Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery Part 14

And yet these slaves were treated with kindness, and no difference was made between them and other and freeborn servants. The younger captives were taught trades, and those who showed that they could manage property were set free and married. Widow ladies treated the girls they bought like their own daughters, and often left them dowries by will, that they might marry as entirely free. Never have I known one of these captives, says Azurara, put in irons like other slaves, or one who did not become a Christian. Often have I been present at the baptisms or marriages of these slaves, when their masters made as much and as solemn a matter of it as if it had been a child or a parent of their own.

During Henry's life the action of buccaneers on the African coast was a good deal kept in check by the spirit and example and positive commands of the Infant, who sent out his men to explore, and could not prevent some outrages in the course of exploration. Again and again he ordered his captains to act fairly to the natives, to trade with them honourably, and to persuade them by gentler means than kidnapping to come to Europe for a time. In the last years of his life he did succeed in bettering things; by establis.h.i.+ng a regular Government trade in the bay of Arguin he brought a good deal more under control the unchained deviltry of the Portuguese freebooters; Cadamosto and Diego Gomez, his most trusted lieutenants of this later time, were real discoverers, who tried to make friends of the natives rather than slaves.

In the early days of Portuguese exploration, it may also be said, information, first-hand news of the new countries and their dangers, was absolutely needed, and if the Negroes and the Azaneguy Moors could not or would not speak some Christian tongue and guide the caravels to Guinea, they must be carried off and made fit and proper instruments for the work.

It would be out of place here to justify or condemn this excuse or to enter on the wider question of the right or wrong of the slave-trade in general. It is enough to see how brutally the work of "saving the Heathen," was carried out by the average explorer, when discovery was used as a plea for traffic.

No one then questioned the right of Christians to make slaves of Heathen Blacks; Henry certainly did not, for he used slavery as an education, he made captives of "Gentiles" for the highest ends, as he believed, to save their souls, and to help him in the way of doing great things for his country and for Christendom. He knew more of the results than of the incidental cruelty, more of the hundreds taken than of the hundreds more killed and maimed and made homeless in the taking. For centuries past Moors had brought back slaves from the south across the Sahara to sell on the coast of Tunis and Morocco; no Christian doubted the right and--more than the right--the merit of the Prince in bringing black slaves by sea from Guinea to Lisbon, where they might be fairly saved from the grasp of "Foul Mahumet."

So if it is said that Henry started the African slave-trade of European nations, that must not be understood as the full-blooded atrocity of the West Indian planters, for the use he made of his prisoners was utterly different, though his action was the cause of incessant abuse of the best end by the worst of means.

At the time the gold question was much more important than the slave-trade, and most Portuguese, most Europeans--n.o.bles, merchants, burghers, farmers, labourers--were much more excited by the news and the sight of the first native gold dust than by anything else whatever. It was the first few handfuls of this dust, brought home by Gonsalvez in 1442, that had such a magical effect on public opinion, that spread the exploring interest from a small circle out into every cla.s.s, and that brought forward volunteers on every side. For a Guinea voyage was now the favourite plan of every adventurer.

But however they may be explained, however natural and even necessary they may seem to be, as things stood in Portugal and in Latin Christendom, the slave-trade and the gold hunger hindered the Prince's work quite as much as they helped it. If further discovery depended upon trade profits, native interpreters, and the attractions of material interest, there was at least a danger that the discoverers who were not disposed to risk anything, and only went out to line their own pockets, would hang about the well known coasts till they had loaded all the plunder they could hold, and would then simply reappear at Sagres with so many more souls for the good Prince to save, but without a word or a thought of "finding of new lands." And this, after all, was the end.

Buccaneering on the north-west coast of Africa was not what Henry aimed at.

So he gave a caravel to one of his household, Gonsalo de Cintra, "who had been his stirrup-boy," and "bade him go straight to the Land of Guinea, and that for no cause whatever should he do otherwise." But when De Cintra got to the White Cape (Blanco) it struck him that "with very little danger he could make some prisoners there."

So with a cheerful impudence, in the face of the Infant's express commands, he put his s.h.i.+p about and landed in that bay of Arguin, where so many captures had been made, but he was cut off from the rest of the men, and killed with seven others by a host of more than two hundred Moors, and the chronicle which tells of all such details at the greatest length, stops to give seven reasons for this, the first serious loss of life the Europeans had suffered in their new African piracies. And for the rest, "May G.o.d receive the soul that He created and the nature that came forth from Him, as it is His very own. _Habeat Deus animam quam creavit et naturam, quod suum est._" (_Azurara_, ch. 27).

Three other caravels, which quickly followed De Cintra, sailed with special orders to Christianise and civilise the natives wherever and however they could, and the result of this was seen in the daring venture of Joan Fernandez. This man, the pattern of all the Crusoes of after time, offered to stay on sh.o.r.e among the Blacks "to learn what he could of the manners and speech and customs of the people," and so was left along with that "b.e.s.t.i.a.l and barbarous" nation for seven months, on the sh.o.r.es of the Bank of Arguin, while in exchange for him an old Moor went back to Portugal.

Yet a third voyage was made in this spring of 1445 by Nuno Tristam. And of this, says Azurara, I know nothing very exact or at first hand, because Nuno Tristam was dead before the time that King Affonso (D.

Henry's nephew) commanded me to write this history. But this much we do know, that he sailed straight to the Isle of Herons in Arguin, that he pa.s.sed the sandy wilderness and landed in the parts beyond, in a land fertile and full of palm trees; and having landed he took a score of prisoners. And so Nuno Tristam was the first to see the country of the real Blacks. In other words, Nuno reached Cape Palmar, far beyond Cape Blanco, where he saw the palms and got the all-important certainty that the desert did end somewhere, and that beyond, instead of a country unapproachable from the heat, where the very seas were perpetually boiling as if in a cauldron, there was a land richer than any northern climate, through which men could pa.s.s to the south.

Still further was this proved by the next voyage, which reached the end of the great western trend of the African coast, and found that instead of the continent stretching out farther and farther to an infinite breadth, there was an immense contraction of the coast.

Diniz Diaz, the eldest of that family which gave to Portugal some of her greatest men and makers, now begged a caravel from the Prince with the promise of "doing more with it than any had done before." He had done well under old King John, and now he kept his word.

Pa.s.sing Arguin and Cape Blanco and Cape Palmar, he entered the mouth of the Senegal, the western Nile, which was now fixed as the northern limit of Guinea, or Blackman's Land. "Nor was this a little honour for our Prince, whose mighty power was thus brought to bear upon the peoples so far distant from our land and so near to that of Egypt." For Azurara like Diaz, like Henry himself, thought not only that the Senegal was the Niger, the western Nile of the Blacks, but that the caravels of Portugal were far nearer to India than was the fact,--were getting close to the Mountains of the Moon and the sources of the Nile.

But Diaz was not content with this. He had reached and pa.s.sed, as he thought, the great western stream up which men might sail, in the belief of the time, to the mysterious sources of the world's greatest river, and so down by the eastern and northern course of the same to Cairo and the Christian seas. He now sailed on "to a great cape, which he named Cape Verde," a green and beautiful headland covered with gra.s.s and trees and dotted with native villages, running out into the Western Ocean far beyond any other land, and beyond which, in turn, there was no more western coast, but only southern and eastern. From this point Diaz returned to Portugal.

"But great was the wonder of the people of the coast in seeing his caravel, for never had they seen or heard tell of the like, but some thought it was a fish, others were sure it was a phantom, others again said it might be a bird that had that way of skimming along the surface of the sea." Four of them picked up courage to venture out in a canoe and try to settle this doubt. Out they went in their little boat, all made from one hollow tree, but when they saw that there were men on board the caravel they fled to the sh.o.r.e and "the wind falling our men could not overtake.

"And though the booty of Diniz Diaz was far less than what others had brought home before him, the Prince made very much of his getting to that land of Negroes and Cape Verde and the Senegal," and with reason, for these discoveries a.s.sured the success of his work, and from this time all trouble and opposition were at an end. Mariners now went out to sail to the golden country that had been found or to the spice land that was now so near; men pa.s.sed at once from extreme apathy or extreme terror to an equally extreme confidence. They seemed to think the fruit was within reach for them to gather, before the tree had been half climbed. Long before Fernando Po had been reached, while the caravels were still off the coasts of Sierra Leone, men at home, from King Affonso to the common seamen of the ports, "thought the line of Tunis and even of Alexandria had been long pa.s.sed." The difficult first steps seemed all.

Now three volunteers, Antam Gonsalvez, and two others who had already sailed in the Prince's service, applied for the command of s.h.i.+ps for the discovery and conquest of the lands of Guinea, and to bring back Joan Fernandez from his exile. Sailing past Cape Blanco they set up there a great wooden cross and "much would it have amazed any one of another nation that should have chanced to pa.s.s that way, not knowing of our voyages along that coast," says Azurara gleefully, giving us proof enough in every casual expression of this sort, often dropped with perfect simplicity and natural truthfulness, that to his knowledge and that of his countrymen, to the Europe of 1450, the Portuguese had had no forerunners along the Guinea Coast.

A little south of the Bight of Arguin the caravels sighted a man on the sh.o.r.e making signals to the s.h.i.+ps, and coming closer they saw Fernandez who had much to tell. He had completely won over the natives of that part during his seven months' stay, and now he was able to bring the caravels to a market where trinkets were exchanged for slaves and gold with a Moorish chief--"a cavalier called Ahude Meymam." Then he was taken home to tell his story to the Prince, the fleet wasting some time in descents on the tribes of the bay of Arguin.

When he was first put on sh.o.r.e, Joan Fernandez told Don Henry, the natives came up to him, took his clothes off him and made him put on others of their own make. Then they took him up the country, which was very scantily clothed with gra.s.s, with a sandy and stony soil, growing hardly any trees. A few thorns and palms were the only relief to the barren monotony of this African prairie, over which wandered a few nomade shepherds in search of pasture for their flocks. There were no flowers, no running streams to light up the waste, so Fernandez thought at first, till he found one or two exceptions that proved the rule. The natives got their water from wells, spoke a tongue and wrote a writing that was different from that of the other Moors, though all these people, in the upland, were Moslems, like the Berbers nearer home. For they themselves were a tribe, the Azaneguy tribe, of the great Berber family, who had four times--in the eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries--come over to help the Moslem power in Spain.

Yet, said Fernandez, these Moors of the west are quite barbarous: they have neither law nor lords.h.i.+p; their food is milk and the seeds of wild mountain herbs and roots; meat and bread are both rare luxuries; and so is fish for those on the upland, but the Moors of the coast eat nothing else, and for months together I have seen those I lived among, their horses and their dogs, eating and drinking only milk, like infants. 'T is no wonder they are weaker than the negroes of the south with whom they are ever at war, fighting with treachery and not with strength.

They dress in leather--leather breeches and jackets, but some of the richer wear a native mantle over their shoulders--such rich men as keep good swift horses and brood mares. It was about the trade and religion of the country that Fernandez was specially questioned, and his answers were not encouraging on either point. The people were bigoted, ignorant wors.h.i.+ppers of the abominations of Mahumet, he said, and their traffic in slaves and gold was a small matter after all. The only gold he saw in their country was in ankle rings on the women of the chiefs; the gold dust and black bodies they got from the negroes they took to Tunis and the Mediterranean coast on camels. Their salt, on which they set great store, was from the Tagazza salt quarries, far inland. The chief, Ahude Meymam, who had been so kind to Fernandez, lived in the upland; the Christian stranger had been induced to ride up from the coast, and had reached the Court only after tortures of thirst. The water failed them on the way, and for three days they had nothing to drink.

Altogether, Fernandez' report discouraged any further attempts to explore by land, where all the country as far as could be reached seemed to yield nothing but desert with a few slender oases. It was not indeed till the European explorers reached the Congo on their coasting voyages to the south that they found a natural and inviting pathway into the heart of Africa. The desert of the north and west, the fever-haunted swamps and jungle of the Guinea Coast only left narrow inlets of more healthy and pa.s.sable country, and these the Portuguese did their best to close by occasional acts of savage cruelty and impudent fraud in their dealings with the natives.

Another expedition, and that an unlucky one, under Gonsalo Pacheco, a gentleman of Lisbon, followed this last of Antam Gonsalvez. Pacheco got leave to make the voyage, equipped a caravel that he had built for himself, and got two others to share the risk and profits with him. And so, says Azurara, hoisting the banners of the Order of Christ, they made their way to Cape Blanco. Here they found, one league from the Cape, a village, and by the sh.o.r.e a writing, that Antam Gonsalvez had set up, in which he counselled all who pa.s.sed that way not to trouble to go up and sack the village, as it was quite empty of people. So they hung about the Bank of Arguin, making raids in various places, and capturing some one hundred and twenty natives, all of which is not of much interest to any one, though as Pacheco and his men had to pay themselves for their trouble, and make a profit on the voyage, these man-hunts were the chief thing they thought about and the main thing in their stories when they got home.

Men like Pacheco and his friends were not explorers at all. They stopped far short of the mark that Diniz Diaz had made for the European Furthest, and their only discovery was of a new cape one hundred miles and more beyond the Bank of Arguin. Sailing south, because the natives fled at their approach and left the coast land all bare, "they came to a headland which they called Cape St. Anne, by which an arm of the sea ran four leagues up the country," where they hunted for more prisoners.

Still in search of slaves and gold they sailed on two hundred and fifty miles--eighty leagues--to Negroland, where Diaz had been before, and where they saw a land, to the north of the Great Western Cape, all green, peopled with men and cattle, but when they tried to near the sh.o.r.e and land a storm drove them back. For three days they struggled against it, but at last they found themselves near Cape Blanco, more than three hundred miles to the north, where they gave up all thought of trying to push into the unknown south, and turned cheerfully to their easier work of slave-hunting. In one of these raids, a party of seven, in a boat away from all the rest, was overpowered and killed like De Cintra's men by a large body of natives, "whose souls may G.o.d in His mercy receive in the Habitation of the Saints." The Moors carried off the boat and broke it up for the sake of its nails, and Azurara was told by some that the bodies of the dead were eaten by their brutal conquerors. 'T is certain at least, he adds, that their custom is to eat the livers of their victims and to drink their blood, when they are avenging the death of parents or brothers or children, as they do it to have full vengeance on such as have so greatly injured them.

CHAPTER XIII.

THE ARMADA OF 1445.

While Gonsalo Pacheco had been wasting time and men and the good name of Europe and Christendom in his plunderings between C. Bojador and C.

Blanco, the memory of the death of Gonsalo de Cintra was kept alive in Lagos, and the men of the town came in solemn deputation to the Prince, before the summer of this same year (1445) was out, to beg him for permission to take full, perfect, and sufficient vengeance. In other words, they offered to equip the largest fleet that had ever sailed on an ocean voyage--as it now began to be called, a Guinea voyage--since the Prince began his work. As far as we know, this was also one of the greatest armadas that had been sent out into the new-discovered or re-discovered or undiscovered seas and lands since the European nations had begun to look at all beyond their own narrow limits.

Neither the fleet of 1341, which found the Canaries, and of which Boccaccio tells us, nor the Genoese expedition of 1291, nor the Catalan venture of 1346, nor De Bethencourt's armament of 1402, for the conquest of the Fortunate Isles, was anything like this armada of 1445.

For this last was a real sign of national interest in a work which was not only discovery, but profit and a means to more; it proved that in Portugal, in however base and narrowly selfish a way, there was now a spirit of general enterprising activity, and till this had been once awakened, there was not much hope of great results from the efforts of individuals.

The first contingent now equipped in Lagos--for the Prince at once approved of his men's idea--numbered fourteen caravels--fourteen of the best sailing s.h.i.+ps afloat, as Cadamosto said a little later; but this was only the central fleet, under Lancarote as Admiral. Three more s.h.i.+ps came from Madeira, one of them under Tristam Vaz, the coloniser of Funchal; Diniz Diaz headed another contingent from Lisbon; Zarco, the chief partner in the discovery and settlement of Madeira, sent his own caravel in command of his nephew; in all there were seven and twenty s.h.i.+ps--caravels, galleys, and pinnaces. Since the Carthaginians sent out their colonists under Hanno beyond the Pillars of Hercules, a larger and braver fleet had not sailed down that desolate West of Africa.

Gil Eannes, who had rounded Bojador, was there, with the Diaz, who had pa.s.sed the Green Headland and come first to the land of the Negroes, and the list of captains was made up of the most daring and seasoned of Spanish seamen. Scarcely a man who had ventured on the ocean voyages of the last thirty years was still alive and able-bodied who did not sail on the 10th August, 1445.

At the start Cape Blanco was appointed as the rendezvous; with favouring wind and tide the s.h.i.+ps raced out as far as Arguin. Lawrence, a younger brother of the Diaz family, drew ahead, and was the first to fall in with Pacheco's three caravels, which were slowly crawling home after their losses. Now, hearing of the great fleet that was coming after to take vengeance, they turned about to wait for them, "as it was worth while to have revenge though one had to live on short rations." So, now, thirty European s.h.i.+ps and their crews were included in the fleet. The pioneer, Lawrence Diaz, and the rest, lay to at the Isle of Herons in the Bank of Arguin; while waiting there they saw some wonderful things in birds, and Azurara tells us what they told him, though rather doubtfully. The great beaks of the Marabout, or Prophet Bird, struck them most,--"a cubit long and more, three fingers' breadth across, and the bill smooth and polished, like a Bashaw's scabbard, and looking as if artificially worked with fire and tools,"--the mouth and gullet so big that the leg of a man of the ordinary size would go into it. On these birds particularly, says Azurara, our men refreshed themselves during their three days' stay.

Slowly but surely, two by two, three by three, nine caravels mustered at C. Blanco, and as the flags.h.i.+p of Lancarote was among them, an attack was made at once with two hundred and seventy-eight men picked from among the crews, the footmen and lancers in one boat and the archers in another, with Lancarote himself and the men-at-arms behind. They were steered by pilots who had been on the coast before and knew it, and it was hoped they would come upon the natives of Tider Island with the first light of dawn. But the way was longer than the pilots reckoned, the night was pitchy dark, without moon or stars, the tide was on the ebb, and at last the boats were aground. It was well on in the morning before they got off on the flood and rowed along the coast to find a landing-place. The sh.o.r.e was manned with natives, not at all taken by surprise, but dancing, yelling, spitting, and throwing missiles in insolent defiance. After a desperate struggle on the beach, they were put to flight with trifling loss--eight killed, four taken,--but when the raiders reached the village, they found it empty; the women and children had been sent away, and all their wretched little property had gone with them. The same was found true of all the villages on that coast; but in a second battle on the next day, fifty-seven Moors were captured, and the army went back on s.h.i.+pboard once more.

And now the fleet divided. Lancarote, holding a council of his captains, declared the purpose of the voyage was accomplished. They had punished the natives and taken vengeance for Gonsalo de Cintra and the other martyrs; now it was for each crew and captain to settle whether they would go farther. All the prisoners having now been divided like prize-money between the s.h.i.+ps, there was nothing more to stay for.

Five caravels at once returned to Portugal after trying to explore the inlet of the sea at C. Blanco; but they only went up in their boats five leagues, and then turned back. One stayed in the Bay of Arguin to traffic in slaves, and lost one of the most valuable captives by sheer carelessness,--a woman, badly guarded, slipped out and swam ash.o.r.e.

But there was a braver spirit in some others of the fleet. The captain of the King's caravel, which had come from Lisbon in the service of the King's uncle, swore he would not turn back. He, Gomes Pires, would go on to the Nile; the Prince had ordered him to bring him certain word of it.

He would not fail him. Lancarote for himself said the same, and another, one Alvaro de Freitas, capped the offers of all the rest. He would go on beyond the Negro-Nile to the Earthly Paradise, to the farthest East, where the four sacred rivers flowed from the tree of life. "Well do you all know how our Lord the Infant sets great store by us, that we should make him know clearly about the land of the Negroes, and especially the River of Nile. It will not be a small guerdon that he will give for such service."

Six caravels in all formed the main body of the Perseverants, and these coasted steadily along till they came to Diaz's Cape of Palms, which they knew was near the Senegal and the land of the Negroes, "and so beautiful did the land now become, and so delicious was the scent from the sh.o.r.e, that it was as if they were by some gracious fruit garden, ordained to the sole end of their delights. And when the men in the caravels saw the first palms and towering woodland, they knew right well that they were close upon the River of Nile, which the men there call the Sanaga." For the Infant had told them how little more than twenty leagues beyond the sight of those trees they would see the river, as his prisoners of the Azanegue tribes had told him. And as they looked carefully for the signs of this, they saw at last, two leagues from land, "a colour of the water that was different from the rest, for that was of the colour of mud."

And understanding this to mean that there were shoals, they put farther out to sea for safety, when one took some of the water in his hand and put it to his mouth, and found that it was sweet. And crying out to the others, "Of a surety," said they, "we are now at the River of Nile, for the water of the river comes with such force into the sea as to sweeten it." So they dropped their anchors in the river's mouth, and they of the caravel of Vincent Diaz (another brother of Diniz and Lawrence) let down a boat, into which jumped eight men who pulled ash.o.r.e.

Here they found some ivory and elephant hide, and had a fierce battle with a huge negro whose two little naked children they carried off,--but though the chronicle of the voyages stops here for several chapters of rapturous reflection on the greatness of the Nile, and the valour and spirit of the Prince who had thus found a way to its western mouth, we must follow the captains as they coast slowly along to Cape Verde, "for that the wind was fair for sailing." Landing on a couple of uninhabited islands off the Cape, they found first of all "fresh goat-skins and other things," and then the arms of the Infant and the words of his motto, _Talan de bien faire_, carved upon trees, and they doubted, like Azurara when writing down his history from their lips; "whether the great power of Alexander or of Caesar could have planted traces of itself so far from home," as these islands were from Sagres. For though the distance looks small enough on a full map of all the world, on the chart of the Then Known it was indeed a lengthy stretch--some two thousand miles, fully as great a distance as the whole range of the Mediterranean from the coast of Palestine to the Straits of Gibraltar.

Now by these signs, adds the chronicler, they understood right well that other caravels had been there already--and it was so; for it was the s.h.i.+p of John Gonsalvez Zarco, Captain of Madeira, which had pa.s.sed this way, as they found for a fact on the day after. And wis.h.i.+ng to land, but finding the number of the natives to be such that they could not land by day or night, they put on sh.o.r.e a ball and a mirror and a paper on which was drawn a cross.

And when the natives came and found them in the morning, they broke the ball and threw away the pieces, and with their a.s.segais broke up the mirror into little bits, and tore the paper, showing that they cared for none of these things.

Since this is so, said Captain Gomes Pires to the archers, draw your bows upon these rascals, that they may know we are people who can do them a damage.

But the negroes returned the fire with arrows and a.s.segais--deadly weapons, the arrows unfeathered and without a string-notch, but tipped with deadly poison of herbs, made of reed or cane or charred wood with long iron heads, and the a.s.segais poisoned in like manner and p.r.i.c.ked with seven or eight harpoons of iron, so that it was no easy matter to draw it out of the flesh.

So they lost heart for going farther, with all the coast-land up in arms against them, and turned back to Lagos, but before they left the Cape they noticed in the desert island, where they had found the Prince's arms, trees so large that they had never seen the like, for among them was one which was 108 palms round at the foot. Yet this tree, the famous baobab, was not much higher than a walnut; "of its fibre they make good thread for sewing, which burns like flax; its fruit is like a gourd and its kernels like chestnuts." And so, we are told, all the captains put back along the coast, in a mind to enter the aforesaid River of Nile, but one of the caravels getting separated from the rest and not liking to enter the Senegal alone, went straight to Lagos, and another put back to water in the Bay of Arguin and the Rio d'Ouro estuary, where there came to them at once the Moors on board the caravel, full of confidence because they had never had any dealings before with the merchants of Spain, and sold them a negro for five doubloons, and gave them meat and water from their camels, and came in and out on board the s.h.i.+p, so that there was great fear of treachery, but at last without any quarrel they were all put on sh.o.r.e, under promise that next July their friends would come again and trade with them in slaves and gold to their hearts'

content. And so, taking in a good cargo of seal-skins, they made their way straight home.