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.
he 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 Arsenal 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 ships, 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 Phœnician 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 anticipated 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 passed, his caravels would come into an eastern current, passing 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.