Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery Part 13

And so to make trial of the people of the land and to have of them more certain knowledge, they put that Arab on sh.o.r.e and one of the Moorish women their captives with him, who were to speak to the natives if they could, about the ransom of those they had taken and about exchange of merchandise.

And at the end of two days there came down to the sh.o.r.e quite one hundred and fifty Moors on foot, and thirty-five mounted on camels and horses, and though they seemed to be a race both barbarous and b.e.s.t.i.a.l, there was not wanting in them a certain sharpness, with which they could cheat their enemies, for at first there only appeared three of them on the beach, and the rest lay in ambush till our men should land and they could rush out and master them, which thing they could easily have done, so many were they, if our men had been a whit less sharp than themselves. But when the Moors saw that our boats did not land, but turned back again to the s.h.i.+p, they discovered their treachery, and all came down in a body upon the beach, hurling stones and making gestures of defiance, shewing us the Arab we had sent to them as a captive in their hands.

So our men came back to the s.h.i.+p and made their division of the prisoners, according to the lot of each. And Antam Gonsalvez turned back because he had now loaded his caravel with the cargo that the Infant had ordered him, but Nuno Tristam went on, as he for his part had in charge.

But as his vessel was in need of repair, he put to sh.o.r.e and careened and refitted it as well as he could, keeping his tides as if he were before the port of Lisbon, at which boldness of his many wondered greatly. And sailing on again, he pa.s.sed the port of "Gallee," and came to a cape which he called "The White" (Cape Blanco), where the crew landed to see if they could make any captures. But after finding only the tracks of men and some nets, they turned back, seeing that for that time they could not do any more than they had already done.

Antam Gonsalvez came home first with his part of the booty and then arrived Nuno Tristam, "whose present reception and future reward were answerable to the trouble he had borne, like a fertile land that with but little sowing answers the husbandman."

The chief, or "cavalier" as he is called, whom Antam Gonsalvez brought home was able to "make the Infant understand a great deal of the state of that land where he had been," though as for the rest, they were pretty well useless, except as slaves, "for their tongue could not be understood by any other Moors who had been in that land." But the Prince was so encouraged by the sight of the first captives that he at once began to think "how it would be necessary to send to those parts many a time his s.h.i.+ps and crews well armed, where they would have to fight with the infidels. So he determined to send at once to the Holy Father and ask of him that he should give him of the treasures of Holy Church, for the salvation of the souls of those who in this conquest should meet their end."

Pope Eugenius IV., then reigning, if not governing, in the great Apostolic See of the West, answered this appeal "with great joy" and with all the rhetoric of the Papal Register. "As it hath now been notified to us by our beloved son Henry, Duke of Viseu, Master of the Order of Christ, that trusting firmly in the aid of G.o.d, for the confusion of the Moors and enemies of Christ in those lands that they have desolated, and for the exaltation of the Catholic Faith,--and because that the Knights and Brethren of the said Order of Christ against the said Moors and other enemies of the Faith have waged war with the Grace of G.o.d, under the banner of the said Order,--and to the intent that they may bestir themselves to the said war with yet greater fervour, we do to each and all of those engaged in the said war, by Apostolic authority and by these letters, grant full remission of all those sins of which they shall be truly penitent at heart and of which they have made confession by their mouth. And whoever breaks, contradicts, or acts against the letter of this mandate, let him lie under the curse of the All-Mighty G.o.d and of the Blessed Apostles Peter and Paul."

And besides, adds the chronicle, rather quaintly, of more temporal and material benefits, the Infant D. Pedro, then Regent of the kingdom, gave to his brother Henry a charter, granting him the whole of the fifth of the profits which appertained to the King, and, considering that it was by him alone that the whole matter of the discovery was carried out at infinite trouble and expense, he ordered further that no one should go to those parts without D. Henry's licence and express command.

The chronicle, which has told us how Antam Gonsalvez made the first captives, now goes on to say how the same one of the Prince's captains made the first ransom. For the captive chief, "that cavalier of whom we spoke," Henry's first prize from the lands beyond Bojador, pined away in Europe, "and many times begged of Antam Gonsalvez that he would take him back to his own land, where, as he said, they would give for him five or six blackamoors, and he said, too, that there were two boys among the other captives for whom they would get a like ransom." So the Infant sent him back with Gonsalvez to his own people, "as it was better to save ten souls than three, for though they were black, yet had they souls like others, all the more as they were not of Moorish race, but Heathen and so all the easier to lead into the way of salvation. From the negroes too it would be possible to get news of the land beyond them. For not only of the Negro land did the Infant wish to know more certainly, but also of the Indies and of the land of Prester John."

So Gonsalvez sailed with his ransom, and in his s.h.i.+p went a n.o.ble stranger, like Vallarte the Dane, whom we shall meet later on, one of a kind which was always being drawn to Henry's Court. This was Balthasar the Austrian, a gentleman of the Emperor's Household, who had entered the Infant's service to try his fortune at Ceuta, where he had got his knighthood, and who now "was often heard to say that his great wish was to see a storm, before he left that land of Portugal, that he might tell those who had never seen one what it was like.

"And certainly his fortune favoured him. For at the first start, they met with such a storm that it was by a marvel they escaped destruction."

Again they put out to sea, and this time reached the Rio d'Ouro in safety, where they landed their chief prisoner, "very well vested in the robes that the Infant had ordered to be given him," under promise that he would soon come back and bring his tribe with him.

"But as soon as he got safely off, he very soon forgot his promises, which Antam Gonsalvez had trusted, thinking that his n.o.bility would hold him fast and not let him break his word, but by this deceit all our men got warning that they could not trust any of the natives save under the most certain security."

The s.h.i.+ps now went twelve miles up the Rio d'Ouro, cast anchor, and waited seven days without a sign of anybody, but on the eighth there came a Moor, on top of a white camel, with fully one hundred others who had all joined to ransom the two boys. Ten of the tribe were given in exchange for the young chiefs, "and the man who managed this barter was one Martin Fernandez, the Infant's own Ransomer of Captives, who shewed well that he had knowledge of the Moorish tongue, for he was understood by those people whom Nuno Tristam's Arab, Moor though he was by nation, could not possibly get speech with, except only the one chief, who had now escaped."

With the "Blackamoors," Antam Gonsalvez got as ransom what was even more precious, a little gold dust, the first ever brought by Europeans direct from the Guinea Coast, which more thoroughly won the Prince's cause at home and brought over more enemies and scoffers and indifferentists to his side than all the discoveries in the world.

"Many ostrich eggs, too," were included in the native ransom, "such that one day men saw at the Infant's table three dishes of the same, as fresh and as good as those of any other domestic fowls." Did the Court of Sagres suppose the ostrich to be some large kind of hen?

What was still more to the Prince's mind, "those same Moors related, that in those parts there were merchants who trafficked in that gold that was found there among them"--the same merchants, in fact, whose caravels Henry had already known on the Mediterranean coast, and whose starting-point he had now begun to touch. Ever since the days of the first Caliphs, this Sahara commerce had gone on under the control of Islam; for centuries these caravans had crossed the valleys and plains to the south of Morocco and sold their goods--pepper, slaves, and gold dust--in Moslem Ceuta and Moslem Andalusia; now, after seven hundred years of monopoly, this Moslem trade was broken in upon by the Europeans, who, in fifty years' time, broke into the greater monopoly of the Indian Seas, when Da Gama sailed from Lisbon to Malabar (1497-9).

Next year (1443) came Nuno Tristam's turn once more. People were now eager to sail in the Infant's service, after the slaves, and still more the gold dust, had been really seen and handled in Portugal, and "that n.o.ble cavalier," for each and all of the three reasons of his fellows--"to serve his lord," "to gain honour," "to increase his profit,"--was eager to follow up his first successes.

Commanding a caravel manned in great part from the Prince's household, he went out straight to Cape Blanco, the white headland, which he had been the first to reach in 1441. Pa.s.sing twenty-five leagues, seventy-five miles beyond, into the bank or bight of Arguin, he saw a little island, from which twenty-five canoes came off to meet him, all hollowed out of logs of wood, with a host of native savages, "naked not for swimming in the water, but for their ancient custom." The natives hung their legs over the sides of their boats, and paddled with them like oars, so that "our men, looking at them from a distance and quite unused to the sight, thought they were birds that were skimming so over the water." As for their size, the sailors expected much greater marvels in those parts of the world, where every map and traveller's tale made the sea swarm with monsters as big as a continent.

"But as soon as they saw they were men, then were their hearts full of a new pleasure, for that they saw the chance of a capture." They launched the s.h.i.+p's boat at once, chased them to the sh.o.r.e, and captured fourteen; if the boat had been stronger, the tale would have been longer, for with a crew of seven they could not hold any more prisoners, and so the rest escaped.

With this booty they sailed on to another island, "where they found an infinite number of herons, of which they made good cheer, and so returned Nuno Tristam very joyfully to the Prince."

This last piece of discovery was of much more value than Nuno thought.

He saw in it a first-rate slave hunting-ground, but it became the starting-point for trade and intercourse with the Negro States of the Senegal and the Gambia, to the south and east. It was here, in the bay of Arguin, where the long desert coast of the Sahara makes its last bend towards the rich country of the south,--that Henry built in 1448 that fort which Cadamosto found, in the next ten years, had become the centre of a great European commerce, which was also among the first permanent settlements of the new Christian exploration, one of the first steps of modern colonisation.

And now the volunteer movement had fairly begun. Where in the beginning, says Azurara, people had murmured very loudly against the Prince's enterprise, each one grumbling as if the Infant was spending some part of _his_ property, now when the way had been fairly opened and the fruits of those lands began to be seen in Portugal in much greater abundance, men began, softly enough, to praise what they had so loudly decried. Great and small alike had declared that no profit would ever come of these ventures, but when the cargoes of slaves and gold began to arrive, all were forced to turn their blame into flattery, and to say that the Infant was another Alexander the Great, and as they saw the houses of others full of new servants from the new discovered lands and their property always increasing, there were few who did not long to try their fortune in the same adventures.

The first great movement of the sort came after Nuno's return at the end of 1443. The men of Lagos took advantage of Henry's settlement so near them in his town of Sagres, to ask for leave to sail at their own cost to the Prince's coast of Guinea. For no one could go without his licence.

One Lancarote, a "squire, brought up in the Infant's household, an officer of the royal customs in the town of Lagos, and a man of great good sense," was the spokesman of these merchant adventurers. He won his grant very easily, "the Infant was very glad of his request, and bade him sail under the banner of the Order of Christ," so that six caravels started in the spring of 1444 on the first exploring voyage that we can call national since the Prince had begun his work.

So, as the beginning of general interest in the Crusade of Discovery which Henry had now preached to his countrymen for thirty years, as the beginning of the career of Henry's chief captain, the head of his merchant allies, as the beginning, in fact, of a new and bright period, this first voyage of Lancarote's, this first Armada sent out to find and to conquer the Moors and Blacks of the unknown or half-known South, is worth more than a pa.s.sing notice.

And this is not for its interest or importance in the story of discovery pure and simple, but as a proof that the cause of discovery itself had become popular, and as evidence that the cause of trade and of political ambition had become thoroughly identified with that of exploration. The expansion of the European _nations_, which had languished since the Crusades, had begun again. What was more unfortunate, from a modern standpoint, the African slave trade, as a part of European commerce, begins here too. It is useless to try to explain it away.

Henry's own motives were not those of the slave-driver; it seems true enough that the captives, when once brought home to Spain, were treated, under his orders, with all kindness; his own wish seems to have been to use this man-hunting traffic as a means to Christianise and civilise the native tribes, to win over the whole by the education of a few prisoners. But his captains did not always aim so high. The actual seizure of the captives--Moors and Negroes--along the coast of Guinea, was as barbarous and as ruthless as most slave-drivings. There was hardly a capture made without violence and bloodshed; a raid on a village, a fire and sack and butchery, was the usual course of things--the order of the day. And the natives, whatever they might gain when fairly landed in Europe, did not give themselves up very readily to be taught; as a rule, they fought desperately, and killed the men who had come to do them good, whenever they had a chance.

The kidnapping, which some of the Spanish patriot writers seem to think of as simply an act of Christian charity, "a corporal work of mercy,"

was at the time a matter of profit and money returns. Negro bodies would sell well, Negro villages would yield plunder, and, like the killing of wild Irish in the sixteenth century, the Prince's men took a Black-Moor hunt as the best of sport. It was hardly wonderful, then, that the later sailors of Cadamosto's day (1450-60) found all the coast up in arms against them, and that so many fell victims to the deadly poisoned arrows of the Senegal and the Gambia. Every native believed, as they told one of the Portuguese captains in a parley, that the explorers carried off their people to cook and eat them.

In most of the speeches that are given us in the chronicle of the time, the masters encourage their men to these slave-raids by saying, first, what glory they will get by a victory; next, what a profit can be made sure by a good haul of captives; last, what a generous reward the Prince will give for people who can tell him about these lands.

Sometimes, after reprisals had begun, the whole thing is an affair of vengeance, and thus Lancarote, in the great voyage of 1445, coolly proposes to turn back at Cape Blanco, without an attempt at discovery of any sort, "because the purpose of the voyage was now accomplished." A village had been burnt, a score of natives had been killed, and twice as many taken. Revenge was satisfied.

It was only here and there that much was said about the Prince's purpose of exploration, of finding the western Nile or, Prester John, or the way round Africa to India; most of the sailors, both men and officers, seem to know that this, or something towards this, is the "will of their Lord," but it is very few who start for discovery only, and still fewer who go straight on, turning neither to right hand nor left, till they have got well beyond the farthest of previous years, and added some piece of new knowledge to the map of the known world out of the blank of the unknown.

What terrified ignorance had done before, greed did now, and the last hindrance was almost worse than the first. So one might say, impatiently, looking at the great expense, the energy, and time and life spent on the voyages of this time, and especially of the years 1444-8.

More than forty s.h.i.+ps sail out, more than nine hundred captives are brought home, and the new lands found are all discovered by three or four explorers. National interest seems awakened to very little purpose.

But what explains the slow progress of discovery, explains also the fact that any progress, however slow, was made at all, apart from the personal action of Henry himself. Without the mercantile interest, the Prince's death would have been the end and ruin of his schemes for many a year.

But for the hope of adventure and of profitable plunder, and the certainty of reward; but for the a.s.surance, so to say, of such and such a revenue on the ventures of the time, Portuguese "public opinion" would not probably have been much ahead of other varieties of the same organ.

In deciding the abstract question to which the Prince had given his life, the mob of Lisbon or of Lagos would hardly have been quicker than modern mobs to rise to a notion above that of personal gain. If the cause of discovery and an empire to come had been left to them, the labour leaders might have said then in Spain, as some of them have said to-day in England, "What is all this talk about the Empire? What is it to us working men? We don't want the Empire, we want more wages." And so when the great leader was dead, and the people were left to carry out his will, his spiritual foresight of great scientific discoveries, his ideas of conversion and civilisation, were not the things for the sake of which ordinary men were reconciled to his scheme and ready to finish his work. If they thought or spoke or toiled for the finding of the way to India, it was to find the gold and spices and jewels of an earthly paradise.

This is not fancy. It is simply impossible to draw any other conclusion from the original accounts of these voyages in Azurara's chronicle, for Azurara himself, though one of Henry's first converts, a man who realised something of the grandeur of his master's schemes and their reach beyond a merely commercial ideal through discovery to empire, yet preserves in the speeches and actions of captains and seamen alike, proof enough of the thoroughly commonplace aims of most of the first discoverers.

On the other hand, the strength of the movement lay of course in the few exceptions. As long as all or nearly all the instruments employed were simply buccaneers, with a single eye to trade profits, discovery could not advance very fast or very far. Till the real meaning of the Prince's life had impressed his nearest followers with something of his own spirit, there could be no exploration, except by accident, though without this background of material gain no national interest could have been enlisted in exploration at all.

Real progress in this case was by the slow increase of that inner circle which really shared Henry's own ambition, of that group of men who went out, not to make bargains or do a little killing, but to carry the flag of Portugal and of Christ farther than it had ever been planted before, "according to the will of the Lord Infant." And as these men were called to the front, and only as they were there at all, was there any rapid advance. If two sailors, Diego Cam and Bartholomew Diaz, could within four years, in two voyages, explore the whole south-west coast of Africa from the Equator to the Cape of Tempests or of Good Hope, was it not absurd that the earlier caravels, after Bojador was once pa.s.sed should hang so many years round the north-west sh.o.r.es of the Sahara?

Even some of the more genuine discoverers, the most trusted of the Prince's household, men like Gil Eannes, the first who saw the coasts beyond the terrible Bojador, or Diniz Diaz, or Antam Gonsalvez, or Nuno Tristam, as they come before us in Azurara's chronicle, are more like their men than their master.

He thought of the slaves they brought home "with unspeakable pleasure, as to the saving of their souls, which but for him, would have been for ever lost." They thought a good deal more, like the crowd that gathered at the slave market in Lagos, of the "distribution of the captives," and of the money they would get for each. At those sales, which Azurara describes so vividly, Henry had the bearing of one who cared little for ama.s.sing plunder, and was known, once and again, to give away his fifth of the spoil, "for his spoil was chiefly in the success of his great wishes." But his suite seems to have been as keenly on the look-out for such favours as their lord was easy in bestowing them.

To return to Lancarote's voyage:

"For that the Infant knew, by certain Moors that Nuno Tristam had carried off, that in the Isle of Naar, in the Bay of Arguin, and in the parts thereabout, were more than two hundred souls," the six caravels began with a descent on that island. Five boats were launched and thirty men in them, and they set off from the s.h.i.+ps about sunset. And rowing all that night, we are told, they came about the time of dawn to the island that they sought. And as day was breaking they got up to a Moorish village close to the sh.o.r.e, where were living all the people in the island. At sight of this the boats' crews drew up, and the leaders consulted whether to go on or turn back. It was decided to attack.

Thirty "Portugals" ought to be a match for five or six times as many natives; the sailors landed and rushed upon the villagers and "saw the Moors with their women and children coming out of their huts as fast as they could, when they caught sight of their enemy; and our men, crying out 'St. James, St. George, Portugal,' fell upon them, killing and taking all they could. There you might have seen mothers catch up their children, husbands their wives, each one trying to fly as best he could.

Some plunged into the sea, others thought to hide themselves in the corners of their hovels, others hid their children underneath the shrubs that grew about there, where our men found them.

"And at last our Lord G.o.d, who gives to all a due reward, to our men gave that day a victory over their enemies, in recompence for all their toil in His service, for they took, what of men, women, and children, one hundred and sixty-five, without counting the slain."

Then finding from the captives that there were other well-peopled islands near at hand, they raided these for more prisoners. In their next descent they could not catch any men, but of women and little boys, not yet able to run, they seized seventeen or eighteen; soon after this they did meet the "Moormen bold," who were drawing together on all sides to defend themselves; a great power of three hundred savages chased another raiding party to their boats.

That the whole expedition had no thought of discovery was plain enough from the fact that Lancarote did not try to go beyond the White Cape (Blanco), which had been already pa.s.sed several times, but turned back directly he found the hunting grounds becoming deserted, and a descent producing no prize, except one girl, who had chosen to go to sleep when the rest of the people fled up country at the first sight of the Christian boats.

The voyage was a slave chase from first to last, and two hundred and thirty-five Blacks were the result. Their landing and their sale at Lagos was a day of great excitement, a long remembered 8th of August.

"Very early in the morning, because of the heat (of the later day) the sailors began to land their captives, who as they were placed all together in the field by the landing-place, were indeed a wonderful sight; for among them there were some that were almost white, of beautiful form and face; others were darker; and others again as black as moles and so hideous, alike in face and body, that they looked, to any one who saw them, the very images of a Lower Hemisphere."

But what heart so stern, exclaims the chronicler, as not to be pierced with pity to see that company. For some held down their heads, crying piteously, others looked mournfully upon one another, others stood moaning very wretchedly, sometimes looking up to the height of Heaven, calling out with shrieks of agony, as if invoking the Father of Nature; others grovelled upon the ground, beating their foreheads with their hands, while others again made their moan in a sort of dirge, in their own way, for though one could not understand the words, the sense of all was plain in the agony of those who uttered it.

But most terrible was that agony when came the part.i.tion and each possessor took away his lot. Wives were divided from husbands, fathers from sons, brothers from brothers, each being forced to go where his lot might send him. Parents and children who had been ranged opposite one another, now rushed forward to embrace, if it were for the last time; mothers, holding their little children in their arms, threw themselves down, covering their babes with their own bodies.