320 A TROPICAL DEPENDENCY Turks were pressing upon Eastern Europe and interfering with all the old routes of the Indian and Chinese trade, the Portuguese, in their capacity of an Atlantic people, were making courageous efforts to find another and a safer road by sea to the Eastern markets. Already, as has been seen, they had crept round the shoulder of the African coast, and had made a few cautious settlements upon its shores. In 1497 they attained the object of their desire, and Vasco da Gama doubled the Cape of Good Hope. The date of the expulsion of the Moors from Spain was 1502. Thus, within five years of each other, there happened two events which profoundly influenced the history of the Soudan. The expulsion of the Moors, followed during the sixteenth century by the wars of Charles V. and his successors against Mohammedanism upon the Mediterranean coasts, closed the old means of approach by land to the territories of the finer races of the Soudan. The discovery of the passage of the Cape of Good Hope opened at the same moment new means of approach by sea. It diverted the whole stream of European intercourse with the far East, and as the caravan trade of Egypt, Persia, and Arabia sank into insignificance, the maritime trade of the Atlantic rose in importance. The Atlantic Ocean became a highway of the world, and while, all unaware of the change, the peoples of the interior continued to look vainly towards the closed avenues of the north — the west coast of Africa fronting on the Atlantic began to face no longer north but south to civilisation. The sea was open to all who had ships to sail upon it. Thus, when Europe approached West Africa, it was upon the coast that her adventurers landed. It was with coast natives that she had to deal — natives who had from time immemorial been enslaved — and it was in the coast climate that her settlements were made. The coast belt was too broad for her to traverse. Its inhabitants were savage, its climate was deadly, its jungle impenetrable without the auxiliary force of steam. For upwards of 400 years