Voyage and Discovery
There were but two methods of avoiding this ever-increasing policy of exploitation apart from doing without such luxuries: either a complete conquest of the Turks, that would compel them to open up afresh the old caravan routes to the East; or else the discovery of a new route that would avoid their dominions altogether. Largely through the blind selfishness of Mediterranean cities, and especially of Venice, we have seen that the golden opportunity of aiding the Byzantine Empire had been lost for ever. Thus the first method failed. It remains to deal with the second, the voyages of discovery with which the Middle Ages fittingly close.
Henry ‘the Navigator’
Towards the end of the fourteenth century there was born in Portugal a prince, Henry, third son of King John I, and grandson by an English mother of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster. While he was still a boy this prince earned fame for his share in the capture of Ceuta, a Moorish town exactly opposite Gibraltar on the North African coast. To the ordinary Portuguese mind this conquest raised hopes of a gradual absorption of the southern Mediterranean seaboard, possibly of competition in the Levant with Genoa and Venice; but Prince Henry saw farther than ordinary minds. The problem that he set himself and any one, Arab or European, who seemed likely to supply a solution was—What would happen if, instead of entering the Mediterranean, Portuguese ships were to sail due south? How big was this unknown stretch of land called Africa, in the maps of which geographers hid their ignorance by placing labels, such as ‘Here are hippografs! Here are two-headed monsters!’? Would it not be possible to reach the far-famed wonders of Cathay by sailing first south and then east round Africa, thus avoiding trade routes through Syria and southern Russia?
It was fortunate that Prince Henry was a mathematician and geographer himself, for many people told him in answer to his inquiries that Africa ended at Cape Nam, not so many miles south of Tangier, and others that the white man who dared to sail beyond a certain point would be turned black by the heat of the sun, while the waters boiled about his vessel and the winds blew sheets of flame across the horizon.
Prince Henry refused to believe such tales. He could not sail himself, because he was so often occupied with wars in Africa against the Moors; but year after year he fitted out ships at his own expense, and chose the most daring mariners whom he could find, bribing them with promises of reward and fame to navigate the unknown African coast. He himself built a naval arsenal at Sagres on a southern promontory of Portugal, and here, when not busy with affairs of state, he would study the heavens, make charts, and watch anxiously for the returning sails of his brave adventurers.
During Prince Henry’s lifetime Portuguese or Italians in his pay discovered not only Madeira, or ‘the island of wood’, as they christened it from its many forests, but the Canaries, Cape Verde Islands, and the African coast as far south as Gambia and Sierra Leone. Soon there was no longer any need to bribe mariners into taking risks, for those who first led the way on these adventurous voyages brought back with them negroes and gold dust as evidence that they had been to lands where men could live, and where there were possibilities of untold wealth. Thus the work of exploration continued joyfully.
It was in 1471, some years after the death of Prince Henry, that Portuguese navigators crossed the Equator without being broiled black by the sun or raising sheets of flame, as the superstitious had predicted. The next important step on this new road to Asia was the voyage of Bartholomew Diaz, who, sailing ever southwards, swept in an icy wind without knowing it round the Cape, past Table Mountain, and then, turning eastwards, landed at last on the little island of Santa Cruz in Algoa Bay, where he planted a cross. He would have explored the mainland also, but Kaffirs armed with heavy stones collected and drove back the landing-party.
Diaz, emboldened by his success, wished to sail farther, but his crew were weary of adventure, and with tears of regret in his eyes he was forced to yield to their threats of mutiny and turn homewards. At Lisbon, describing his voyage, he said that on account of its dangers he had called the southernmost point of Africa the ‘Cape of Storms’, but the King of Portugal, hearing that this was indeed the limit of the continent, and that in all probability the way to Asia lay beyond, would not consent to such an ill-omened name. ‘It shall be the Cape of Good Hope,’ he declared, and so it has remained.
Vasco da Gama