Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery Part 9

"to open up those wastes of tide No generation opened before."

It was through a love affair that the crisis came about. Ferdinand the Handsome, the last of the House of Burgundy to reign in Lisbon, became the slave of the worst of his subjects, the evil genius of himself and his kingdom, Leonora Telles. For her sake he broke his marriage treaty with Castille (1372), and brought down the vengeance of Henry of Trastamara, whom the Black Prince of England had fought and seemed to conquer at Navarette, but who in the end had foiled all his enemies--Pedro the Cruel, Ferdinand of Portugal, and Prince Edward of Crecy and Poictiers.

For Leonor's sake Ferdinand braved the great riot of the Lisbon mob, when Fernan Vasquez the Tailor led his followers to the palace, burst in the gates, and forced from the King an oath to stand by the Castilian marriage he had contracted. For her sake he broke his word to his artisans, as he had broken it to his n.o.bles and his brother monarch.

Leonor herself the people hunted for in vain through the rooms and corridors of the palace; she escaped from their lynch law to Santarem.

The same night Ferdinand joined her. Safe in his strongest fortress, he gathered an army and forced his way back into the capital. The mob was scattered; Vasquez and the other leaders beheaded on the spot. Then at Oporto, without more delay, the King of Portugal married his paramour, in the face of her husband, of Castille, and of his own people.

"Laws are nil," said the rhyme, "when kings will," but though n.o.bles and people submitted in the lifetime of Ferdinand, the storm broke out again on his death in October, 1383. During the last ten years the Queen had practically governed, and the kingdom seemed to be sinking back into a province of Spain. Ferdinand's b.a.s.t.a.r.d brother, John, Master of the Knights of Aviz, and father of Henry the Navigator, was the leader of the national party, and Leonor had in vain tried to get rid of him, silent and dangerous as he was. She forged some treasonable letters in his name, and procured his arrest; then as the King would not order him to execution without trial, she forged the warrant, too, and sent it promptly to the Governor of Evora Castle, where the Master lay in prison. But he refused to obey without further proof, and John escaped to lead the national restoration.

On the death of Ferdinand his widow took the regency in the name of her daughter Beatrice, just married to the King of Castille. It was only a question of time, this coming subjection of Portugal, unless the whole people rose and made monarchy and government national once more. And in December, 1383, they did so. Under John of Aviz the patriots cut to pieces the Queen's friends, and made ready to meet her allies from Castille. On the battle field of Aljubarrota (August 14, 1385), the struggle was decided. Castille was finally driven back, and the new age, of the new dynasty, was fairly started. The Portuguese people under King John I. and his sons Edward, Pedro, Henry, and Ferdinand, pa.s.sed out of the darkness of their slavery into the light and life of their heroic age.

[Ill.u.s.tration: WEST FRONT OF THE MONASTERY CHURCH OF BATALHA WHERE PRINCE HENRY LIES BURIED.]

The founder of the House of Aviz, John, the King of Good Memory, is the great transition figure in his country's history, for in his reign the age of the merely European kingdom is over, and that of discovery and empire begins. That is, the limits of territory and of population, as well as the type of government and of policy, both home and foreign, secured by his victory and his reign, are permanent in themselves, and as the conditions of success they lie at the root of the development of the next hundred years.

Even the drift of Portuguese interests, seawards and southwards, is decided by his action, his alliance with England, his encouragement of trade, his wars against the Moors. For, by the middle of his reign, by the time of the Ceuta conquest (1415), his third son, Prince Henry, had grown to manhood.

Yet, King John's personal work (1383-1433) is rather one of settlement and the providing of resources for future action than the taking of any great share in that action. His mind was practical rather than prophetic, common-sense rather than creative; but in his regeneration of the Court and trade and society and public service of the kingdom, he fitted his people to play their part, to be for a time the "very foremost men of all this world."

First of all, he founded a strong centralised monarchy, like those which marked the fifteenth century in France and England and Russia. The spirit, the aim of Louis XI., of the Tudors, of Ivan III., was the same as that of John I. of Portugal--to rule as well as govern in every department, "over all persons, in all causes, as well ecclesiastical as civil, within their dominions supreme." The Master of Aviz had been the people's choice; the Lisbon populace and their leaders had been among the first who dared to fight for him; but he would not be a simple King of Parliaments. He preferred to reign with the help of his n.o.bles. For though he distrusted feudalism, he dreaded Cortes still more. So, while in most of the new monarchies of Europe the subjection or humiliation of the baronage was a primary article of policy, John tried to win his way by lavish gifts of land, while resolutely checking feudalism in government, curtailing local immunities, and guarding the liberties of the towns against n.o.ble usurpers.

We shall see the results of this in the life of Prince Henry; at present there is only s.p.a.ce to notice the general fact. The other lines of John's home government--his reform of criminal procedure, his sanction of the vernacular in legal and official business in place of Latin, his attempt to publish the first collection of Portuguese laws, his settlement of the Court in the true national capital of Lisbon--are only to be linked with the life of his son, as helping one and all of them towards that conscious political unity on which Henry's work was grounded.

The same was the result of his foreign policy, which was nothing more than the old state-rules of Diniz. Systematic neutrality in Spain and a commercial alliance with England and the northern nations, were but the common-sense securities of the restored kingdom; but they played another part than one of mere defence, in drawing out the seamans.h.i.+p and worldly knowledge, and even the greed of Portuguese traders. In the marts of Bruges and London, "the Schoolmasters of Husbandry to Europe," Henry's countrymen met the travellers and merchants of Italy and Flanders and England and the Hanse Towns, and gained some inkling of the course and profits of the overland trade from India and the further East, first as in Nismes and Montpellier they saw the Malaguette pepper and other merchandise of the Sahara and Guinea caravans.

The Windsor and Paris treaties of 1386 and 1389; the marriage of John himself with Philippa, daughter of old "John of Gaunt, time-honoured"

and time-serving "Lancaster," and the consequent alliance between the House of Aviz and the House of our own Henry IV., are proofs of an unwritten but well understood Triple Alliance of England, Flanders, and Portugal, which had been fostered by the Crusades and by trade and family politics. And through this friends.h.i.+p had come into being what was now the chief outward activity of Portuguese life, an interest in commerce, which was the beginning of a career of discovery and colonisation. Lastly, besides good government, besides saving the kingdom and keeping it safely in the most prosperous path, Portugal owed to King John and his English wife the training of their five sons, Edward the Eloquent, Pedro the Great Regent, Henry the Navigator, John the Constable, Ferdinand the Saint--the cousins of our own Henry V., Henry of Azincourt.

Edward, the heir of John the Great and his unfortunate successor (1433-8), unlucky as most literary princes, but deserving whatever courage and honesty and the best gifts can deserve, was a good ruler, a good son, a good brother, a good lawyer, and one of the earliest writers in his own Portuguese. As a pupil of his father's great Chancellor, John of the Rules, he has left a tract on the _Ordering of Justice_; as a king, two others, on _Pity_ and _A Loyal Councillor_; as a cavalier, _A Book of Good Riding_. Still more to our purpose, he was always at the side of his brother Henry, helped him in his schemes and brought his movement into fas.h.i.+on at a critical time, when enterprise seemed likely to slacken in the face of unending difficulties.

But the Navigator's right-hand man was his next brother Pedro the Traveller, who, after visiting all the countries of Western Europe and fighting with the Teutonic knights against the heathen Prussians, brought back to Portugal for the use of discovery that great ma.s.s of suggestive material, oral and written, in maps and plans and books, which was used for the first ocean voyages of Henry's sailors.

On his judgment and advice, more than of any other man, Henry relied, and after Edward's death it was due to him as Regent that the generous support of the past was more than kept up, that so many s.h.i.+ps and men were found for the rounding of Cape Verde, and that Edward's son and heir Affonso V., was trained in the mind of his father and his uncle, to be their successor in leading the expansion of Portugal and of Christendom.

[Ill.u.s.tration: AISLE IN BATALHA CHURCH CONTAINING THE TOMBS OF HENRY AND HIS BROTHERS.]

John and Ferdinand, Henry's two younger brothers, are not of much importance in his work, though they were both of the same rare quality as the elder Infantes, and the worst disaster of Henry's life, the Tangier campaign, is closely bound up with the fate of "Fernand the Constant Prince," but as we pa.s.s from the earlier story of Portugal to the age of its great achievements, it would be hard to doubt or to forget that the mother of the Navigator was also of some account in the shaping of the heroes of her house. Through her at least the Lusitanian Prince of Thomson's line is half an Englishman:

"The Lusitanian prince, who, Heaven-inspired, To love of useful glory roused mankind, And in unbounded commerce mixed the world."

[NOTE 1.--The Old Roman Lusitania, but with a wider stretch on the North, and a narrower stretch on the East. So the Portuguese are "Lusians," "Lusitanians," etc., in poetry. _Cf._ Camoens, _Lusiads_.]

[NOTE 2.--

What Diniz willed He ever fulfilled

--said the popular rhyme.]

CHAPTER VII.

HENRY'S POSITION AND DESIGNS AT THE TIME OF THE FIRST VOYAGES, 1410-15.

Then from ancient gloom emerged The rising world of trade: the genius then, Of Navigation, held in hopeless sloth, Had slumbered on the vast Atlantic deep For idle ages, starting, heard at last The Lusitanian Prince, who, Heaven-inspired, To love of useful glory roused mankind, And in unbounded commerce mixed the world.

THOMSON, _Seasons, Summer, 1005-1012_.

The third son of John the Great and of Philippa was the Infant Henry, Duke of Viseu, Master of the Order of Christ, Governor of the Algarves, born March 4, 1394, who might have travelled from Court to Court like his brother Pedro, but who refused all offers from England, Italy, and Germany, and chose the life of a student and a seaman,--retiring more and more from the known world that he might open up the unknown.

After the capture of Ceuta, in 1415, he planted himself in his Naval a.r.s.enal at Sagres, close to Lagos town and Cape St. Vincent, and for more than forty years, till his death in 1460, he kept his mind upon the ocean that stretched out from that rocky headland to the unknown West and South. Twice only for any length of time did he come back into political life; for the rest, though respected as the referee of national disputes and the leader and teacher of the people, his time was mainly spent in thinking out his plans of discovery--drawing his maps, adjusting his instruments, sending out his s.h.i.+ps, receiving the reports of his captains. His aims were three: to discover, to add to the greatness and wealth of Portugal, and to spread the Christian Faith.

(1.) First of all, he was trying to find a way round Africa to India for the sake of the new knowledge itself and for the power which that knowledge would give. As his mind was above all things interested in the scientific question, it was this side which was foremost in his plans.

He was really trying to find out the shape of the world, and to make men feel more at home in it, that the dread of the great unknown round the little island of civilised and habitable world might be lightened. He was working in the mist that so long had hung round Christendom, chilling every enterprise.

Thus the whole question of the world and its shape, its countries and climates, its seas and continents, on every side of practical exploration, was bound to be before Prince Henry as a theorist; the practical question which he helped to solve was only a part of this wider whole. Did this Africa stretching opposite to him in his retreat at Sagres never end till it reached the Southern pole, or was it possible to get round into the Eastern ocean? Since Ptolemy's map had held the field, it had been heresy to suppose this; but in the age of Greek and Phoenician voyages it had been guessed by some, and perhaps even proved by others.

The Tyrians whom Pharaoh Necho sent down the Red Sea more than six hundred years before Christ, brought back after three years a story of their finding Africa an island, and so returning by the west and north through the Straits of Gibraltar.

The same tradition, after a long time of discredit, was now reviving upon the maps of the fourteenth century, and, in spite of the terrible stories of the Arabs, Henry was able in the first years of the fifteenth to find men who would try the forlorn hope of a direct sea-route from Europe to the Indies. We have seen how far the charts and guide-books of the time just before this had advanced Christian knowledge of the world; how the southern coastline of Asia is traced by Marco Polo, and how even Madagascar is named, though not visited, by the same traveller; the Florentine map of 1351 proves that a fairly true guess of the shape of Africa could be made even before persistent exploration began with Henry of Portugal; the Arab settlements on the east coast of Africa and their trade with the Malabar coast, though still kept as a close monopoly for Islam, had thoroughly opened up a line of navigation, that was ready, as it were, for the first Europeans who could strike into it and press the Moorish pilots into a new service. Discovery was thus antic.i.p.ated when the coasts of West and South had once been rounded.

Beyond this, the vague knowledge of the Guinea coast already gained through the Sahara Caravan Trade was improved by the Prince himself, during his stay at Ceuta, into the certainty that if the great western hump of Africa beyond Bojador could be pa.s.sed, his caravels would come into an eastern current, pa.s.sing the gold and ivory coast, which might lead straight to India, and at any rate would be connected by an overland traffic with the Mediterranean.

(2.) Again, Henry was founding upon his work of exploration an empire for his country. At first perhaps only thinking of the straight sea-pa.s.sage as the possible key of the Indian trade, it became clearer with every fresh discovery that the European kingdom might and must be connected by a chain of forts and factories with the rich countries for whose sake all these barren coasts were pa.s.sed. In any case, and in the eyes of ordinary men, the riches of the East were the plain and primary reason of the explorations. Science had its own aims, but to gain an income for its work it must promise some definite gain. And the chief hope of Henry's captains was that the wealth now flowing by the overland routes to the Levant would in time, as the prize of Portuguese daring, go by the water way, without delay or fear of plunder or Arab middlemen, to Lisbon and Oporto. This would repay all the trouble and all the cost, and silence all who murmured. For this Indian trade was the prize of the world, and for the sake of this Rome had destroyed Palmyra, and attacked Arabia and held Egypt, and struggled for the mastery of the Tigris. For the same thing half the wars of the Levant had been waged, and by this the Italian republics, Venice, Genoa, and Pisa, had grown to greatness.

(3.) Lastly, Henry was a Crusader with Islam and a missionary with the heathen. Of him fully as much as of Columbus, it may be said, that if he aimed at an empire, it was a Christian one, and from the time of the first voyages his captains had orders not merely to discover and to trade, but to convert. Till his death he hoped to find the land of Prester John, the half-true, half-fabulous Christian Priest-King of the outer world, so long cut off from Christendom by the Mohammedan states.

At this time many things were drawing western Europe towards the East and towards discovery. The progress of science and historic knowledge, the records and suggestions of travellers, the development of the Christian nations, the position of Portugal and the spirit of her people,--all these lines met, as it were, in Henry's time and nation and person, and from that meeting came the results of Columbus and Da Gama and Magellan.

In the earlier chapters we have tried to trace the preparation along these slowly converging paths, for the discoveries of the fifteenth century. We started with that body of knowledge and theory about the world which the Roman Empire bequeathed to Christendom, and which in the earlier Middle Ages was worked upon by the Arabs, and we gained some idea, from the sayings of Moslem geographers and from the doings of Moslem warriors, of the hindrance as well as of the help that Islam gave to European expansion. We saw that during the great struggle of Christianity and of the old Order with barbarism, the chief energy of our Western world in discovery or extension of any sort took the shape of pilgrimage. Then, as time went on, it was possible to see that the Saracens, who had begun as destroyers in the South, were acting as teachers and civilisers upon Europe, and that the Vikings, who as pirates in the North seemed raised up to complete the ruin of Latin civilisation, were really waking it into a new activity.

In the Crusades this activity, which had already founded the kingdom of Russia on one side and touched America on the other, seemed to pa.s.s from the Northern seamen into every Christian nation and every cla.s.s of society, and with the conversion of the Northmen their place as the discoverers and leaders of the Christian world fitted in with the other movements of Mediterranean commerce and war and devotion. Even the pilgrims of the Crusading Age were now no longer distinctive: they were often, as individuals, members of other cla.s.ses, traders, fighters, or travellers who, after gaining a firm foothold in Syria, began the exploration of the further East.

The three great discovering energies of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries--in land-travel, navigation, and science--were all seen to be results, in whole or in part, of the Crusades themselves, and in following the more important steps of European travel and trade and proselytism from the Holy Land to China, it became more and more evident that this practical finding out of the treasures of Cathay and the Indies was the necessary preparation for the attempts of Genoese and Portuguese to open up the sea route as another and a safer way to the source of the same treasures.

Lastly, the intermittent and uncertain ventures of the fourteenth-century seamen, Italian, Spanish, French, or English, to coast round Africa or to find the Indies by the Southern route--to reach a definite end without any clear plan of means to that end--and the revival in theoretical geography, which was trying at the same time to fill up the gaps of knowledge by tradition or by probability--seemed to offer a clear contrast and a clear foreshadowing also of Prince Henry's method. Even his nearest forerunners, in seamans.h.i.+p or in map-making[33]

were strikingly different from himself. They were too much in the spirit of Ptolemy and of ancient science; they neglected fact for hypothesis, for clever guessing, and so their work was spasmodic and unfruitful, or at least disappointing.

[Footnote 33: Except the draughtsmen of the Portolani.]

It was true enough that each generation of Christian thought was less in fault than the one before it; but it was not till the fifteenth century, till Henry had set the example, that exploration became systematic and continuous. To Marco Polo and men like him we owe the beginnings of the art and science of discovery among the learned; to the Portuguese is due at least the credit of making it a thing of national interest, and of freeing it from a false philosophy. To find out by incessant and unwearying search what the world really was, and not to make known facts fit in with the ideas of some thinker on what the world ought to be, this we found to be the main difference between Cosmas or even Ptolemy and any true leader of discovery. For a real advance of knowledge, fancy must follow experiment, and no merely hypothetical system or Universe as shewn in Holy Scripture, would do any longer. We have come to the time when explorers were not Ptolemaics or Strabonians or Scripturists, but Naturalists--men who examined things afresh, for themselves.

These various objects are all involved in the one central aim of discovery, but they are not lost in it. To know this world we live in and to teach men the new knowledge was the first thing, which makes Henry what he is in universal history; his other aims are those of his time and his nation, but they are not less a part of his life.