There have been claims advanced by Margry in his Les navigations Françaises et la révolution maritime du XIVe au XVIe siècle, d’après les documents inédits tirés de France, d’Angleterre, d’Espagne, et d’Italie, pp. 13-70, Paris, 1867, and embraced in his first section on “Les marins de Normandie aux côtes de Guinée avant les Portugais,” in which he cites an old document, said to be in London, setting forth the voyage of a vessel from Dieppe to the coast of Africa in 1364. Estancelin had already, in 1832, in his Navigateurs Normands en Afrique, declared there were French establishments on the coast of Guinea in the fourteenth century,—a view D’Avezac says he would gladly accept if he could. Major, however, failed to find, by any direction which Margry could give him, the alleged London document, and has thrown—to say the least—discredit on the story of that document as presented by Margry.[138]
PRINCE HENRY.
This follows a portrait in a contemporary manuscript chronicle, now in the National Library at Paris, which Major, who gives a colored fac-simile of it, calls the only authentic likeness, probably taken in 1449-1450, and representing him in mourning for the death of his brother Dom Pedro, who died in 1449. There is another engraving of it in Jules Verne’s La Découverte de la Terre, p. 112.
Major calls the portrait in Gustave de Veer’s Life of Prince Henry, published at Dantzig, in 1864, a fancy one. The annexed autograph of the Prince is the equivalent of Iffante Dom Anrique.
Prince Henry, who was born March 4, 1394, died Nov 15, 1463. He was the third son of John I. of Portugal; his mother was a daughter of John of Gaunt, of England.
The African explorations of the Portuguese are less visionary, and, as D’Avezac says, the Portuguese were the first to persevere and open the African route to India.[139]
The peninsular character of Africa—upon which success in this exploration depended—was contrary to the views of Aristotle, Hipparchus, and Ptolemy, which held to an enclosed Indian Ocean, formed by the meeting of Africa and Asia at the south.[140] The stories respecting the circumnavigation of Africa by the ancients are lacking in substantial proof; and it seems probable that Cape Non or Cape Bojador was the limit of their southern expeditions.[141] Still, this peninsular character was a deduction from imagined necessity rather than a conviction from fact. It found place on the earliest maps of the revival of geographical study in the Middle Ages. It is so represented in the map of Marino Sanuto in 1306, and in the Lorentian portolano of 1351. Major[142] doubts if the Catalan map of 1375 shows anything more than conjectural knowledge for the coasts beyond Bojador.
Of Prince Henry—the moving spirit in the African enterprise of the fifteenth century—we have the most satisfactory account in the Life of Prince Henry of Portugal, surnamed the Navigator, and its Results ... from Authentic Contemporary Documents, by Richard Henry Major, London, 1868,[143]—a work which, after the elimination of the controversial arguments, and after otherwise fitting it for the general reader, was reissued in 1877 as The Discoveries of Prince Henry the Navigator. These works are the guide for the brief sketch of these African discoveries now to be made, and which can be readily followed on the accompanying sketch-map.[144]