European exploration of Africa
One of the ships under command of Diogo Dias arrived at a coast that was not in East Africa. Two years later, a chart already showed an elongated island east of Africa that bore the name Madagascar. But only a century later, between 1613 and 1619, did the Portuguese explore the island in detail. They signed treaties with local chieftains and sent the first missionaries, who found it impossible to make locals believe in Hell, and were eventually expelled.
History of Madagascar
Necho II's Phoenician expedition c. 595 BC circumnavigated Africa but did not see Madagascar when passing through the Mozambique Channel, as it stayed within sight of land. The island was likely uninhabited; the earliest unambiguous evidence of human presence in Madagascar was found at Andavakoera and dates to 490 CE. There is some evidence for earlier human presence, but it is ambiguous or not widely studied yet. Archaeological finds such as cut marks on bones found in the northwest and stone tools in the northeast indicate that Madagascar was visited by foragers around 2000 BCE. There is potential evidence in the form of a cutmarked subfossil lemur bone from a palaeontological site, Taolambiby, in the southwest. One date was obtained, calibrated 530 to 300 BCE (Godfrey & Jungers 2003). The cutmarking looks plausible, but there is a potential problem of old carbon from the limestone landscape compromising the date, and there are no associated artifacts or archaeological sites in the vicinity. Nearly contemporaneous potential evidence comes from cannabis or humulus pollen which occurs in a pollen column from the central highlands at an interpolated date of c. 2200 Before Present (BP). There is some suspicion that cannabis may have reached Africa 3000 years ago.