After accounts of European exploration have discussed the influence of Marco Polo, they tend to turn to the Portuguese and Henry the Navigator, the initial sponsor of their maritime exploration.
However, despite the prominence he is usually accorded, Henry did not start the process that unfolded after Mediterranean navigators overcame adverse currents in the Strait of Hercules.
They began to frequent the Atlantic in large numbers through the 13th century.
Some headed north to the lucrative markets of Flanders and England. Others tentatively ventured south into waters off the west coast of Africa unsailed — as far as written records are concerned — since the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century.
By the 1340s, according to Petrarch, Genoese ships had sailed to the Canary Islands and surviving maps dating back as far as 1339 show islands that appear to be the Madeira archipelago.
By the 1380s, maps show the Canaries, Madeira, and the Azores in a zone of navigation termed the Atlantic Mediterranean, a 'middle sea' surrounded by mainlands and archipelagoes which constituted, for a time, the practical limits of navigation.
The account here carries the narrative to the point where Bartholomeu Diaz rounded Africa's southern tip and set things up for Vasco da Gama's voyage to India.
What happened after that forms a significant part of the answer to The Portuguese Question; So did they reach and chart Australia's east coast?