La Mina.
Within a few years after Henry's death—though some place it earlier—the explorations had been pushed to Sierra Leone and beyond Cape Mezurada. When the revenues of the Gold Coast were farmed out in 1469, it was agreed that discovery should be pushed a hundred leagues farther south annually; and by 1474, when the contract expired, Fernam Gomez, who had taken it, had already found the gold dust region of La Mina, which Columbus, in 1492, was counseled by Spain to avoid while searching for his western lands.
This, then, was the condition of Portuguese seamanship and of its exploits when Columbus, some time, probably, in 1473, reached Portugal. He found that country so content with the rich product of the Guinea coast that it was some years later before the Portuguese began to push still farther to the south. The desire to extend the Christian faith to heathen, often on the lips of the discoverers of the fifteenth century, was never so powerful but that gold and pearls made them forget it.
[CHAPTER VI.]
COLUMBUS IN PORTUGAL.
Date of his arrival.
1470.