeleton Coast was simply the section of difficult coastline between the known world and the passage Dias was looking for.
Dias described the Namibian coast as inhospitable; he sought fresh water at several points along the coast and found none. The coast of death that the Portuguese named was experiential rather than legendary: they were dying of thirst on its beaches.
The Padrões
The stone crosses that the Portuguese erected at the limits of their voyages were both navigational markers and territorial claims. Three replica padrões stand on the Namibian coast; the Cape Cross replica is the most visited. The originals, where they survive, are in European museums, testament to the 19th-century European interest in reclaiming colonial heritage items.