Prince Henry The Navigator, The Hero Of Portugal And Of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. - free ebook by C. Raymond (Charles Raymond) Beazley

PRINCE HENRY THE NAVIGATOR

GATEWAY AT BELEM. WITH STATUE, BETWEEN THE DOORS, OF PRINCE HENRY IN ARMOUR. GATEWAY AT BELEM. with statue, between the doors, of prince henry in armour ....

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C. RAYMOND BEAZLEY, M.A., F.R.G.S.

Seneca , Medea 376/380. NEW YORK 27 WEST TWENTY-THIRD STREET LONDON 24 BEDFORD STREET, STRAND 1895 Copyright, 1894 BY G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS Entered at Stationers' Hall, London Electrotyped, Printed and Bound by The Knickerbocker Press, New York G. P. Putnam's Sons decorative illustration...

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LIST OF MAPS.[6]

decorative illustration Preface T his volume aims at giving an account, based throughout upon original sources, of the progress of geographical knowledge and enterprise in Christendom throughout the Middle Ages, down to the middle or even the end of the fifteenth century, as well as a life of Prince Henry the Navigator, who brought this movement of European Expansion within sight of its greatest successes. That is, as explained in Chapter I., it has been attempted to treat Exploration as one con

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INTRODUCTION.

A rabic science constitutes one of the main links between the older learned world of the Greeks and Latins and the Europe of Henry the Navigator and of the Renaissance. In geography it adopted in the main the results of Ptolemy and Strabo; and many of the Moslem travellers and writers gained some additional hints from Indian, Persian, and Chinese knowledge; but, however much of fact they added to Greek cartography, they did not venture to correct its postulates. And what were these postulates? I

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CHAPTER I.

T he special interest of the life and work of Henry the Navigator (1394-1460) lies in the relation it bears to the general expansion of Europe and Christendom—an expansion that had been slowly gathering strength since the eleventh century. But even before the tide had turned in the age of Hildebrand and the First Crusade, even from the time that Constantine founded the Christian Empire of Rome, the Christian Capital on the Bosphorus, and the State Church of the Western World,—pilgrimage, trade,

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CHAPTER II.

T he discoveries and conquests and colonies of the Norse Vikings, from the White Sea to North America, are the first glimpses of light on the sea of darkness round the little island of the known world that made up Christendom. And from the needs of the time these were the natural, the only natural beginnings of European expansion. From the rise of Islam, Saracens controlled the great trade-routes of the South and East. It was only on the West and North that the coast was clear—of all but natural

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CHAPTER III.

T he pilgrims were the pioneers of the growth of Europe and of Christendom until Charlemagne, in one sense, in another and a broader sense until the Crusades. Their original work, as far as it can be called original at all, was entirely overshadowed by the Vikings, who made real discoveries of the first importance in hunting for new worlds to conquer; but when first the Viking rovers themselves, and then the Northmen, settled in the colonies and the old home, took up Christianity as the Arabs ha

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CHAPTER IV.

I talian, Catalan, French, and English sailors were the forerunners of the Portuguese in the fourteenth century, and the latter years of the thirteenth. And as in land travel, so in maritime, the republics of Italy, Amalphi, Pisa, Venice, and Genoa, were the leaders and examples of Europe. Just as the Italian Dante is the first great name in the new literatures of the West, so the Italian Dorias and Vivaldi and Malocelli are the first to take up again the old Greek and Phœnician enterprise in th

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CHAPTER V.

B efore the Crusades of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the scientific geography of Christendom, as we have seen, was mainly a borrowed thing. From the ninth century to the time of the Mediæval and Christian Renaissance, in the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries, the Arabs were the recognised heirs of Greek science, and what Franks or Latins knew of Ptolemy or Strabo was either learnt or corrected in the schools of Cordova and Bagdad. But when the Northmen and the Holy War with Isla

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CHAPTER VI.

H enry the Navigator is the Hero of Portugal, as well as of discovery, the chief figure in his country's history, as well as the first leader of the great European expansion; and the national growth of three hundred years is quite as much a part of his life, quite as much a cause of his forward movement, as the growth of Christendom towards a living interest in the unknown or half-known world around. The chief points of interest in the story of Portugal are first the stubborn restless independen

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CHAPTER VII.

Thomson , Seasons, Summer, 1005-1012 . T he third son of John the Great and of Philippa was the Infant Henry, Duke of Viseu, Master of the Order of Christ, Governor of the Algarves, born March 4, 1394, who might have travelled from Court to Court like his brother Pedro, but who refused all offers from England, Italy, and Germany, and chose the life of a student and a seaman,—retiring more and more from the known world that he might open up the unknown. After the capture of Ceuta, in 1415, he pla

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CHAPTER VIII.

W e have seen how the kingdom of Portugal itself was almost an offspring of the Crusades. They had left behind them a thirst for wealth and for a wider life on one side, and a broken Moslem power on the other, which opened the way and stirred the enterprise of every maritime state. We know that Lisbon had long been an active centre of trade with the Hanse Towns, Flanders, and England. And now the projected conquest of Ceuta and the appeal of the conqueror of Aljubarrota for a great national effo

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CHAPTER IX.

W hatever the Prince owed to his stay at Ceuta beyond the general suggestion and encouragement to take up a life-profession of discovery, it was at any rate put into practice on his second and last return (1418). From that time to the end of his life he became a recluse from the Court life of Lisbon, though he soon gathered round himself a rival Court, of science and seamanship. The old "Sacred Cape" of the Romans, then called Sagres, now the "Cape St. Vincent" of Nelson and modern maps, was his

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CHAPTER X.

B ut in spite of Zarco's success, Cape Bojador had not yet been passed, though every year, from 1418, caravels had left Sagres, "to find the coasts of Guinea." In 1428, Don Pedro, Henry's elder brother, had come home from his travels, with all the books and charts he had collected to help the explorers—and it is practically certain that the Mappa Mundi given him in Venice acted as a direct suggestion to the next attempts on west and south—westward to the Azores, southward towards Guinea. Kept in

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CHAPTER XI.

T he Prince's exile from politics in his hermitage at Sagres could not be absolutely unbroken. He was ready to come back to Court and to the battle field when he was needed. So he appeared at the deathbed of his father in 1433 and of his brother in 1438, at the siege of Tangier in 1437, and during the first years of the Regency (1438-40) he helped to govern for his nephew, Edward's son Affonso. From 1436 till 1441 he did not seriously turn his attention back to discovery. What is chiefly interes

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CHAPTER XII.

B ut with the year 1441 discovery begins again in earnest, and the original narratives of Henry's captains, which old Azurara has preserved in his chronicle, become full of life and interest. From this point to the year 1448, where ends the Chronica , its tale is exceedingly picturesque, as it was written down from the remembrance of eye-witnesses and actors in the discoveries and conquests it records. And though the detail may be wearisome to a modern reader as a wordy and emotional and unscien

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CHAPTER XIII.

W hile Gonsalo Pacheco had been wasting time and men and the good name of Europe and Christendom in his plunderings between C. Bojador and C. Blanco, the memory of the death of Gonsalo de Cintra was kept alive in Lagos, and the men of the town came in solemn deputation to the Prince, before the summer of this same year (1445) was out, to beg him for permission to take full, perfect, and sufficient vengeance. In other words, they offered to equip the largest fleet that had ever sailed on an ocean

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CHAPTER XIV.

A nd yet, but for the enterprise of Zarco's crew, this expedition of 1445 that began with so much promise, and on which so much time and trouble had been spent, was almost fruitless of "novelties," of discoveries, of the main end and object of all the Prince's voyages. The next attempt, made by Nuno Tristam in 1446, ended in the most disastrous finish that had yet befallen the Christian seamen of Spain. Nuno, who had been brought up from boyhood at the Prince's court, "seeing how earnest he was

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CHAPTER XV.

W e have now come very nearly to the end of the voyages that are described in the old Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea , and setting aside the story of the famous Venetian Cadamosto, this is also the end of the African mainland-coasting of Henry's seamen. Though he did not die till 1460, and we have now only reached the year 1448, for Azurara's solemn catalogue of negroes brought to Europe is reckoned only up to that year—"nine hundred and twenty-seven who had been turned into t

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CHAPTER XVI.

D on Pedro had been nominated sole Regent of Portugal on November 1, 1439, and by the end of the next year all the unsettlement consequent on the change at court seemed to be at an end. But a deep hatred continued between the various parties. First of all, the Count of Barcellos, natural son of John I., created Duke of Braganza by Affonso V., had taken up a definite policy of supplanting the Regent. The Queen Mother had not forgotten or forgiven Don Pedro's action at Edward's death, and the youn

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CHAPTER XVII.

W e have now come to the voyages of the Venetian Cadamosto, in the service of Prince Henry. And though these were far from being the most striking in their general effect, they are certainly the most famous, the best known, of all the enterprises of these fifty years (1415-1460). It is true that Cadamosto fairly reached Sierra Leone and, passing the farthest mark of the earlier Portuguese caravels, coasted along many miles of that great eastern bend of the West African coast which we call the Gu

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CHAPTER XVIII.

T he last voyage of Henry's lifetime was that of his faithful servant, Diego Gomez, by which the Cape Verde islands first became clearly and fully known. It followed close upon Cadamosto's venture. "No long time after, the Prince equipped at Lagos a caravel, called the Wren , and set over it Diego Gomez, with two other caravels, of which the same Gomez was captain-in-chief. Their orders were to go as far as they could. "But after passing a great river beyond the Rio Grande, we met such strong cu

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CHAPTER XIX.

W hile Cadamosto and Diego Gomez were carrying the Prince's flag farther from the shores of Europe "than Alexander or Cæsar had ever ventured," the Prince himself was getting more and more absorbed in the project of a new Holy War against the Infidel. The fall of Constantinople in 1453 into the hands of the Ottoman Turks, had at least the effect of frightening and almost of rousing Western Christendom at large. In the most miserably divided of Latin states there was now a talk about doing great

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CHAPTER XX.

H enry's own life is in one way the least important part of him. We have seen how many were the lines of history and of progress—in Christendom, in Portugal, in Science—that met in him; how Greek and Arabic geography, both knowledge and practical exploration, was as much a part of what he found to work with as the memoirs of Christian pilgrims, traders, and travellers for a thousand years; how the exploring and expanding energy which the Northmen poured into Europe, leading directly to the Crusa

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Heroes of the Nations.

The first group of the Series comprises the following volumes: Nelson, and the Naval Supremacy of England. By W. Clark Russell, author of "The Wreck of the Grosvenor," etc. Gustavus Adolphus, and the Struggle of Protestantism for Existence. By C.R.L. Fletcher , M.A., late Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. Pericles, and the Golden Age of Athens. By Evelyn Abbott, M.A. , Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford. Theodoric the Goth, the Barbarian Champion of Civilisation. By Thomas Hodgkin , author of

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