n this it may be well to summarise briefly, for the better illustration of the Chronicle here translated, not only the life of Prince Henry of Portugal, surnamed the Navigator, but also various questions suggested by Prince Henry's work, e.g.—The history of the Voyages along the West African coast and among the Atlantic islands, encouraged by him and recorded by Azurara; The History of the other voyages of Prince Henry's captains, not recorded by Azurara; The attempts of navigators before Prince Henry, especially in the fourteenth century, to find a way along West Africa to the Indies; The parallel enterprises by land from the Barbary States to the Sudan, across the Sahara; The comparative strength of Islam and Christianity in the Africa of Prince Henry's time; The State of Cartographical Knowledge in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and its relation to the new Portuguese discoveries; The question of the "School of Sagres," said to have been instituted by the Navigator for the better training of mariners and map-makers.
I.—The Life of Prince Henry.
Henry, Duke of Viseu, third[[1]] son of King John I of Portugal, surnamed the Great, founder of the House of Aviz, and of Philippa of Lancaster, daughter of John of Gaunt and niece of King Edward III of England, was born on March 4th, 1394.
We are told by Diego Gomez,[[2]] who in 1458 sailed to the West Coast of Africa in the service of Prince Henry, and made a discovery of the Cape Verde islands, that in 1415 John de Trasto was sent by the Prince on a voyage of exploration, and reached "Telli," the "fruitful" district of Grand Canary. Gomez here gives us the earliest date assigned by any authority of the fifteenth century for an expedition of the Infant's; but in later times other statements were put forward, assigning 1412 or even 1410 as the commencement of his exploring activity. This would take us back to a time when the Prince was but sixteen or eighteen years old; and though it is probable enough that Portuguese vessels may have sailed out at this time (as in 1341) to the Canaries or along the West African coast, it is not probable that Henry took any great share in such enterprise before the Ceuta expedition of 1415. In any case, it is practically certain that before 1434, no Portuguese ship had passed beyond Cape Bojador. Gil Eannes' achievement of that year is marked by Azurara and all our best authorities as a decided advance on any previous voyage, at least of Portuguese mariners. We shall consider presently how far this advance was anticipated by other nations, and more particularly by the French. Cape Non, now claimed by some as the southernmost point of Marocco, had been certainly passed by Catalan and other ships[[3]] before Prince Henry's day; but it had not been forgotten how rhyme and legend had long consecrated this point as a fated end of the world. Probably it was still (c. 1415) believed by many in Portugal—
"Quem passar o Cabo de Não Ou tornará, ou não."
and the Venetian explorer, Cadamosto, preserves a mention of its popular derivation in Southern Europe from the Latin "Non," "as beyond it was believed there was no return possible." The real form was probably the Arabic Nun or "Fish."[[4]]
Prince Henry's active share in the work of exploration is usually dated only from the Conquest of Ceuta. Here we are told in one of our earliest authorities (Diego Gomez) he gained information, from Moorish prisoners, merchants, and other acquaintance "of the passage of traders from the coasts of Tunis to Timbuktu and to Cantor on the Gambia, which led him to seek those lands by the way of the sea;" and, to come to details, he was among other things, "told of certain tall palms growing at the mouth of the Senegal [or Western Nile], by which he was able to guide the caravels he sent out to find that river." It will be important hereafter to examine the evidence which had been accumulated for such belief up to the fifteenth century: now it will be enough to say: 1. That Prince Henry was probably of the same opinion as the ordinary cartographer of his time about the peninsular shape of Africa. 2. That the "shape" in question was usually satisfied with what we should now call the Northern half of the Continent, making the Southern coast of "Guinea" continue directly to the Eastern, Abyssinian, or Indian Ocean. 3. That trade had now (c. 1415) been long maintained between this "Guinea coast" and the Mediterranean seaboard—chiefly by Moorish caravans across the Sahara. 4. That something, though little, was known in Western Christendom about the Christian faith and king of Abyssinia; for "Prester John's" story in the fifteenth century had really become a blend of rumours from Central (Nestorian) Asia and Eastern (Abyssinian) Africa.
In Prince Henry's work we may distinguish three main objects—scientific, patriotic, and religious. First of all he was a discoverer, for the sake of the new knowledge then beginning. He was interested in the exploration of the world in general, and of the sea-route round Africa to India in particular. Dinis Diaz, returning from his discovery of Cape Verde (Az., ch. xxxi.), brought home a "booty not so great as had arrived in the past," but "the Infant thought it very great indeed, since it came from that land", and he proportioned his rewards to exploration rather than to trade profits. Nuno Tristam in 1441 (Az., ch. xiii.) reminds Antam Gonçalvez that "for 15 years" the Infant has "striven ... to arrive at ... certainty as to the people of this land, under what law or lordship they do live."
Azurara, though always more prone to emphasize the emotional than the scientific, himself assigns as the first reason for the Infant's discoveries, his "wish to know the land that lay beyond the isles of Canary and that cape called Bojador, for that up to his time, neither by writings nor by the memory of man, was known with any certainty the nature of the land" (Az., ch. vii.).