CHAPTER XVII.
CADAMOSTO.
1455-6.
e have now come to the voyages of the Venetian Cadamosto, in the service of Prince Henry. And though these were far from being the most striking in their general effect, they are certainly the most famous, the best known, of all the enterprises of these fifty years (1415-1460). It is true that Cadamosto fairly reached Sierra Leone and, passing the farthest mark of the earlier Portuguese caravels, coasted along many miles of that great eastern bend of the West African coast which we call the Gulf of Guinea. But it is to his general fame as a seaman, his position in Italy, and the interest he aroused by his written and published story that he owed his greater share of attention.
When I first set my mind, begins his narrative, on sailing the ocean between the Strait of Cadiz and the Fortunate Islands, the one man who had tried to enter the aforesaid ocean, since the days of our Father Adam, was the Infant Don Henry of Portugal, whose illustrious and almost countless deeds I pass over, excepting only his zeal for the Christian faith and his freedom from the bonds of matrimony. For his father, King John, had not given up the ghost before he had warned his son Henry with saving precepts, that the aforesaid Holy Faith he should foster with a dauntless mind and not fail in his vows of warring down the foes of Christ.