"And when the chronicle of these voyages was in writing at the end of the self-same year, there were brought certain prisoners from Guinea to Prince Henry, who told him that in a city of the upland, in the heart of Africa, there were four Christian prisoners." One had died, three were living, and in these four, men in Europe believed they had news of Vallarte and his men.
But between the last voyage of Zarco's caravel in 1446 and the first voyage of Cadamosto in 1455, there is no real advance in exploration.
The "third armada," as it was called, that is the fleet of the nine caravels of 1446-7, the voyage of Gomes Pires to the Rio d'Ouro at the same time, the trading ventures of the Marocco coast which were the means of bringing the first lion to Portugal in 1447, the expeditions to the Rio d'Ouro and to Arguin in the course of the same year, are not part of the story of discovery, but of trade. There is hardly a suspicion of exploring interest about most of them. Even Vallarte's venture in 1448 has nothing of the novelty which so many went out to find "for the satisfaction of the Lord Henry." Guinea voyages are frequent, almost constant, during these years, and this frequency has at any rate the point of making Europeans thoroughly familiar with the coast already explored, if it did little or nothing to bring in new knowledge.
But the value and meaning of Henry's life and work was not after all in commerce, except in a secondary sense; and these voyages of purely trading interest, with no design or at any rate no result of discovery, do not belong to our subject. Each one of them has its own picturesque beauty in the pages of the old chronicle of the Conquest of Guinea, but measured by its importance to the general story of the expansion of Europe, there is no lasting value in any one of the last chapters of Azurara's voyages,—his description of the Canaries, and of the "Inferno" of Teneriffe, "of how Madeira was peopled, and the other islands that are in that part, of how the caravel of Alvaro Dornellas took certain of the Canarians, of how Gomes Pires went to the Rio d'Ouro and of the Moors that he took, of the caravel that went to Meça (in Marocco) and of the Moors that were taken, of how Antam Gonsalvez received the island of Lançarote in the name of the Prince."
Only the chronicler's summary of results, up to the year 1446, the year of Nuno Tristam's failure, is of wider interest. "Till then there had been fifty-one caravels to those parts, which had gone 450 leagues (1350 miles) beyond the Cape (Boyador). And as it was found that the coast ran southward with many points, the Prince ordered these to be added to the sailing chart. And here it is to be noted, that what was clearly known before of the coast of the great sea was 200 leagues (600 miles), which have been increased by these 450. Also what had been laid down upon the Mappa Mundi was not true but was by guess work, but now 't is all from the survey by the eyes of our seamen. And now seeing that in this history we have given account sufficient of the first four reasons which brought our noble Prince to his attempt, it is time we said something of the accomplishment of his fifth object, the conversion of the Heathen, by the bringing of a number of infidel souls from their lands to this, the which by count were nine hundred and twenty-seven, of whom the greater part were turned into the true way of salvation. And what capture of town or city could be more glorious than this."
