Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery Part 16

The first Captain Donatory of Fayal was another Fleming--Job van Heurter, Lord of Moerkerke--and there is a special interest in his name.

For it is through him that we get in 1492 the long and interesting notice of the first settlement of the Azores on the globe of Martin Behaim, now at Nuremberg, the globe which was made to play such a curious part, as undesigned as it was ungenerous, in the Columbus controversy.

"These islands," says the tablet attached to them on the map, "these Hawk islands, were colonised in 1466, when they were given by the King of Portugal to his sister Isabel, d.u.c.h.ess of Burgundy, who sent out many people of all cla.s.ses, with priests and everything necessary for the maintenance of religion. So that in 1490 there were there some thousands of souls, who had come out with the n.o.ble knight, Job de Heurter, my dear father-in-law, to whom the islands were given in perpetuity by the d.u.c.h.ess.

"Now in 1431, Prince Henry provisioned two s.h.i.+ps for two years and sent them to the lands beyond Cape Finisterre, and they, sailing due west for some five hundred leagues, found these islands, ten in number, all desert without quadrupeds or men, only tenanted by birds, and these so tame that they could be caught by the hand. So they called these 'the Islands of the Hawks' (Azores).

"And next year (1432), by the King's orders, sixteen vessels were sent out from Portugal with all kinds of tame animals, that they might breed there."

Of the first settlement of Flores and Corvo, the two remaining islands of the group, still less is known, but in any case it seems not to have been fully carried out till the last years of the Prince's life, possibly it was the work of his successor in the Grand Masters.h.i.+p of the Order of Christ, which now took up a sort of charge to colonise outlying and new discovered lands. For among the Prince's last acts was his bequest of the islands, which had been granted to himself by his brother, King Edward, in 1433, to Prince Ferdinand, his nephew, whom he had adopted with a view of making him his successor in aims as well as in office, in leading the progress of discovery as well as in the heads.h.i.+p of the Order of Christ.

CHAPTER XVI.

THE TROUBLES OF THE REGENCY AND THE FALL OF DON PEDRO.

1440-9.

Don Pedro had been nominated sole Regent of Portugal on November 1, 1439, and by the end of the next year all the unsettlement consequent on the change at court seemed to be at an end. But a deep hatred continued between the various parties.

First of all, the Count of Barcellos, natural son of John I., created Duke of Braganza by Affonso V., had taken up a definite policy of supplanting the Regent. The Queen Mother had not forgotten or forgiven Don Pedro's action at Edward's death, and the young King himself, though engaged to the Regent's daughter, was already distrustful, was fitting himself to lead the Barcellos party against the Prince.

On February 18, 1445, died the Queen Leonor, with suspicions of poison, diligently fostered by the malcontents. Next year (1446) Affonso, now fourteen, came of age, and his uncle proposed at once to resign all actual power and retire to his estates as Duke of Coimbra. But the King was either not yet prepared to part with him, or still felt some grat.i.tude to his guardian, "the wisest head in Spain."

He begged him to keep the chief direction of affairs, thanked him for the past, and promised to help him in the future. More than this, he protested that he wished to be married to his cousin, Pedro's daughter Isabel. They had been formally betrothed four years; now Affonso called on his n.o.bles and the deputies of Cortes to witness the marriage.

In May, 1447, this royal wedding was celebrated, but coldly and poorly, as nephew and uncle had now drifted quite apart. The more the younger disliked and suspected the elder, the more vehement became his protestations of regard. But he bitterly resented the Duke's action in holding him to his promise, and he made up his mind before the marriage that he would henceforth govern as well as reign.

The Regent just prevented his dismissal by laying down his offices; the King seemed almost to relent in parting from his guardian, who had kept the kingdom in such perfect peace and now resigned so well discharged a duty; but even his wife could not prevent the coming storm. She struggled hard to reconcile her father and her husband, but the mischief-makers were too hard for her. Persuaded that the Duke was a traitor, the King allowed himself to be used to goad him into revolt.

"Your father wishes to be punished," he said fiercely to the Queen, "and he shall be punished."

[Ill.u.s.tration: HENRY IN MORNING DRESS, WITH GREAT HAT.]

If Henry, who in the last six years had only once left Sagres, to knight Don Pedro's eldest son at Coimbra in 1445, had now been able, in presence as well as writing, to stand by his brother in this crisis, the Regent might have been saved. As it was, Pedro had hardly settled down in his exile at Coimbra, when he found himself charged with the secret murders of King Edward, Queen Leonor, and Prince John. The more monstrous the slander, the more absurd and self-contradictory it might be, the more eagerly it was made.

Persecution as petty and grinding as that which hunted Wolsey to death, at last drove Pedro to take arms. His son, knighted by Henry himself for the high place of Constable of the Realm, had been forced into flight, the arms of Coimbra a.r.s.enal seized for the King's use, his letters to his nephew opened and answered, it was said by his enemies, who wrote back in the sovereign's name, as he would write to an open rebel. All this the Prince bore, but when he heard that his b.a.s.t.a.r.d brother of Braganza, who had betrayed and maligned and ruined him, was on the march to plunder his estates, like an outlaw's, he collected a few troops and barred his way. At this Affonso was persuaded to declare war.

Only one great n.o.ble stood by the fallen Regent, but this was his friend Almada, the Spanish Hercules, his sworn brother in arms and in travels, one of the Heroes of Christendom, who had been made a Count in France and a Knight of the Garter in England. It was he who now escaped from honourable imprisonment at Cintra, joined Pedro in Coimbra, and proposed to him that they should go together to Court and demand justice and a fair trial, but sword in hand and with their men at their back. Was it not better to die as soldiers than as traitors without a hearing?

So on May 5, 1449, the Duke left Coimbra with his little army of va.s.sals, 1000 horse and 5000 foot and pa.s.sed by Batalha, where he stopped to revisit the great church and the tombs of his father and his brothers. Thence he marched straight on Lisbon, which the King covered from Santarem with 30,000 men. At the rivulet of Alfarrobeira the armies met; a lance thrust or a cross-bow shot killed the Infant; a common soldier cut off his head and carried it to Affonso in the hope of knighthood. Almada, who fought till he could not stand from loss of blood, died with his friend. Hurling his sword from him, he threw himself on the ground, with a scornful, "Take your fill of me, Varlets,"

and was cut to pieces.

Though at first leave could hardly be got to bury Don Pedro's body, as time went on his name was cleared. His daughter bore a son to the King, and the proofs of his loyalty, the indignant warnings of foreign Courts, the entreaties of the Queen, at last brought Affonso to something like repentance and amendment. He buried the Regent at Batalha and pardoned his friends, those who were left from the butchery of Alfarrobeira.

CHAPTER XVII.

CADAMOSTO.

1455-6.

We have now come to the voyages of the Venetian Cadamosto, in the service of Prince Henry. And though these were far from being the most striking in their general effect, they are certainly the most famous, the best known, of all the enterprises of these fifty years (1415-1460).

It is true that Cadamosto fairly reached Sierra Leone and, pa.s.sing the farthest mark of the earlier Portuguese caravels, coasted along many miles of that great eastern bend of the West African coast which we call the Gulf of Guinea. But it is to his general fame as a seaman, his position in Italy, and the interest he aroused by his written and published story that he owed his greater share of attention.

When I first set my mind, begins his narrative, on sailing the ocean between the Strait of Cadiz and the Fortunate Islands, the one man who had tried to enter the aforesaid ocean, since the days of our Father Adam, was the Infant Don Henry of Portugal, whose ill.u.s.trious and almost countless deeds I pa.s.s over, excepting only his zeal for the Christian faith and his freedom from the bonds of matrimony. For his father, King John, had not given up the ghost before he had warned his son Henry with saving precepts, that the aforesaid Holy Faith he should foster with a dauntless mind and not fail in his vows of warring down the foes of Christ.

Therefore every year did Don Henry, as it were, challenging and hurling defiance at the Moors, persist in sending out his caravels as far as the headland called the Cape of Non (Not), from the belief that beyond the said Cape there is "_No_" return possible. And as for a long time the s.h.i.+ps of the Prince did not dare to pa.s.s that point, Henry roused himself to accomplish this feat, seeing that his caravels did much excel all other sailing s.h.i.+ps afloat, and strictly enjoined his captains not to return before they had pa.s.sed the said Cape. Who steadily pressing on, and never leaving sight of the sh.o.r.e, did in truth pa.s.s near one hundred miles beyond, finding nothing but desert land.

Beyond this again, for the s.p.a.ce of one hundred and fifty miles, the Prince then sent another fleet, which fared no better, and finding no trace of men or of tillage, returned home. And Don Henry, growing ever keener for discovery, and excited by the opposition as it were of nature, sent out again and again till his sailors had reached beyond the Desert Coast to the land of the Arabs and of those new races called Azaneguys, people of a tawny colour.

And finally there appeared to these bold mariners the land of aethiopia, which lies upon the sh.o.r.e of the Southern ocean, and here again from day to day the explorers discovered new races and new lands.

"Now I, Luigi Ca da Mosto, who had sailed nearly all the Mediterranean coasts, once leaving Venice for 'Celtogallia' (France), but being caught by a storm off C. St. Vincent, had to take refuge in the Prince's town, near the said Cape, and was here told of the glorious and boundless conquests of the Prince, whence accrued such gain that from no traffic in the world could the like be had.

"The which," continues the candid trader, "did exceedingly stir my soul, eager as it was for gain above all things else; and so I made suit to be brought before the Prince, if so be that I might gain leave to sail in his service, for since the profit of this voyage is subject to his pleasure, he doth guard his monopoly with no small care."

With the Prince, at last, Cadamosto made terms: either that he, the adventurer, should furnish the s.h.i.+ps at his own cost, and take the whole risk upon himself, and of the merchandise that he might gain a fourth part to go to his lord; or that the Prince should bear the cost of equipment and should have half the profits. But in any case, if there was no profit, the whole expense should fall upon the trader. The Prince added that he would heartily welcome any other volunteers from Venice, and on Cadamosto himself he urged an immediate start. "As for me,"

repeats the sailor, "my age, my vigour, my skill equal to any toil, above all my pa.s.sionate desire to see the world and explore the unknown, set me all on fire with eagerness. And especially the fact that no countryman of mine had ever tried the like, and my certainty of winning the highest honour and gain from such a venture, made me forward to offer myself. I only stayed to enquire from veteran Portuguese what merchandise was the most highly prized among the aethiopians and people of the furthest South, and then went home to find the best light craft for the ocean coasting that I had in mind." Meantime the Prince ordered a caravel to be equipped, which he gave to one Vincent, a native of Lagos, as captain, and caused to be armed to the teeth, as was required, and on the 21st of March, 1455, Cadamosto sailed for Madeira. On the 25th they were off Porto Santo, and the Venetian stops to give us a description of the island, which, he says in pa.s.sing, had been found and colonised by the Prince's seamen twenty-seven years before. It was worth the settling. Every kind of grain and fruit was easily raised, and there was a great trade in dragon's blood, "which is made from the tears of a tree."

On March 27th, Cadamosto sailed from Porto Santo to Madeira, forty miles distant, and easily seen from the first island when the weather was cloudy, and here the narrative stops some time to describe and admire sufficiently. Madeira had been colonised under the lead and action of the Prince four and twenty years before, and was now thickly peopled by the Portuguese settlers. Beyond Portugal its existence was hardly known.

Its name was "from its woodland,"--here Cadamosto repeats the traditional falsehood about the place,--but the first settlers had destroyed most of this in trying to clear an open s.p.a.ce by fire. The whole island had once been in flames, the colonists only saved their lives by plunging into the rivers, and even Zarco, the chief discoverer, with his wife and children had to stand in a torrent bed for two whole days and nights before they could venture on dry land again.

The island was forty miles round; like Porto Santo, it was without a harbour, but not without convenient roads for s.h.i.+ps to lie in; the soil was fertile, well watered by eight rivers that flowed through the island. "Various kinds of carved wood are exported, so that almost all Portugal is now adorned with tables and other furniture made from these woods."

"Hearing of the great plenty of water in the island, the Prince ordered all the open country to be planted with sugar-cane and with vines imported from Crete, which do excellent well in a climate so well suited to the grape; the vine staves make good bows, and are exported to Europe like the wine, red and white alike, but especially the red. The grapes are ripe about Easter in each year," and this vintage, as early as Cadamosto's day, was evidently the main interest of the islanders, who had all the enthusiasm of a new venture in their experiment, "for no one had ever tried his hand upon the soil before."

From Madeira the caravel sailed on 320 miles to the Canaries, of which says our Venetian, there are ten, seven cultivated and three still desert; and of the seven inhabited four are Christian, three Heathen, even now, fifty years after De Bethencourt's conquest. Neither wine nor grain can be produced on this soil, and hardly any fruit, only a kind of dye, used for clothes in Portugal; goat's flesh and cheese can also be exported, and something, Cadamosto fancies, might be made of the wild a.s.ses that swarm in the islands.

Each of these Canary islands being some forty miles from the next, the people of one do not understand the speech of their neighbours. They have no walls, but open villages; watch towers are placed on the highest mountains to guard the people of one village from the attacks of the next, for a guerilla warfare, half marauding, half serious civil war, is the order of the day.

Speaking of the three heathen islands, "which were also the most populous," Cadamosto stops a little over the mention of Teneriffe, "wonderful among the islands of the earth, and able to be seen in clear weather for a distance of seventy Spanish leagues, which is equal to two hundred and fifty miles. And what makes it to be seen from so far, is that on the top is a great rock of adamant, like a pyramid, which stone blazes like the mountain of aetna, and is full fifteen miles from the plain, as the natives say."

These natives have no iron weapons, but fight with stones and wooden daggers; they go naked except for a defensive armour of goat-skins, which they wear in front and behind. Houses they have none, not even the poorest huts, but live in mountain caves, without faith, without G.o.d.

Some indeed wors.h.i.+p the sun and moon, and others planets, reverence certain idols; in their marriage customs the chiefs have the first right by common consent, and at the graves of their dead chiefs are most of their religious sacrifices; the islanders have only one art, that of stone-slinging, unless one were to count their mountain-climbing and skill in running and in all bodily exercises, in which nature has created these Canarians to excel all other mortals.

They paint their bodies with the juice of plants in all sorts of colours and think this the highest point of perfection, to be decked out on their skins like a garden bed.

From the Canaries, Cadamosto sails to the White Cape, C. Blanco, on the mainland, some way beyond Bojador, "towards aethiopia," pa.s.sing the bay and isles of Arguin on the way, where the crews found such quant.i.ties of sea-birds that they brought home two s.h.i.+p-loads. And here it is to be noticed, says the narrative, that in sailing from the parts of Cadiz to that aethiopia which faces to the south, you meet with nothing but desert lands till you come to Cape Cantin, from which it is a near course to C.

Blanco. These parts towards the south do run along the borders of the negroes' land, and this great tract of white and arid land, full of sand, very low lying at a dead level, it would be a quick thing to cross in sixty days. At C. Blanco some hills begin to rise out of the plain, and this cape was first found by the Portuguese, and on it is nothing but sand, no trace of gra.s.s or trees; it is seen from far, being very sharply marked, three-sided, and having on its crest three pyramids, as they may be called, each one a mile from its neighbour. A little beyond this great desert tract is a vast sea and a wondrous concourse of rivers, where only explorers have reached. At C. Blanco there is a mart of Arab traders, a station for the camels and caravans of the interior, and those pa.s.s by the cape who are coming from Negro-land and going to the Barbary of North Africa. As one might expect on such a barren stony soil, no wine or grain can be raised; the natives have oxen and goats, but very few; milk of camels and others is their only drink; as for religion, the wretches wors.h.i.+p Mahomet and hate Christians right bitterly. What is of more interest to the Venetian merchant, the traders of these parts have plenty of camels which carry loads of bra.s.s and silver, and even of gold, brought from the negroes to the people of our parts.

The natives of C. Blanco are black as moles, but dress in white flowing robes, after the Moorish fas.h.i.+on, with a turban wound round the head; and indeed plenty of Arabs are always hovering off the cape and the bay of Arguin for the sake of trade with the Infant's s.h.i.+ps, especially in silver, grain, and woven stuffs, and above all in slaves and gold. To protect this commerce, the Prince some time since (1448), built a fort in the bay, and every year the Portuguese caravels that come here lie under its protection and exchange the negro slaves that they have captured farther south for Arab horses, one horse against ten or fifteen slaves, or for silks and woven stuffs from Morocco and Granada, from Tunis and the whole land of Barbary. The Arabs on their side sell slaves, that they have driven from the upland, to the Portuguese at Arguin, in all nearly a thousand a year, so that the Europeans, who used to plunder all this coast as far as the Senegal, now find it more profitable to trade.

The mention of the Senegal brings Cadamosto to the next stage of his voyage, to the great river, "which divides the Azaneguys, Tawny Moors, from the First Kingdom of the Negroes."