Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery Part 11

HENRY'S SETTLEMENT AT SAGRES AND FIRST DISCOVERIES.

1418-28.

Whatever the Prince owed to his stay at Ceuta beyond the general suggestion and encouragement to take up a life-profession of discovery, it was at any rate put into practice on his second and last return (1418). From that time to the end of his life he became a recluse from the Court life of Lisbon, though he soon gathered round himself a rival Court, of science and seamans.h.i.+p.

The old "Sacred Cape" of the Romans, then called Sagres, now the "Cape St. Vincent" of Nelson and modern maps, was his chosen home for the next forty years, though he seems to have pa.s.sed a good deal of his time in his port of Lagos, close by.

In 1419 King John made him Governor for life of the Algarves (the southern province of Portugal) and the new governor at once began to rebuild and enlarge the old naval a.r.s.enal, in the neck of the Cape, into a settlement that soon became the "Prince's Town." In Lagos, his s.h.i.+ps were built and manned; and there, and in Sagres itself, all the schemes of discovery were thought out, the maps and instruments corrected, and the accounts of past and present travellers compared by the Prince himself. His results then pa.s.sed into the instructions of his captains and the equipment of his caravels. The Sacred Cape, which he now colonised, was at any rate a good centre for his work of ocean voyaging.

Here, with the Atlantic was.h.i.+ng the land on three sides, he was well on the scene of action. There were buildings on Sagres headland as old as the eleventh century; Greek geography had made this the starting-point of its shorter and continental measurements for the length of the habitable world, and the Genoese, whose policy was to buy up points of vantage on every coast, were eager to plant a colony there, but Portugal was not ready to become like the Byzantine Empire, a depot for Italian commerce, and Henry had his own reasons for securing a desolate promontory.

On this he now built himself a palace, a chapel, a study, an observatory--the earliest in Portugal--and a village for his helpers and attendants. "In his wish to gain a prosperous result for his efforts, the Prince devoted great industry and thought to the matter, and at great expense procured the aid of one Master Jacome from Majorca, a man skilled in the art of navigation and in the making of maps and instruments, and who was sent for, with certain of the Arab and Jewish mathematicians, to instruct the Portuguese in that science." So at least, says De Barros, the "Livy of Portugal." At Sagres was thus founded anew the systematic study of applied science in Christendom; it was better than the work of the old Greek "University" at Alexandria with which it has been compared, because it was essentially practical.

From it "our sailors," says Pedro Nunes, "went out well taught and provided with instruments and rules which all map-makers should know."

We would gladly know more of Henry's scientific work; a good many legends have grown up about it, and even his foundation of the Chair of Mathematics in the University of Lisbon or Coimbra, our best evidence of the unrecorded work of his school, has been doubted by some modern critics, even by the national historian, Alexander Herculano. But to Prince Henry's study and science two great improvements on this side may be traced: first in the art of map-making, secondly in the building of caravels and ocean craft.

The great Venetian map of Fra Mauro of the Camaldolese convent of Murano, finished in 1459, one year before the Navigator's death, is evidence for the one; Cadamosto's words, as a practical seaman, of Italian birth, in Henry's service, that the "caravels of Portugal were the best sailing s.h.i.+ps afloat," may be proof sufficient of the other.

On both these lines, Henry took up the results of Italians and worked towards success with their aid. As Columbus and the Cabots and Verazzano in later times represented the intellectual leaders.h.i.+p of Italy to other nations--Spain, England, and France; but had to find their career and resources not in their own commercial republics, but at the Courts of the new centralised kingdoms of the West, where a paternal despotism gave the best hope of guiding any popular movement, social or religious or political or scientific,--so in the earlier fifteenth century, mariners like Cadamosto and De Nolli, scientific draughtsmen like Fra Mauro and Andrea Bianco, looked from Venice and Genoa to the Court of Sagres and to the service of Prince Henry as their proper sphere, where they would find the encouragement and reward they sought for at home and often sought in vain.

Henry's settlement on Cape St. Vincent was not long without results. The voyage of his captain, John de Trasto, to the "fruitful" district of Grand Canary in 1415 was not in any sense a discovery, as the conquest of John de Bethencourt in 1402 had made these "Fortunate" islands perfectly well known, but the finding of Porto Santo and Madeira in 1418-20 was a real gain. For the Machin story of the English landing in Madeira was a close secret, which by good fortune pa.s.sed into the Prince's keeping, but not beyond, so that as far as general knowledge went, the Portuguese were now fairly embarked upon the Sea of Darkness.

First came the sighting of the "Holy Haven" in 1418. In this year, says Azurara, two squires of the Prince's household, named John Gonsalvez Zarco and Tristam Vaz, eager for renown and anxious to serve their lord, had set out to explore as far as the coast of Guinea, but they were caught by a storm near Lagos and driven to the island of Porto Santo.

This name they gave themselves "at this very time in their joy at thus escaping the perils of the tempest."

Zarco and Vaz returned in triumph to Sagres and reported the new-found island to be well worth a permanent settlement. Henry, always "generous," took up the idea with great interest and sent out Zarco and Vaz with another of his equerries, one Bartholomew Perestrello, to colonise, with two s.h.i.+ps and products for a new country; corn, honey, the sugar cane from Sicily, the Malvoisie grape from Crete, even the rabbit from Portugal.

On his first return voyage Zarco had captured the pilot Morales of Seville, and from him the Prince had gained certain news of the English landing in Madeira. So it was with a definite purpose of further discovery that his captains returned to Porto Santo in 1420, with Morales as their guide. Now, as before, Zarco appears as chief in command; he had won himself a name at Ceuta, and if the tradition be true, had just brought in the first use of s.h.i.+p-artillery; the finding of Porto Santo was mainly credited to him.

Sailing from Lagos in June, 1420, he had no sooner reached once again the "Fair Haven" of his first success, than he was called to note a dark line, like a mark of distant land, upon the south-west horizon. The colonists he had left on his earlier visit had watched this day by day till they had made certain of its being something more than a pa.s.sing appearance of sea or sky, and Morales was ready with his suggestion that this was Machin's island. The fog that hung over this part of the ocean would be natural to a thick and dank woodland like that on the island of his old adventure.

Zarco resolved to try: After eight days' rest in Porto Santo he set sail, and, observing that the fog grew less toward the east of the cloud bank, made for that point and came upon a low marshy cape, which he called St. Lawrence Head. Then, creeping round the south coast, he came to the high lands and the forests of Madeira,--so named here and now, either as De Barros says, "from the thick woods they found there," or, in the form of Machico, from the first discoverer, luckless Robert Machin. For on landing the Portuguese, guided by Morales, soon found the wooden cross and grave of the Englishman and his mistress, and it was there that Zarco, with no human being to dispute his t.i.tle, "took seizin" of the island in the name of King John, Prince Henry, and the Order of Christ.

Embarking once more, he then coasted slowly round from the "River of the Flint" to "Jackdaw Point," and the "Chamber of the Wolves," where his men started a herd of sea-calves. So he came to the vast plain overgrown with fennel or "Funchal," where the chief town of after days grew up. A party sent inland to explore, reported that on every side the ocean could be seen from the hills; and Zarco, after taking in some specimens of the native wood and plants and birds at Funchal, put back in the last days of August to Portugal.

He was splendidly received at Court, made a count--"Count of the Chamber of the Wolves,"--and granted the command of the island for his own life. A little later, the commanders.h.i.+p was made hereditary in his family. Tristam Vaz, the second in the Prince's commission, was rewarded too: the northern half of Madeira was given him as a captaincy, and in 1425 Henry began to colonise in form. Zarco, as early as May, 1421, had returned with wife and children and attendants, and begun to build the "port of Machico," and the "city of Funchal," but this did not become a state affair until four years more had gone by.

But from the first, the island, by its export of wood and dragon's blood and wheat, began to reward the trouble of discovery and settlement.

Sugar and wine were brought to perfection in later years, after the great "Seven years' fire" had burnt down the forests and enriched the soil of Madeira. It was soon after Zarco's return to Funchal that he first set fire to the woods behind the fennel fields of the coast, to clear himself a way through the undergrowth into the heart of the island; the fire blazed and smouldered till it had taken well hold of the entire ma.s.s of timber that covered the upper country, nothing in the feeble resources of the first settlers could stop it, and Madeira lighted the s.h.i.+ps of Henry on their way to the south, like a volcano, till 1428. This was at least the common story as told in Portugal, and it was often joined with another--of the rabbit plague, which ate up all the green stuff of the island in the first struggling years of Zarco's settlement, and so prevented the export of anything but timber. So much of this was brought into Portugal that Henry's lifetime is a landmark in the domestic architecture of Spain, and from the trade of the "Wood Island" is derived the lofty style of building that now began to replace the more modest fas.h.i.+on of the Arabs.

A charter of Henry's, dated 1430, ten years after the rediscovery of Madeira, and reciting the names of some of the first settlers, and his bequest of the island, or rather of its "spiritualties," to the Order of Christ on September 18, 1460, just before his death, are the chief links between this colony and the home country in the next generation--but in the history of inst.i.tutions there are few more curious facts than the insistence of the Prince on a census for his little "Nation." From the first, the family registers of the colonists were carefully kept, and from these we see something of the wonder of men who were beginning human life, as it were, in a new land. The first children born in Madeira--a son and daughter of Ayres Ferreira, one of Zarco's comrades--were christened Adam and Eve.[36]

[Footnote 36: In 1418 and 1424-5 Henry purchased and tried to secure certain rights of possession in the Canaries, conceded by De Bethencourt; and these attempts were repeated in 1445 and 1446.]

CHAPTER X.

CAPE BOJADOR AND THE AZORES.

1428-1441.

But in spite of Zarco's success, Cape Bojador had not yet been pa.s.sed, though every year, from 1418, caravels had left Sagres, "to find the coasts of Guinea."

In 1428, Don Pedro, Henry's elder brother, had come home from his travels, with all the books and charts he had collected to help the explorers--and it is practically certain that the Mappa Mundi given him in Venice acted as a direct suggestion to the next attempts on west and south--westward to the Azores, southward towards Guinea.

Kept in the royal monastery of Alcobaca till late in the sixteenth century, though now irrecoverably lost, this treasure of Don Pedro's, like his "ma.n.u.scripts of travel," would seem to have been used at the Sagres school till Prince Henry's death, and at least as early as 1431 its effect was seen in the first Portuguese recovery of the Azores. All the West African islands, plainly enough described in the map of 1428, were half within, half without the knowledge of Christendom, ever and anon being brought back or rediscovered by some accident or enterprise, and then being lost to sight and memory through the want of systematic exploration. This was exactly what the Portuguese supplied. The Azores, marked on the Laurentian Portulano of 1351, were practically unknown to seamen when, after eighty years had pa.s.sed, Gonzalo Cabral was sent out from Sagres to find them (1431). He reached the Formiga group--the Ant islands,--and next year (1432) returned to make further discoveries, chiefly of the island Santa Maria. But the more important advances on this side were made between 1444-50, after the first colony had been planted twelve or fourteen years, and were the result of the Prince's theoretical correction of his captains' practical oversight. From a comparison of old maps and descriptions with their accounts, he was able to correct their line of sail and so to direct them to the very islands they had searched for in vain.

But as yet these results were far distant, and the slow and sure progress of African coasting towards Cape Bojador was the chief outcome of Pedro's help. In 1430, 1431, and 1432, the Infant urged upon his captains the paramount importance of rounding the Cape, which had baffled all his caravels by its strong ocean currents and dangerous rocks. At last this became the Prince's one command: Pa.s.s the Cape if you do nothing beyond; yet the years went by, King John of good memory died in 1433, and Gil Eannes, sent out in the same year with strong hopes of success, turned aside at the Canaries and only brought a few slaves back to Portugal. A large party at Court, in the Army, and among the n.o.bles and merchant cla.s.ses, complained bitterly of the utter want of profit from Henry's schemes, and there was at this time a danger of the collapse of his movement. For though as yet he paid his own expenses, his treasury could not long have stood the drain without any incoming.

Bojador, the "paunch" or "bulging Cape," 180 miles beyond Cape Non, had been, since the days of the Laurentian Portulano (1351), and the Catalan and Portuguese voyages of 1341 and 1346, the southmost point of Christian knowledge. A long circuit was needed here, as at the Cape of Good Hope, to round a promontory that stretched, men said, fully one hundred miles into the ocean, where tides and shoals formed a current twenty miles across. It was the sight or the fancy of this furious surge which frightened Henry's crews, for it plainly forbade all coasting and compelled the seamen to strike into the open sea out of sight of land.

And though the discovery of Porto Santo had proved the feasibility and the gain of venturing boldly into the Sea of Darkness, and though since that time (1418) the Prince had sent out his captains due west to the Azores and south-west to Madeira, both hundreds of miles from the continent, yet in rounding Bojador there were not only the real terrors of the Atlantic, but the legends of the tropics to frighten back the boldest.

Most mariners had heard it said that any Christian who pa.s.sed Bojador would infallibly be changed into a black, and would carry to his end this mark of G.o.d's vengeance on his insolent prying. The Arab tradition of the Green Sea of Night had too strongly taken hold of Christian thought to be easily shaken off. And it was beyond the Cape which bounded their knowledge that the Saracen geographers had fringed the coast of Africa with sea-monsters and serpent rocks and water unicorns, instead of place names, and had drawn the horrible giant hand of Satan raised above the waves to seize the first of his human prey that would venture into his den. If G.o.d made the firm earth, the Devil made the unknown and treacherous ocean--this was the real lesson of most of the mediaeval maps, and it was this ingrained superst.i.tion that Henry found his worst enemy, appearing as it did sometimes even in his most trusted and daring captains.

And then again, the legends of Tropical Africa, of the mainland beyond Bojador, were hardly less terrible than those of the Tropical Ocean. The Dark Continent, with its surrounding Sea of Darkness, was the home of mystery and legend. We have seen how ready the Arabs were to write Uninhabitable over any unknown country--dark seas and lands were simply those that were dark to them, like the Dark Ages to others, but nowhere did their imagination revel in genies and fairies and magicians and all the horrors of h.e.l.l, with more enthusiastic and genial interest than in Africa. Here only the northern parts could be lived in by man. In the south and central deserts, as we have heard from the Moslem doctors themselves, the sun poured down sheets of liquid flame upon the ground and kept the sea and the rivers boiling day and night with the fiery heat. So any sailors would of course be boiled alive as soon as they got near to the Torrid Zone.

It was this kind of learning, discredited but not forgotten, that was still in the minds of Gil Eannes and his friends when they came home in 1433, with lame excuses, to Henry's Court. The currents and south winds had stopped them, they said. It was impossible to get round Bojador.

The Prince was roused. He ordered the same captain to return next year and try the Cape again. His men ought to have learned something better than the childish fables of past time. "And if," said he, "there were even any truth in these stories that they tell, I would not blame you, but you come to me with the tales of four seamen who perhaps know the voyage to the Low Countries or some other coasting route, but, except for this, don't know how to use needle or sailing chart. Go out again and heed them not, for by G.o.d's help, fame and profit must come from your voyage, if you will but persevere."

The Prince was backed by the warm encouragement of the new King, Edward, his eldest brother, who had only been one month upon the throne when he bestirred himself to shew his favour to a national movement of discovery. King John had died on August 14, 1433 (the anniversary of Aljubarrota), and on September 26th, of the same year, by a charter given from Cintra, King Edward granted the islands of Madeira and Porto Santo, with the Desertas, to Henry as Grand Master of the Order of Christ.

With this encouragement the Infant sent out Gil Eannes in 1434 under the strongest charge not to return without a good account of the Cape and the seas beyond. Running far out into the open, his caravel doubled Bojador, and coming back to the coast found the sea "as easy to sail in as the waters at home," and the land very rich and pleasant. They landed and discovered no trace of men or houses, but gathered plants, "such as were called in Portugal St. Mary's roses," to present to Don Henry. Not even the southern Cape of Tempests or Good Hope was so long and obstinate a barrier as Bojador had been, and the pa.s.sing of this difficulty proved the salvation of the Prince's schemes. Though again and again interrupted by political troubles between 1437 and 1449, the advance at sea went on, and never again was there a serious danger of the failure of the whole movement through general opposition and discontent.

In 1435 Gil Eannes was sent out again to follow up his success with Affonso Baldaya, the Prince's cupbearer, in a larger vessel than had yet been risked in exploration, called a varinel, or oared galley. The two captains pa.s.sed fifty leagues--one hundred and fifty miles--beyond the Cape, and found traces of caravans, reached as far as an inlet they named Gurnet Bay, from its shoals of fish, and again put back to Lagos, early in the year.

There were still several months left for ocean sailing in 1435, and Henry at once despatched Baldaya again in his varinel, with orders to go as far as he could along the coast, at least till he could find some natives. One of these he was to bring home with him. Baldaya accordingly sailed 130 leagues--390 miles--beyond Cape Bojador, till he reached an estuary running some twenty miles up the country and promising to lead to a great river. This might prove to be the western Nile of the Negroes, or the famous River of Gold, Baldaya thought, and though it proved to be only an inlet of the sea, the name of Rio d'Ouro, then given by the first hopes of the Portuguese, has outlasted the disappointment that found only a sandy reach instead of a waterway to the Mountains of the Moon and the kingdom of Prester John.

Baldaya anch.o.r.ed here, landed a couple of horses which the Infant had given him to scour the country, and set "two young n.o.ble gentlemen" upon them to ride up country, to look for signs of natives, and if possible to bring back one captive to the s.h.i.+p. Taking no body-armour, but only lance and sword, the boys followed the "river" to its source, seven leagues up the country, and here came suddenly upon nineteen savages, armed with a.s.segais. They rode up to them and drove them out of the open up to a loose mound of stones; then as evening was coming on and they could not secure a prisoner, they rode back to the sea and reached the s.h.i.+p about the dawn of day. "And of these boys," says the chronicler, "I myself knew one, when he was a n.o.ble gentleman of good renown in arms.

His name was Hector Homen, and you will find him in our history well proved in brave deeds. The other, named Lopez d'Almeida, was a n.o.bleman of good presence, as I have heard from those who knew him."

This first landing of Europeans on the coasts of unknown Africa, since the days of Carthaginian colonies, is one of the great moments in the story of Western expansion and discovery. For it means that Christendom on her Western side has at last got beyond the first circle of her enemies, the belt of settled Moslem ground, and has begun to touch the wider world outside, on the sh.o.r.e of the ocean as well as along the Eastern trade routes. And it almost seemed to be of little practical value that Marco Polo and the friars and traders who followed him had pa.s.sed Islam in Asia, and reached even furthest Tartary, for it only made more clear that Asia was not Christian, and that there would have to be a deadly struggle before European influence could be restored on this side to what it had been under Alexander; but on the west, by the Atlantic coasts, once Morocco had been pa.s.sed, there were only scattered savage tribes to be dealt with. Baldaya had now reached the pagans beyond Islam; the rival civilisation of the Arabs and their converts had been almost outflanked by Don Henry's s.h.i.+ps; and the boys who rode up the Rio d'Ouro beach in 1435 were the first pickets of a great army.

Their charge upon a body of grown men ten times their number, was a prophecy of the coming conquests of Christian Europe in the new worlds it was now in search of, in south and east and west.

Now Baldaya instantly followed up his pioneers. He took a party in his s.h.i.+p's boat and rode up the stream to the scene of the fight, with the boys on horseback riding by the bank and shewing him the stone-heap where the natives had rallied on the day before. But in the night they had all fled farther up country, leaving most of their miserable goods behind. All these were carried off, and the Portuguese left the Bay of the Horses, as they called this farthest reach of the Rio d'Ouro, and pulled back to the varinel, without any further success than a wholesome disappointment. They must go farther southward if they were to find the western Nile and the way round Africa.

Still Baldaya was not content. He wished to carry back a prisoner, as Henry had charged him, and so he coasted along fifty leagues more, from the Rio d'Ouro to the Port of Gallee, a rock that looked like a galley, where there was a more prominent headland than he had pa.s.sed since Bojador. Here he landed once again, and found some native nets, made of the bark of trees, but none of the natives who made them.

In the early months of 1436 he and his varinel were again in Portuguese waters; but the land had now been touched that lay three hundred miles beyond the old African Finisterre, and in two years (1434-6) Portugal and all the Christian nations, through Henry's work, had entered on a new chapter of history. The narrower world of the Roman Empire and the Mediaeval Church was already growing into the modern globe in the break up of that old terror of the sea which had so long fixed for men the bounds that they must not pa.s.s. The land routes had been cleared to Western knowledge, though not mastered, by the Crusades; now the far more dreaded and unknown water-way was fairly entered. For up to this time there is no fair evidence that either Christian or Moorish enterprise had ever rounded Bojador, and the theoretical marking of it upon maps was a very different thing from the experience that it was just like any other cape, and no more an end of the world than Cape St.

Vincent itself. Neither Genoese, nor Catalans, nor Normans of Dieppe, nor the Arab wanderers of Edrisi and Ibn Said were before Don Henry now.

His discoveries of the Atlantic islands were findings, rediscoveries; his coast voyages from the year 1433 are all ventures in the true unknown.

But from 1436 to 1441, from Baldaya's second return to the start of Nuno Tristam and Antam Gonsalvez for Cape Blanco, exploration was not successful or energetic. The simple cause of this was the Infant's other business. In these years took place the fatal attempt on Tangier, the death of King Edward, and the troubles of the minority of his child, Affonso V.--Affonso the African conqueror of later years.

True it is, we read in our _Chronicle of the Discovery of Guinea_, that in these years there went to those parts two s.h.i.+ps, one at a time, but the first turned back in the face of bad weather, and the other only went to the Rio d'Ouro for the skins and oil of sea wolves, and after taking in a cargo of these, went back to Portugal. And true it is, too, that in the year 1440 there were armed and sent out two caravels to go to that same land, but in that they met with contrary fortune, we do not tell any more of their voyage.