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

There were still several months left for ocean sailing in 1435, and Henry at once despatched Baldaya again in his varinel, with orders to go as far as he could along the coast, at least till he could find some natives. One of these he was to bring home with him. Baldaya accordingly sailed 130 leagues—390 miles—beyond Cape Bojador, till he reached an estuary running some twenty miles up the country and promising to lead to a great river. This might prove to be the western Nile of the Negroes, or the famous River of Gold, Baldaya thought, and though it proved to be only an inlet of the sea, the name of Rio d'Ouro, then given by the first hopes of the Portuguese, has outlasted the disappointment that found only a sandy reach instead of a waterway to the Mountains of the Moon and the kingdom of Prester John.

Baldaya anchored here, landed a couple of horses which the Infant had given him to scour the country, and set "two young noble gentlemen" upon them to ride up country, to look for signs of natives, and if possible to bring back one captive to the ship. Taking no body-armour, but only lance and sword, the boys followed the "river" to its source, seven leagues up the country, and here came suddenly upon nineteen savages, armed with assegais. They rode up to them and drove them out of the open up to a loose mound of stones; then as evening was coming on and they could not secure a prisoner, they rode back to the sea and reached the ship about the dawn of day. "And of these boys," says the chronicler, "I myself knew one, when he was a noble gentleman of good renown in arms. His name was Hector Homen, and you will find him in our history well proved in brave deeds. The other, named Lopez d'Almeida, was a nobleman of good presence, as I have heard from those who knew him."

This first landing of Europeans on the coasts of unknown Africa, since the days of Carthaginian colonies, is one of the great moments in the story of Western expansion and discovery. For it means that Christendom on her Western side has at last got beyond the first circle of her enemies, the belt of settled Moslem ground, and has begun to touch the wider world outside, on the shore of the ocean as well as along the Eastern trade routes. And it almost seemed to be of little practical value that Marco Polo and the friars and traders who followed him had passed Islam in Asia, and reached even furthest Tartary, for it only made more clear that Asia was not Christian, and that there would have to be a deadly struggle before European influence could be restored on this side to what it had been under Alexander; but on the west, by the Atlantic coasts, once Morocco had been passed, there were only scattered savage tribes to be dealt with. Baldaya had now reached the pagans beyond Islam; the rival civilisation of the Arabs and their converts had been almost outflanked by Don Henry's ships; and the boys who rode up the Rio d'Ouro beach in 1435 were the first pickets of a great army. Their charge upon a body of grown men ten times their number, was a prophecy of the coming conquests of Christian Europe in the new worlds it was now in search of, in south and east and west.

Now Baldaya instantly followed up his pioneers. He took a party in his ship's boat and rode up the stream to the scene of the fight, with the boys on horseback riding by the bank and shewing him the stone-heap where the natives had rallied on the day before. But in the night they had all fled farther up country, leaving most of their miserable goods behind. All these were carried off, and the Portuguese left the Bay of the Horses, as they called this farthest reach of the Rio d'Ouro, and pulled back to the varinel, without any further success than a wholesome disappointment. They must go farther southward if they were to find the western Nile and the way round Africa.

Still Baldaya was not content. He wished to carry back a prisoner, as Henry had charged him, and so he coasted along fifty leagues more, from the Rio d'Ouro to the Port of Gallee, a rock that looked like a galley, where there was a more prominent headland than he had passed since Bojador. Here he landed once again, and found some native nets, made of the bark of trees, but none of the natives who made them.

In the early months of 1436 he and his varinel were again in Portuguese waters; but the land had now been touched that lay three hundred miles beyond the old African Finisterre, and in two years (1434-6) Portugal and all the Christian nations, through Henry's work, had entered on a new chapter of history. The narrower world of the Roman Empire and the Mediæval Church was already growing into the modern globe in the break up of that old terror of the sea which had so long fixed for men the bounds that they must not pass. The land routes had been cleared to Western knowledge, though not mastered, by the Crusades; now the far more dreaded and unknown water-way was fairly entered. For up to this time there is no fair evidence that either Christian or Moorish enterprise had ever rounded Bojador, and the theoretical marking of it upon maps was a very different thing from the experience that it was just like any other cape, and no more an end of the world than Cape St. Vincent itself. Neither Genoese, nor Catalans, nor Normans of Dieppe, nor the Arab wanderers of Edrisi and Ibn Said were before Don Henry now. His discoveries of the Atlantic islands were findings, rediscoveries; his coast voyages from the year 1433 are all ventures in the true unknown.

But from 1436 to 1441, from Baldaya's second return to the start of Nuno Tristam and Antam Gonsalvez for Cape Blanco, exploration was not successful or energetic. The simple cause of this was the Infant's other business. In these years took place the fatal attempt on Tangier, the death of King Edward, and the troubles of the minority of his child, Affonso V.—Affonso the African conqueror of later years.

True it is, we read in our Chronicle of the Discovery of Guinea, that in these years there went to those parts two ships, one at a time, but the first turned back in the face of bad weather, and the other only went to the Rio d'Ouro for the skins and oil of sea wolves, and after taking in a cargo of these, went back to Portugal. And true it is, too, that in the year 1440 there were armed and sent out two caravels to go to that same land, but in that they met with contrary fortune, we do not tell any more of their voyage.