Prince Henry, the Navigator.
The guiding spirit in this new habit of exploration was that scion of the royal family of Portugal who became famous eventually as Prince Henry the Navigator, and whose biography has been laid before the English reader within twenty years, abundantly elucidated by the careful hand of Richard H. Major. The Prince had assisted King João in the attack on the Moors at Ceuta, in 1415, and this success had opened to the Prince the prospect of possessing the Guinea coast, and of ultimately finding and passing the anticipated cape at the southern end of Africa.
Cape Bojador.
This was the mission to which the Prince early in the fifteenth century gave himself. His ships began to crawl down the western Barbary coast, and each season added to the extent of their explorations, but Cape Bojador for a while blocked their way, just as it had stayed other hardy adventurers even before the birth of Henry. "We may wonder," says Helps, "that he never took personal command of any of his expeditions, but he may have thought that he served the cause better by remaining at home, and forming a centre whence the electric energy of enterprise was communicated to many discoverers and then again collected from them."
Sagres.
Meanwhile, Prince Henry had received from his father the government of Algaroe, and he selected the secluded promontory of Sagres, jutting into the sea at the southwestern extremity of Portugal, as his home, going here in 1418, or possibly somewhat later. Whether he so organized his efforts as to establish here a school of navigation is in dispute, but it is probably merely a question of what constitutes a school. There seems no doubt that he built an observatory and drew about him skillful men in the nautical arts, including a somewhat famous Majorcan, Jayme. He and his staff of workers took seamanship as they found it, with its cylindrical charts, and so developed it that it became in the hands of the Portuguese the evidence of the highest skill then attainable.
Art of seamanship.
Seamanship as then practiced has become an interesting study. Under the guidance of Humboldt, in his remarkable work, the Examen Critique, in which he couples a consideration of the nautical astronomy with the needs of this age of discovery, we find an easy path among the intricacies of the art. These complications have, in special aspects, been further elucidated by Navarrete, Margry, and a recent German writer, Professor Ernst Mayer.