1500 — Madagascar Sighted

On August 10, 1500 — the Feast of Saint Lawrence — a storm-battered Portuguese caravel under Captain Diogo Dias limped toward an unknown coastline. Lost from Cabral's India-bound fleet, Dias became the first European to sight Madagascar, naming it São Lourenço for the saint's day on which it appeared before him.

The Malagasy peoples had lived there a thousand years, and Arab traders knew it as the Island of the Moon. Madagascar was new only to Europe's maps. Yet once Dias drew the great island onto those maps, the ships of empires followed, and the island's long isolation from Europe was over.