Around 1496–1497, the Portuguese trader Lourenço Marques explored the bay and coastal regions of southeastern Africa that would later bear his name — present-day Maputo Bay in Mozambique. His reconnaissance was part of the broader Portuguese maritime push down the East African coast that preceded Vasco da Gama's epochal voyage to India in 1497–1499. The Portuguese mapping of East Africa integrated this region into European geographical imagination for the first time and established trading contacts with the Swahili coast's sophisticated mercantile civilization. These voyages collectively dismantled medieval European geographical assumptions and opened the Indian Ocean to sustained cross-cultural exchange.

The Portuguese exploration of East Africa entered literary consciousness most powerfully through Camões's 'Os Lusíadas,' which dramatizes da Gama's voyage and explicitly engages with the Swahili coast and its peoples. The encounters with Swahili Islamic civilization challenged European categories of civilization and barbarism in ways that reverberate through early modern travel writing and colonial poetry. The broader Age of Discovery literature these voyages generated — from Portuguese chronicles to Elizabethan travel narratives — created the archive from which poets from Spenser to Keats would draw images of wonder, distance, and exotic otherness.