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XIV
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VOYAGES OF 1446-8.
And 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 that his caravels should explore the land of the Negroes, and knowing
how some had already passed the River of Nile, thought that if he should not do
something of right good service to the Infant in that land, he could in no wise
gain the name of a brave knight.
“So he armed a
caravel and began sail, not stopping anywhere that he might come straight to
the Black Man's land. And passing by Cape Verde he sailed on sixty leagues and
found a river, where he judged there ought to be some people living. So he bade
them lower two small boats and put ten men in the one and twelve in the other,
which pulled straight towards some huts they sighted ahead of them. But before
they could jump on shore, twelve canoes came out on the other side, and seventy
or eighty Blackmoors in them, with bows in their
hands, who began to shoot at our people." As the tide rose, one of the
Guinea boats passed them and landed its crew, "so that our men were
between a fire from the land and a fire from the boats." They pulled back
as hard as they could, but before they could get on board, four of them were
lying dead.
“And so they began
to make sail home again, leaving the boats in that they were not able to take
charge of them. For of the twenty-two who went to land in them there did not
escape more than two; nineteen were killed, for so deadly was the poison that
with a tiny wound, a mere scratch that drew blood, it could bring a man to his
last end. But above and beyond these was killed our noble knight, Nuno Tristam, earnestly desiring life, that he might die not a
shameful death like this, but as a brave man should”.
Of seven who had
been left in the caravel, two had been struck by the poisoned arrows as they
tried to raise the anchors, and were long in danger of death, lying a good
twenty days at the last gasp, without the power to raise a finger to help the
others who were trying to get the caravel home, so that only five were left to
work the ship.
Nuno’s men were
saved by the energy and skill of one—a mere boy, a page of the Infant's
House—who took charge of the ship, and steered its course due north, then north
by east, so that in two months’ time they were off the coast of Portugal. But
they were absolutely helpless and hopeless, knowing nothing of their
whereabouts, for in all those two months they had had no glimpse of land,—so
that when at last they caught sight of an armed fusta,
they were much troubled, supposing it to be a Moorish cruiser. When it came
near and shewed itself to be a Gallician pirate, the
poor fellows were almost wild with delight, still more when they found they
were not far from Lagos. They had had a terrible time; first they were almost
poisoned by the dead bodies of Nuno Tristam and the
victims of the savages' poisoned arrows; then, when at last they had
"thrown their honour to the winds and those
bodies to the fishes," shamefaced and utterly broken in spirit, the five
wretchedly ignorant seamen, who were now left alone, drifted, with the
boundless and terrible ocean on one side, and the still more dangerous and
unknown coast of Africa on the other, for sixty days. A common sailor, “little
enough skilled in the art of sailing”; a groom of the Prince’s chamber, the
young hero who saved the ship; a negro boy, who was taken with the first
captives from Guinea; and two other “little lads small enough”,—this was the
crew. As for the rest, Beati mortui qui in Domino moriuntur, Blessed are the dead that die in the Lord, cries
the chronicler in that outburst of bewildered grief with which he ends his
story. There were widows and orphans left for the Prince to care for, and “of
these he took especial charge”.
But all people
were not so unlucky as Nuno Tristam. The caravel of Zarco of Madeira, which under Zarco’s nephew, Alvaro Fernandez, had already passed beyond every other in the year of
the great armada, 1445, was sent back again on its errand “of doing service in
the unknown lands of Guinea to the Lord Don Henry”, in the black year, 1446.
Its noble and valiant owner now “charged the aforesaid” Alvaro Fernandez, with
the ship well-armed, to go as far as he could, and to try and make some booty,
that should be so new and so splendid that it would be a sign of his good-will
to serve the Lord who had made him. So they sailed on straight to Cape Verde,
and beyond that to the Cape of Masts (or Spindle Palms), their farthest of the
year before, but they did not turn back here, in spite of unfriendly natives
and unknown shores. Still coasting along, they found tracks of men, and a little
farther on a village, “where the people came out as men who showed that they
meant to defend their homes; in front of them was a champion, with a good
target on his arm and an assegai in his hand. This fellow our captain rushed
upon, and with a blow of his lance struck him dead upon the ground. Then,
running up, he seized his sword and spear, and kept them as trophies to be
offered to the Lord Infant”. The negroes fled, and the conquerors turned back
to their ship and sailed on. Next day they came to a land where they saw
certain of the women of those negroes, and seized one who was of age about
thirty, with her child a baby of two, and another, a young girl of fourteen, “the
which had a good enough presence and beauty for that country”; but the strength
of the woman was so wonderful, that she gave the three men who held her trouble
enough to lift her into the boat. And seeing how they were kept struggling on
the beach, they feared that some of the people of the country might come down
upon them. So one of them put the child into the boat, and love of it forced
the mother to go likewise, without much more pushing.
Thence they went
on, pursues the story, till they came to a river, into which they made an
entrance with a boat, and carried off a woman that they found in a house. But
going up the river somewhat farther, with a mind to make some good booty, there
came out upon them four or five canoes full of negroes, armed as men who would
fight for their country, whose encounter our men in the boat did not wish to
await in face of the advantage of the enemy, and fearing above all the great
peril of poisoned arrows. So they began to pull down stream as hard as they
could towards the caravel; but as one of the canoes distanced the others and
came up close to them, they turned upon it and in the fight one of the negroes
shot a dart, that wounded the captain, Alvaro Fernandez, in the foot. But he,
as he had been already warned of the poison, drew out the arrow very quickly
and bathed it with acid and oil, and then anointed it well with theriack, and it pleased God that he passed safely
through a great trouble, though for some days he lay on the point of death. And
so they got back to the caravel.
But though the
captain was so badly wounded, the crew did not stop in following the coast and
went on (all this was over quite new ground) till they came to a certain
sand-spit, directly in front of a great bay. Here they launched a boat, and
rowed out to see the land they had come to, and at once there came out against
them full 120 negroes, some with bows, others with shields and assegais, and
when they reached the edge of the sea, they began to play and dance about, “like
men clean wearied of all sadness, but our men in the boat wishing to be excused
from sharing in that festival of theirs, turned and rowed back to the ship”
Now all this was a
good 110 leagues,—320 miles beyond Cape Verde, “mostly to the south of the
aforesaid cape” (that is, about the place of Sierra Leone on our maps), and
this caravel remained a longer time abroad and went farther than any other ship
of that year, and but for the sickness of the wounded captain they would not
have stopped there. But as it was they came straight back to the Bank of Arguin, “where they met that chief Ahude Meymam, of whom we have spoken before”, in the story
of Joan Fernandez. And though they had no interpreter, by whom they might do
their business, by signs they managed so that they were able to buy a negress,
in exchange for certain cloths that they had with them. And so they came safe
home. There was not much trouble now in getting volunteers for the work of
discovery, and a reward of 200 doubloons—100 from Prince Henry, 100 more from
the Regent Don Pedro—to the last bold explorers who had got fairly round
Senegambia, added zest to enterprise.
In this same year
1446-7, no fewer than nine caravels sailed to Guinea from Portugal in another
armada, on the track of Zarco’s successful crew. At
Madeira they were joined by two more, and the whole fleet sailed through the
Canary island group to Cape Verde. Eight of them passed sixty leagues, 180
miles, beyond, and found a river, the Rio Grande, “of good size enough”, up
which they sailed, except one ship, belonging to a Bishop—the Bishop of
Algarve—"for that this happened to run upon a sand-bank, in such wise,
that they were not able to get her off, though all the people on board were
saved with the cargo. And while some of them were busy in this, others landed
and found the country just deserted by its inhabitants, and going on to find
them, they soon perceived that they had found a track, which they had chanced
on near the place where they landed”.
They followed this
track recklessly enough, and nearly met the fate of Nuno Tristam.
“For as they went on by that road, they came to a country with great sown
fields, with plantations of cotton trees and rice plots, in a land full of
hills like loaves, after which they came to a great wood”, and as they were
going into the wood, the Guineas came out upon them in great numbers, with bows
and assegais and saluted them with a shower of poisoned arrows. The first five
Europeans fell dead at once, two others were desperately wounded, the rest
escaped to the ships, and the ships went no farther that year.
Still worse was
the fate of Vallarte’s venture in the early months of
1448. Vallarte was a nobleman of the Court of King
Christopher of Denmark, who had been drawn to the Court of Henry at Sagres by the growing fame of the Prince's explorations,
and who came forward with the stock request, “Give me a caravel to go to the
land of the negroes”.
A little beyond
Cape Verde, Vallarte went on shore with a boat’s crew
and fell into the trap which had caught the exploring party of the year before.
He and his men were surrounded by negroes and were shot down or captured to a
man. But one escaped, swimming to the ship, and told how as he looked back over
his shoulder to the shore, again and again, he saw Vallarte sitting a prisoner in the stern of the boat.
“And when the
chronicle of these voyages was in writing at the end of the self-same year,
there were brought certain prisoners from Guinea to Prince Henry, who told him
that in a city of the upland, in the heart of Africa, there were four Christian
prisoners”. One had died, three were living, and in these four, men in Europe
believed they had news of Vallarte and his men.
But between the
last voyage of Zarco’s caravel in 1446 and the first
voyage of Cadamosto in 1455, there is no real advance
in exploration.
The “third armada”,
as it was called, that is the fleet of the nine caravels of 1446-7, the voyage
of Gomes Pires to the Rio d'Ouro at the same time,
the trading ventures of the Marocco coast which were
the means of bringing the first lion to Portugal in 1447, the expeditions to
the Rio d'Ouro and to Arguin in the course of the same year, are not part of the story of discovery, but of
trade. There is hardly a suspicion of exploring interest about most of them.
Even Vallarte’s venture in 1448 has nothing of the
novelty which so many went out to find “for the satisfaction of the Lord Henry”.
Guinea voyages are frequent, almost constant, during these years, and this
frequency has at any rate the point of making Europeans thoroughly familiar
with the coast already explored, if it did little or nothing to bring in new
knowledge.
But the value and
meaning of Henry’s life and work was not after all in commerce, except in a
secondary sense; and these voyages of purely trading interest, with no design
or at any rate no result of discovery, do not belong to our subject. Each one
of them has its own picturesque beauty in the pages of the old chronicle of the
Conquest of Guinea, but measured by its importance to the general story of the
expansion of Europe, there is no lasting value in any one of the last chapters
of Azurara’s voyages,—his description of the
Canaries, and of the Inferno of Teneriffe, “of how
Madeira was peopled, and the other islands that are in that part, of how the
caravel of Alvaro Dornellas took certain of the Canarians, of how Gomes Pires went to the Rio d'Ouro and of the Moors that he took, of the caravel that
went to Meça (in Marocco)
and of the Moors that were taken, of how Antam Gonsalvez received the island of Lançarote in the name of the Prince”.
Only the
chronicler's summary of results, up to the year 1446, the year of Nuno Tristam’s failure, is of wider interest. “Till then there
had been fifty-one caravels to those parts, which had gone 450 leagues (1350
miles) beyond the Cape (Boyador). And as it was found
that the coast ran southward with many points, the Prince ordered these to be
added to the sailing chart. And here it is to be noted, that what was clearly
known before of the coast of the great sea was 200 leagues (600 miles), which
have been increased by these 450. Also what had been laid down upon the Mappa Mundi was not true but was by guess work, but now it
is all from the survey by the eyes of our seamen. And now seeing that in this
history we have given account sufficient of the first four reasons which
brought our noble Prince to his attempt, it is time we said something of the
accomplishment of his fifth object, the conversion of the Heathen, by the
bringing of a number of infidel souls from their lands to this, the which by
count were nine hundred and twenty-seven, of whom the greater part were turned
into the true way of salvation. And what capture of town or city could be more
glorious than this”.
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