Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. / With an Account of Geographical Progress Throughout the Middle Ages As the Preparation for His Work.

by C. Raymond Beazley

COLUMBUS AS S. CHRISTOPHER, CARRYING THE CHRISTIAN FAITH, IN THE FORM OF THE INFANT JESUS, ACROSS THE OCEAN.

There are figures which are of national interest: there are others which are less than that, figures of family or provincial importance; others again which are always dear to us as human beings, as men who felt the ordinary wants and passions and lived the ordinary life of men with a brilliancy and an intense power that was all their own; there are other men who stand out as those who have changed more or less, but changed vitally and really, the course of the world's history; without whom the whole of our modern society, our boasted civilisation, would have been profoundly different.

For after all the modern Christian world of Europe has something to boast of, though its writers spend much of their time in reviling and decrying it. It is something that our Western world has conquered or worsted every other civilisation upon earth; that with the single exception of China, it has made everyone of the coveted tracts of Asia its own; that it has discovered, settled, and developed a new continent to be the equal of the old; that it has won not a complete but a good working knowledge of the whole surface of the globe. We are at home in the world now, we say, and if we would know what that means, we must look at the Europe of the tenth or even the fourteenth century, look at the theoretic maps of the Middle Ages, look at the legends and the pseudo-science of a civilisation which was shut up within itself and condemned for so long to fight in a narrowing circle against incessant attacks from without and the barbarism which this state of things kept alive within. Then perhaps we shall take things a little less for granted, and perhaps also we shall begin to think that if this great advance, the greatest thing in Modern History as we know it, that which is the distinction and glory of the last three hundred years, is at all due to the inspiration and the action of Henry of Portugal, an obscure Prince of the fifteenth century, that obscure Prince may possibly belong to the rank of the great civilisers, the men who have most altered society and advanced it, men like Alexander and Cæsar and the founders of the great world religions.

It may be as well to trace out very shortly the evidence for such a claim as this and to see, how the Prince's work was followed up, first on his own lines to south and east; second, on other lines, which his own suggested, to west and north.

1. King Affonso V., Henry's nephew, though rather more of a hard fighter and tournament king than a man who could fully take up his uncle's plans, had yet caught enough of his inspiration to push on steadily, though slowly, the advance round Africa. He had already done his best to get the great map of Fra Mauro finished: this, which embodied all the achievements of the Navigator and gave the most complete and perfect view of the world that had ever yet appeared, had come out in 1459, just before Henry's death, the last tribute of science to the Prince's work.

Now, in 1461, left alone to deal with the discovery and conquest of Guinea, Affonso repaired Henry's fort in the Bay of Arguin and sent one Pedro de Cintra to survey the coast beyond the Rio Grande, the farthest point of Cadamosto in his first voyage, as generally known. Pedro went six hundred miles into the Bight of Benin, passed a mountain range called Sierra Leone from the lion-like growl of the thunder on its summits, and turned back near the point afterwards known as Fort La Mina (1461). Some time in the next few years, another courtier, one Sueiro da Costa followed Pedro de Cintra to Guinea, but without any new results; when Cadamosto left Portugal (Feb. 1, 1463), he tells us "there were no more voyages to the new-found parts."

The slave-trade nearer home was now, indeed, absorbing all energies and Affonso's main relation with African voyaging is to be found in his regulations for the security of this trade.

But in 1471 there was another move in the line of further discovery. For exploring energy was not dead or worn out, but only waiting a leader. Fernando Po now reached the island in the farthest inlet of the Gulf of Guinea, which is still called after him, finding as he went on that the eastern bend of Africa, which men had followed so confidently since 1445, the year of the rounding of Cape Verde, now ended with a sharp turn to the south. It was a great disappointment. But in spite of this discouragement, at the very same time two of the foremost of the Portuguese pilots, Martin Fernandez and Alvaro Esteeves, passed the whole of the Guinea Coast, the Bights of Benin and of Biafra, and crossed the Equator, into a new Heaven and a new Earth, on the edge of which the caravels of Portugal had long been hovering, as they saw like Cadamosto, stars unknown in the Northern Hemisphere and more and more nearly lost sight of the Northern Pole.