ABSTRACT
The criterion for selecting the fifteenth-century writers is that they should all be individuals who wrote vernacular accounts in the autobiographical mode of what they had seen and heard in the newly-discovered African Atlantic and particularly in Guinea. Indeed, as Columbus himself pointed out, according to most cosmographers tropical Africa ought to be uninhabitable by ordinary members of the human race. Cá da Mosto's curiosity sometimes gave him special opportunities for practising that oneupmanship at the expense of stay-at-homes which is an underlying feature of all travel writing. Thus he describes very accurately the characteristics of the African elephant. Pedro de Sintra completed a voyage of exploration as far as modem Liberia shortly after Henry the Navigator's death in 1460, when the Guinea monopoly had reverted to the Crown. Cá da Mosto wrote his account of this voyage in his own style and in accordance with the approach he had employed when narrating his own firsthand experiences.
