Christopher Columbus and How He Received and Imparted the Spirit of Discovery

by Justin Winsor

REGIOMONTANUS'S ASTROLABE, 1468.
[After an original in the museum at Nuremberg, shown in E. Mayer's Die Hilfsmittel der Schiffahrtskunde.]

From that time, so far as Humboldt could ascertain, down to a period later than Columbus, and certainly after the revival of long ocean voyages by the Catalans, Portuguese, and Normans, there seems to have been no skill beyond that of the eyes in measuring the speed of vessels. After the days of Columbus, it is only when we come to the voyages of Magellan that we find any mention of such a device as a log, which consisted, as his chronicler explains, of some arrangements of cog-wheels and chains carried on the poop.

Prince Henry's character.

Such were in brief the elements of seamanship in which Prince Henry the Navigator caused his sailors to be instructed, and which more or less governed the instrumentalities employed in his career of discovery. He was a man who, as his motto tells us, wished, and was able, to do well. He was shadowed with few infirmities of spirit. He joined with the pluck of his half-English blood—for he was the grandson of John of Gaunt—a training for endurance derived in his country's prolonged contests with the Moor. He was the staple and lofty exemplar of this great age of discovery. He was more so than Columbus, and rendered the adventitious career of the Genoese possible. He knew how to manage men, and stuck devotedly to his work. He respected his helpers too much to drug them with deceit, and there is a straightforward honesty of purpose in his endeavors. He was a trainer of men, and they grew courageous under his instruction. To sail into the supposed burning zone beyond Cape Bojador, and to face the destruction of life which was believed to be inevitable, required a courage quite as conspicuous as to cleave the floating verdure of the Sargasso Sea, on a western passage. It must be confessed that he shared with Columbus those proclivities which in the instigators of African slavery so easily slipped into cruelty. They each believed there was a merit, if a heathen's soul be at stake, in not letting commiseration get the better of piety.

Cape Bojador passed, 1434.

It was not till 1434 that Prince Henry's captains finally passed Cape Bojador. It was a strenuous and daring effort in the face of conceded danger, and under the impulse of the Prince's earnest urging. Gil Eannes returned from this accomplished act a hero in the eyes of his master. Had it ever been passed before? Not apparently in any way to affect the importance of this Portuguese enterprise. We can go back indeed, to the expedition of Hanno the Carthaginian, and in the commentaries of Carl Müller and Vivien de St. Martin track that navigator outside the Pillars of Hercules, and follow him southerly possibly to Cape Verde or its vicinity; and this, if Major's arguments are to be accepted, is the only antecedent venture beyond Cape Bojador, though there have been claims set up for the Genoese, the Catalans, and the Dieppese. That the map of Marino Sanuto in 1306, and the so-called Laurentian portolano of 1351, both of which establish a vague southerly limit to Africa, rather give expression to a theory than chronicle the experience of navigators is the opinion of Major. It is of course possible that some indefinite knowledge of oriental tracking of the eastern coast of Africa, and developing its terminal shape southerly, may have passed, as already intimated, with other nautical knowledge, by the Red Sea to the Mediterranean peoples. To attempt to settle the question of any circumnavigation of Africa before the days of Diaz and Da Gama, by the evidence of earlier maps, makes us confront very closely geographical theories on the one hand, and on the other a possible actual knowledge filtered through the Arabs. All this renders it imprudent to assume any tone of certainty in the matter.

SKETCH MAP OF AFRICAN DISCOVERY.

The captains of Prince Henry now began, season by season, to make a steady advance. The Pope had granted to the Portuguese monarchy the exclusive right to discovered lands on this unexplored route to India, and had enjoined all others not to interfere.