To Henry’s sorrow for the death of one brother and the living death of another—the tortures of Fernando’s captivity ended in a miserable dungeon in 1443—was added the crushing of his hopes and projects. For the new King was but a boy, and it needed no peculiar foresight to prophesy impending trouble in Portugal. It required all Prince Henry’s fortitude and faith to persevere, in loneliness and remorse. Prince Pedro had strongly opposed the expedition: it was on Henry that its failure rested. Nor was he one to wish to shirk responsibility, and many an hour he must have spent brooding over the fatal effects of his rashness.
Henry is too great a man to need to have his mistakes glossed over. He had underestimated the difficulty of the enterprise, he had been rash in advancing from Ceuta without awaiting reinforcements, he had been rasher in not retiring after the first unsuccessful attempt to scale the walls of Tangier. His object certainly had been a noble one, based on no personal greed or ambition, and the results of his failure were felt by none more than by himself. In the eyes of others his magnificent courage and steadfast retreat placed him even higher than before.
Fortunately for him, there was plenty of work ready to his hand, for, although he did not personally accompany the ships of exploration, he scientifically worked out their instructions, equipped them, and followed their progress on his maps. Perhaps a certain estrangement between Pedro and Henry was natural after 1437; Henry, at least, did not very actively support his brother in his quarrel with the Queen-Regent, and failed to stand by him later when he had resigned his Regency and was venomously attacked and slandered by his enemies before his weak son-in-law, King Affonso V. When the matter came to open conflict Pedro, with his small band of followers, could not hope for victory, and again Henry did not resolutely intervene. Pedro’s tragic death at Alfarrobeira in 1449 cannot have diminished Henry’s remorse for the death of Duarte and Fernando eleven and six years earlier.
Meanwhile, his austere devotion to the work of discovery bore increasing fruit, and before he died the rich islands of the Azores, Madeira, the Canaries, and Cape Verde were discovered, and the coast of Africa explored as far as Sierra Leone, which was reached by the famous Venetian, Luigi Cadamosto, in the service of Prince Henry, nearly a quarter of a century after Gil Eannez had rounded Cape Bojador in 1434. The Infante himself had lost little of his energy, and although nearly sixty-five, accompanied his nephew Affonso V in the expedition against Morocco in 1558, and took a prominent part in the siege and capture of Alcacer.
The last two years of his life were spent at Sagres. In September 1460 he disposed of certain of his revenues, potential rather than actual, to the Order of Christ and to the State, which had hitherto recognised his right to receive the profits of the discoveries as it had allowed him to bear its burden. The burden to the day of his death was far greater than the profits. Yet he must have realised that his life’s purpose was attained, and that the rest was but a matter of time, as surely as though he had planted an orange-tree and died when it was covered with blossom. His body was taken to Batalha, and, if it was not to remain on Cape St. Vincent looking southwards over the sea to Africa, no worthier resting-place could be found for it than the splendid church built to commemorate the victory of his father and of his friend Nun’ Alvarez. Prince Henry spent himself, his time, and his revenues without stint in the service of a great idea and a high ambition. Nun’ Alvarez had worked for the independence of Portugal; Prince Henry left it well on the road to an imperishable glory.
A generation later, when the full effects of his life’s work were manifest, his countrymen and the world recognised in this strong, tenacious ascetic, with his burning zeal for God and country, his fearlessness and unwavering devotion, the inspirer and origin of Portugal’s new greatness.
VASCO DA GAMA
IV
VASCO DA GAMA
(1460?-1524)