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

CHAPTER IX.

HENRY'S SETTLEMENT AT SAGRES AND FIRST DISCOVERIES.

1418-28.

hatever the Prince owed to his stay at Ceuta beyond the general suggestion and encouragement to take up a life-profession of discovery, it was at any rate put into practice on his second and last return (1418). From that time to the end of his life he became a recluse from the Court life of Lisbon, though he soon gathered round himself a rival Court, of science and seamanship.

The old "Sacred Cape" of the Romans, then called Sagres, now the "Cape St. Vincent" of Nelson and modern maps, was his chosen home for the next forty years, though he seems to have passed a good deal of his time in his port of Lagos, close by.

In 1419 King John made him Governor for life of the Algarves (the southern province of Portugal) and the new governor at once began to rebuild and enlarge the old naval arsenal, in the neck of the Cape, into a settlement that soon became the "Prince's Town." In Lagos, his ships were built and manned; and there, and in Sagres itself, all the schemes of discovery were thought out, the maps and instruments corrected, and the accounts of past and present travellers compared by the Prince himself. His results then passed into the instructions of his captains and the equipment of his caravels. The Sacred Cape, which he now colonised, was at any rate a good centre for his work of ocean voyaging. Here, with the Atlantic washing the land on three sides, he was well on the scene of action. There were buildings on Sagres headland as old as the eleventh century; Greek geography had made this the starting-point of its shorter and continental measurements for the length of the habitable world, and the Genoese, whose policy was to buy up points of vantage on every coast, were eager to plant a colony there, but Portugal was not ready to become like the Byzantine Empire, a depot for Italian commerce, and Henry had his own reasons for securing a desolate promontory.

On this he now built himself a palace, a chapel, a study, an observatory—the earliest in Portugal—and a village for his helpers and attendants. "In his wish to gain a prosperous result for his efforts, the Prince devoted great industry and thought to the matter, and at great expense procured the aid of one Master Jacome from Majorca, a man skilled in the art of navigation and in the making of maps and instruments, and who was sent for, with certain of the Arab and Jewish mathematicians, to instruct the Portuguese in that science." So at least, says De Barros, the "Livy of Portugal." At Sagres was thus founded anew the systematic study of applied science in Christendom; it was better than the work of the old Greek "University" at Alexandria with which it has been compared, because it was essentially practical. From it "our sailors," says Pedro Nunes, "went out well taught and provided with instruments and rules which all map-makers should know." We would gladly know more of Henry's scientific work; a good many legends have grown up about it, and even his foundation of the Chair of Mathematics in the University of Lisbon or Coimbra, our best evidence of the unrecorded work of his school, has been doubted by some modern critics, even by the national historian, Alexander Herculano. But to Prince Henry's study and science two great improvements on this side may be traced: first in the art of map-making, secondly in the building of caravels and ocean craft.

The great Venetian map of Fra Mauro of the Camaldolese convent of Murano, finished in 1459, one year before the Navigator's death, is evidence for the one; Cadamosto's words, as a practical seaman, of Italian birth, in Henry's service, that the "caravels of Portugal were the best sailing ships afloat," may be proof sufficient of the other.

On both these lines, Henry took up the results of Italians and worked towards success with their aid. As Columbus and the Cabots and Verazzano in later times represented the intellectual leadership of Italy to other nations—Spain, England, and France; but had to find their career and resources not in their own commercial republics, but at the Courts of the new centralised kingdoms of the West, where a paternal despotism gave the best hope of guiding any popular movement, social or religious or political or scientific,—so in the earlier fifteenth century, mariners like Cadamosto and De Nolli, scientific draughtsmen like Fra Mauro and Andrea Bianco, looked from Venice and Genoa to the Court of Sagres and to the service of Prince Henry as their proper sphere, where they would find the encouragement and reward they sought for at home and often sought in vain.