While Diaz was still tossing in the storms off the Great Cape, Covilham and his friends had started from Lisbon to settle the course of the future sea-route to India by an "observation of all the coasts of the Indian Ocean," to explore what they could of Upper Africa, to find Prester John, and to ally the Portuguese experiment with anything they could find of Christian power in Greater or Middle or Further India.
As King John's Senegal adventurers had been exploring the Niger, the Sahara caravan routes, the city of Timbuctoo and the fancied western Nile, so the Abyssinian travellers surveyed all the ground of Africa and Malabar which the first fleet that could round the Cape of Storms must come to. "Keep southward," Covilham wrote home from Cairo after his first visit to Calicut on one side and to Mozambique on the other, "if you persist, Africa must come to an end. And when ships come to the Eastern Ocean let them ask for Sofala and the island of the Moon (Madagascar), and they will find pilots to take them to Malabar."
Yet another chapter of discoveries was opened by King John's Cathay fleet. He failed to get news of a North-east passage, but beyond the north coast of Asia there was found a frozen island whose name of Novaia Zemlaia or Nova Zembla still keeps the memory of the first Portuguese attempts on the road where so many Dutch and English seamen perished in after years.
The great voyage of Vasco da Gama (1497-9), the empire founded by Albuquerque (1506-15) in the Indian seas, were the other steps in the complete achievement of Prince Henry's ambition. When in the early years of the sixteenth century a direct and permanent traffic was fairly started between Malabar and Portugal, when European settlements and forts controlled the whole eastern and western coasts of Africa from the mouth of the Red Sea to the mouth of the Mediterranean, and the five keys of the Indies—Malacca, Goa, Ormuz, Aden, and Ceylon—were all in Christian hands, when the Moslem trade between east Africa and western India had passed into a possession of the Kings of Lisbon, Don Henry might see of the travail of his soul and be well satisfied.
The supposed discovery of Australia about 1530, or somewhat earlier, and the travels of Ferdinand Mendez Pinto in Japan and the furthest East, the opening of the trade with China in 1517, and the complete exploration of Abyssinia, the Prester's kingdom, in 1520, by Alvarez and the other Catholic missionaries, the millions converted by Francis Xavier and the Jesuit preachers in Malabar, and the union of the old native Christian Church of India with the Roman (1599), were other steps in the same road. All of them, if traced back far enough, bring us to the Court of Sagres, and the same is true of Spanish and French and Dutch and English empires in the southern and eastern world. Henry built for his own nation, but when that nation failed from the exhaustion of its best blood, other peoples entered upon the inheritance of his work.
But though he was not able himself to see the fulfilment of his plans, both the method of a South-east passage, and the men who followed it out to complete success, were his,—his workmanship and his building.
Da Gama, Diego Cam, the Diaz family, and most of the great seamen who followed the path they had traced, were either "brought up from boyhood in the Household of the Infant," as the Chronicle of the Discovery tells us of each new figure that comes upon the scene, or looked to him as their master, owed to the School of Sagres their training, and began their practical seamanship under his leave and protection. Even the lines upon which the national expansion and exploration went on were so strictly and exclusively the same as he had followed, that when a different route to the Indies was suggested after his death by Christopher Columbus, the Court of John II. refused to treat it seriously. And this brings us to the other, the indirect side of Henry's influence.
"It was in Portugal," (says Ferdinand Columbus, in his Life of the Admiral, his father,) "that the Admiral began to think, that if men could sail so far south, one might also sail west and find lands in that quarter." The second great stream of modern discovery can thus be traced to the "generous Henry" of Camoëns' Lusiads no less plainly, though more indirectly, than the first; the Western path was suggested by his success in the Eastern.
But that success had turned the heads of his own people. When Columbus, the son of the Genoese wool-comber, who had been a resident in Lisbon since 1470, submitted to the Court of John II. some time before 1484 a proposal to find Marco Polo's Cipangu by a few weeks' sail west, from the Azores, he was treated as a dreamer. John, as Henry's disciple and successor, was, like other disciples, narrower than his master in the master's own way.
He was ready for any expense and trouble, but no novelty. He would only go on as he had been taught. He had reason to be confident, and his scientific Junto of four, Martin Behaim of Nuremburg among them, to whom Columbus was referred, were too much elated with their new improvements in the astrolabe, and the now assured confidence that the Southern Cape would soon be passed. They could not endure with patience the vehement dogmatism of an unknown theorist.