De Barros explicitly states that the Moors told Prince Henry how on the other side of the Great Desert lived the Azanegues, who bordered on the Jaloff negroes, where began the kingdom of Guinea, or Guinanha. From other sources we know, as already stated, that the Infant obtained from the same informants[[107]] definite descriptions of the Senegal estuary, its "tall palms," and other landmarks. For here, rather than at any point more to the south, was the Guinea coast proper of the fifteenth century; though in the Bull of Pope Nicholas V, granting to Portugal (1454) all the lands that should be discovered "from the Cape of Bojador and of Nun throughout the whole of Guinea, as far as its Southern shore, or even to the Antarctic Pole and the Indies," our modern extension of the term is virtually admitted.
2. And, in the second place, granting what has just been said, it is obvious that the Moorish information was important enough to have very considerable influence on the Infant's plans, and especially to furnish him with hopes of success, and reasons for perseverance in the face of opposition and repeated failure.
Our materials for the Prince's life are so inadequate that we can hardly decide, from the silence of our authorities, that he was entirely ignorant, even at second hand, of all that the Arab geographers or travellers had written about Africa. Especially is this the case with Edrisi (1099-1154), whose work was composed in the Christian kingdom of Sicily, and owed much to Christian writers. And perhaps the same hope applies to Ibn-Batuta (fl. 1330), who, living at a time so near to the epoch of the Prince's voyages, had revealed the Western Sudan to the Moslem world—and so to any Christians conversant with Moslem trade and enterprise—far more thoroughly than ever before. These are only two examples among those Moslem geographers, whose work may have been brought to the Infant's notice during his visits to Ceuta.
* * * * *
We have now to see what progress had been made by Christian nations in the exploration of Africa immediately before Prince Henry's time. The Crusades were not merely expeditions to recover the Holy Sepulchre: they were the outward sign of the great mediæval awakening of Europe and Christendom, which, beginning in the eleventh century, has never slumbered since, and which, in the Infant's days, was passing through that great transition we call the Renaissance. On the geographical side this movement took first of all the direction of land travel, and achieved such great discoveries in Asia that a new desire for wealth and commercial expansion was kindled in Europe, with the special object of controlling the Asiatic treasures which Marco Polo and others had described. Islam, however, interposed a troublesome barrier between Central Asia, India and China on the one side, and European trade or dominion on the other. Hence, from the thirteenth century, we find a new series of attempts to reach the Far East by sea from the Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts. It was not till the last years of Prince Henry's life that any serious attempts were made to explore the interior of Africa, but expeditions along its shores were sent out long before his time to reconnoitre for a sea-route to India.[[108]] We have already remarked that the Infant represents in his own life-work the leading transition in this movement, from a tentative, impermanent, and unorganised series of efforts, to a continuous, properly directed, and successful plan; but some notice must be taken of those ventures which immediately prepared his way. Leaving out of sight, for another section as far as possible, the voyages which are concerned only with the Atlantic islands, or aim in a rudimentary way at finding a Western route to Asia, it is possible to mention several genuine attempts to anticipate the Portuguese along the Eastern or African mainland course.
The first of these, as far as known, is the voyage of Lancelot Malocello, of Genoa, in 1270. There is no proof that he started, like the adventurers of 1291, to find the ports of India: it is probable his ambitions were more modest; but we do not know how far he reached along the African mainland—only that he touched the Canaries, and staying there some time built a castle in Lancarote[[109]] island.
The next venture in this direction is also Genoese. In May, 1291,[[110]] Tedisio Doria and Ugolino de Vivaldo, with the latter's brother and certain other citizens of Genoa, equipped two galleys "that they might go by sea to[wards] the ports of India and bring back useful things for trade." But "after they had passed a place called Gozora,[[111]] nothing more certain has been heard of them." This is confirmed by Pietro d'Abano, writing in 1312; but in the fifteenth century one of Prince Henry's captains, the Genoese colleague of Cadamosto, Antoniotto Ususmaris or Uso di Mare, professed to give some more details. On December 12th, 1455, he wrote his creditors a letter, in which he stated[[112]] that the two galleys of "Vadinus and Guido Vivaldi," leaving Genoa in 1281 "for the Indies," reached the "Sea of Ghinoia," where one ship was stranded, but the other sailed on to a city of Ethiopia called Menam, where lived Christian subjects of Prester John, who held them captive. None ever returned, but Uso di Mare himself spoke with the last surviving descendant of those Genoese.[[113]] Menam, he concludes, was on the sea coast, near the river Gihon.[[114]]
It is difficult to attach great weight to Uso di Mare's letter, which looks like an attempt to amuse his creditors with interesting adventures; but the voyage of 1291, with or without the survival of 1455, is sufficiently remarkable. It is the first direct attempt of Europeans in the Middle Ages to find a sea-route to India around Africa; its far-reaching design contrasts forcibly with the more modest projects of nearly all similar attempts before Prince Henry's time, and it is not improbable that some of its work survived, though officially unrecognised.[[115]]
The Hispano-Italian voyage of 1341 appears to have been solely occupied with the exploration of the Canaries, which were now becoming pretty well known, and we leave over any further notice of this for the present; but the Catalan expedition of 1346 was to some extent similar, both in object and method, to the Genoese expedition of 1291. "The ship of Jayme Ferrer," according to the Catalan Mappemonde of 1375, "started for the River of Gold[[116]] on St. Lawrence's Day, 1346."[[117]] To the same effect the Genoese archives[[118]] assert "On the Feast of St. Lawrence there went forth from the city of the Majorcans one galley of John Ferne the Catalan, with intent to go to Rujaura.[[119]] Of the same nothing has since been heard."[[120]] And on the Map of 1375 already noticed, upon the third sheet, is depicted off Cape Bojador the picture[[121]] of the ship in question adjoining the legend above-quoted. We may notice, however, that Guinea, the gold land of Africa, and not India, was the objective of this voyage—although Guinea was the first step on the African route to India—and that the venture, as Major says, was apparently designed only for the discovery of the supposed Negro river in which gold was collected: a guess of Mediterranean merchants[[122]] from the information of Moorish middlemen.
Beginning with the year 1364, the French also claimed to have made important advances along the African coast route. The men of Dieppe, it is said, repeatedly sailed beyond Cape Verde, and even Sierra Leone, and founded settlements on what was afterwards called the La Mina coast.[[123]] These stations, called Petit Paris, Petit Dieppe, etc., lasted till 1410, when home troubles caused their abandonment,[[124]] like the temporary evacuation of the French Ivory Coast Settlements after 1870; but during the forty or fifty years of their existence, they carried on a regular trade with the Norman ports.