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

But however they may be explained, however natural and even necessary they may seem to be, as things stood in Portugal and in Latin Christendom, the slave-trade and the gold hunger hindered the Prince's work quite as much as they helped it. If further discovery depended upon trade profits, native interpreters, and the attractions of material interest, there was at least a danger that the discoverers who were not disposed to risk anything, and only went out to line their own pockets, would hang about the well known coasts till they had loaded all the plunder they could hold, and would then simply reappear at Sagres with so many more souls for the good Prince to save, but without a word or a thought of "finding of new lands." And this, after all, was the end. Buccaneering on the north-west coast of Africa was not what Henry aimed at.

So he gave a caravel to one of his household, Gonsalo de Cintra, "who had been his stirrup-boy," and "bade him go straight to the Land of Guinea, and that for no cause whatever should he do otherwise." But when De Cintra got to the White Cape (Blanco) it struck him that "with very little danger he could make some prisoners there."

So with a cheerful impudence, in the face of the Infant's express commands, he put his ship about and landed in that bay of Arguin, where so many captures had been made, but he was cut off from the rest of the men, and killed with seven others by a host of more than two hundred Moors, and the chronicle which tells of all such details at the greatest length, stops to give seven reasons for this, the first serious loss of life the Europeans had suffered in their new African piracies. And for the rest, "May God receive the soul that He created and the nature that came forth from Him, as it is His very own. Habeat Deus animam quam creavit et naturam, quod suum est." (Azurara, ch. 27).

Three other caravels, which quickly followed De Cintra, sailed with special orders to Christianise and civilise the natives wherever and however they could, and the result of this was seen in the daring venture of Joan Fernandez. This man, the pattern of all the Crusoes of after time, offered to stay on shore among the Blacks "to learn what he could of the manners and speech and customs of the people," and so was left along with that "bestial and barbarous" nation for seven months, on the shores of the Bank of Arguin, while in exchange for him an old Moor went back to Portugal.

Yet a third voyage was made in this spring of 1445 by Nuno Tristam. And of this, says Azurara, I know nothing very exact or at first hand, because Nuno Tristam was dead before the time that King Affonso (D. Henry's nephew) commanded me to write this history. But this much we do know, that he sailed straight to the Isle of Herons in Arguin, that he passed the sandy wilderness and landed in the parts beyond, in a land fertile and full of palm trees; and having landed he took a score of prisoners. And so Nuno Tristam was the first to see the country of the real Blacks. In other words, Nuno reached Cape Palmar, far beyond Cape Blanco, where he saw the palms and got the all-important certainty that the desert did end somewhere, and that beyond, instead of a country unapproachable from the heat, where the very seas were perpetually boiling as if in a cauldron, there was a land richer than any northern climate, through which men could pass to the south.

Still further was this proved by the next voyage, which reached the end of the great western trend of the African coast, and found that instead of the continent stretching out farther and farther to an infinite breadth, there was an immense contraction of the coast.

Diniz Diaz, the eldest of that family which gave to Portugal some of her greatest men and makers, now begged a caravel from the Prince with the promise of "doing more with it than any had done before." He had done well under old King John, and now he kept his word.

Passing Arguin and Cape Blanco and Cape Palmar, he entered the mouth of the Senegal, the western Nile, which was now fixed as the northern limit of Guinea, or Blackman's Land. "Nor was this a little honour for our Prince, whose mighty power was thus brought to bear upon the peoples so far distant from our land and so near to that of Egypt." For Azurara like Diaz, like Henry himself, thought not only that the Senegal was the Niger, the western Nile of the Blacks, but that the caravels of Portugal were far nearer to India than was the fact,—were getting close to the Mountains of the Moon and the sources of the Nile.

But Diaz was not content with this. He had reached and passed, as he thought, the great western stream up which men might sail, in the belief of the time, to the mysterious sources of the world's greatest river, and so down by the eastern and northern course of the same to Cairo and the Christian seas. He now sailed on "to a great cape, which he named Cape Verde," a green and beautiful headland covered with grass and trees and dotted with native villages, running out into the Western Ocean far beyond any other land, and beyond which, in turn, there was no more western coast, but only southern and eastern. From this point Diaz returned to Portugal.

"But great was the wonder of the people of the coast in seeing his caravel, for never had they seen or heard tell of the like, but some thought it was a fish, others were sure it was a phantom, others again said it might be a bird that had that way of skimming along the surface of the sea." Four of them picked up courage to venture out in a canoe and try to settle this doubt. Out they went in their little boat, all made from one hollow tree, but when they saw that there were men on board the caravel they fled to the shore and "the wind falling our men could not overtake.