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VII
.
HENRY'S POSITION
AND DESIGNS AT THE TIME OF THE FIRST VOYAGES, 1410-1415.
Then from ancient gloom
emerged
The rising world of trade: the genius then,
Of Navigation, held in hopeless sloth,
Had slumbered on the vast Atlantic deep
For idle ages, starting, heard at last
The Lusitanian Prince, who, Heaven-inspired,
To love of useful glory roused mankind,
And in unbounded commerce mixed the world.
THOMSON, Seasons,
Summer, 1005-1012.
The 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 planted himself in his Naval Arsenal at Sagres, close to Lagos town and Cape St. Vincent, and for
more than forty years, till his death in 1460, he kept his mind upon the ocean
that stretched out from that rocky headland to the unknown West and South.
Twice only for any length of time did he come back into political life; for the
rest, though respected as the referee of national disputes and the leader and
teacher of the people, his time was mainly spent in thinking out his plans of
discovery—drawing his maps, adjusting his instruments, sending out his ships, receiving
the reports of his captains. His aims were three: to discover, to add to the
greatness and wealth of Portugal, and to spread the Christian Faith.
(1.) First of all,
he was trying to find a way round Africa to India for the sake of the new
knowledge itself and for the power which that knowledge would give. As his mind
was above all things interested in the scientific question, it was this side
which was foremost in his plans. He was really trying to find out the shape of
the world, and to make men feel more at home in it, that the dread of the great
unknown round the little island of civilised and
habitable world might be lightened. He was working in the mist that so long had
hung round Christendom, chilling every enterprise.
Thus the whole
question of the world and its shape, its countries and climates, its seas and
continents, on every side of practical exploration, was bound to be before
Prince Henry as a theorist; the practical question which he helped to solve was
only a part of this wider whole. Did this Africa stretching opposite to him in
his retreat at Sagres never end till it reached the
Southern pole, or was it possible to get round into the Eastern ocean? Since
Ptolemy's map had held the field, it had been heresy to suppose this; but in
the age of Greek and Phoenician voyages it had been guessed by some, and
perhaps even proved by others.
The Tyrians whom
Pharaoh Necho sent down the Red Sea more than six
hundred years before Christ, brought back after three years a story of their
finding Africa an island, and so returning by the west and north through the
Straits of Gibraltar.
The same
tradition, after a long time of discredit, was now reviving upon the maps of
the fourteenth century, and, in spite of the terrible stories of the Arabs,
Henry was able in the first years of the fifteenth to find men who would try
the forlorn hope of a direct sea-route from Europe to the Indies. We have seen
how far the charts and guide-books of the time just before this had advanced
Christian knowledge of the world; how the southern coastline of Asia is traced
by Marco Polo, and how even Madagascar is named, though not visited, by the
same traveller; the Florentine map of 1351 proves
that a fairly true guess of the shape of Africa could be made even before
persistent exploration began with Henry of Portugal; the Arab settlements on
the east coast of Africa and their trade with the Malabar coast, though still
kept as a close monopoly for Islam, had thoroughly opened up a line of
navigation, that was ready, as it were, for the first Europeans who could
strike into it and press the Moorish pilots into a new service. Discovery was
thus anticipated when the coasts of West and South had once been rounded.
Beyond this, the
vague knowledge of the Guinea coast already gained through the Sahara Caravan
Trade was improved by the Prince himself, during his stay at Ceuta, into the
certainty that if the great western hump of Africa beyond Bojador could be passed, his caravels would come into an eastern current, passing the
gold and ivory coast, which might lead straight to India, and at any rate would
be connected by an overland traffic with the Mediterranean.
(2.) Again, Henry
was founding upon his work of exploration an empire for his country. At first
perhaps only thinking of the straight sea-passage as the possible key of the
Indian trade, it became clearer with every fresh discovery that the European
kingdom might and must be connected by a chain of forts and factories with the
rich countries for whose sake all these barren coasts were passed. In any case,
and in the eyes of ordinary men, the riches of the East were the plain and
primary reason of the explorations. Science had its own aims, but to gain an
income for its work it must promise some definite gain. And the chief hope of
Henry's captains was that the wealth now flowing by the overland routes to the
Levant would in time, as the prize of Portuguese daring, go by the water way,
without delay or fear of plunder or Arab middlemen, to Lisbon and Oporto. This
would repay all the trouble and all the cost, and silence all who murmured. For
this Indian trade was the prize of the world, and for the sake of this Rome had
destroyed Palmyra, and attacked Arabia and held Egypt, and struggled for the
mastery of the Tigris. For the same thing half the wars of the Levant had been
waged, and by this the Italian republics, Venice, Genoa, and Pisa, had grown to
greatness.
(3.) Lastly, Henry
was a Crusader with Islam and a missionary with the heathen. Of him fully as
much as of Columbus, it may be said, that if he aimed at an empire, it was a
Christian one, and from the time of the first voyages his captains had orders
not merely to discover and to trade, but to convert. Till his death he hoped to
find the land of Prester John, the half-true, half-fabulous Christian
Priest-King of the outer world, so long cut off from Christendom by the
Mohammedan states.
At this time many
things were drawing western Europe towards the East and towards discovery. The
progress of science and historic knowledge, the records and suggestions of travellers, the development of the Christian nations, the
position of Portugal and the spirit of her people,—all these lines met, as it
were, in Henry's time and nation and person, and from that meeting came the
results of Columbus and Da Gama and Magellan.
In the earlier
chapters we have tried to trace the preparation along these slowly converging
paths, for the discoveries of the fifteenth century. We started with that body
of knowledge and theory about the world which the Roman Empire bequeathed to
Christendom, and which in the earlier Middle Ages was worked upon by the Arabs,
and we gained some idea, from the sayings of Moslem geographers and from the
doings of Moslem warriors, of the hindrance as well as of the help that Islam
gave to European expansion. We saw that during the great struggle of
Christianity and of the old Order with barbarism, the chief energy of our
Western world in discovery or extension of any sort took the shape of
pilgrimage. Then, as time went on, it was possible to see that the Saracens,
who had begun as destroyers in the South, were acting as teachers and civilisers upon Europe, and that the Vikings, who as
pirates in the North seemed raised up to complete the ruin of Latin civilisation, were really waking it into a new activity.
In the Crusades
this activity, which had already founded the kingdom of Russia on one side and
touched America on the other, seemed to pass from the Northern seamen into
every Christian nation and every class of society, and with the conversion of
the Northmen their place as the discoverers and leaders of the Christian world
fitted in with the other movements of Mediterranean commerce and war and
devotion. Even the pilgrims of the Crusading Age were now no longer
distinctive: they were often, as individuals, members of other classes,
traders, fighters, or travellers who, after gaining a
firm foothold in Syria, began the exploration of the further East.
The three great
discovering energies of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries—in land-travel,
navigation, and science—were all seen to be results, in whole or in part, of
the Crusades themselves, and in following the more important steps of European
travel and trade and proselytism from the Holy Land to China, it became more
and more evident that this practical finding out of the treasures of Cathay and
the Indies was the necessary preparation for the attempts of Genoese and
Portuguese to open up the sea route as another and a safer way to the source of
the same treasures.
Lastly, the
intermittent and uncertain ventures of the fourteenth-century seamen, Italian,
Spanish, French, or English, to coast round Africa or to find the Indies by the
Southern route—to reach a definite end without any clear plan of means to that
end—and the revival in theoretical geography, which was trying at the same time
to fill up the gaps of knowledge by tradition or by probability—seemed to offer
a clear contrast and a clear foreshadowing also of Prince Henry's method. Even
his nearest forerunners, in seamanship or in map-making were strikingly
different from himself. They were too much in the spirit of Ptolemy and of
ancient science; they neglected fact for hypothesis, for clever guessing, and
so their work was spasmodic and unfruitful, or at least disappointing.
It was true enough
that each generation of Christian thought was less in fault than the one before
it; but it was not till the fifteenth century, till Henry had set the example,
that exploration became systematic and continuous. To Marco Polo and men like
him we owe the beginnings of the art and science of discovery among the learned;
to the Portuguese is due at least the credit of making it a thing of national
interest, and of freeing it from a false philosophy. To find out by incessant
and unwearying search what the world really was, and
not to make known facts fit in with the ideas of some thinker on what the world
ought to be, this we found to be the main difference between Cosmas or even
Ptolemy and any true leader of discovery. For a real advance of knowledge,
fancy must follow experiment, and no merely hypothetical system or Universe as
shewn in Holy Scripture, would do any longer. We have come to the time when
explorers were not Ptolemaics or Strabonians or Scripturists, but Naturalists—men who examined
things afresh, for themselves.
These various
objects are all involved in the one central aim of discovery, but they are not
lost in it. To know this world we live in and to teach men the new knowledge
was the first thing, which makes Henry what he is in universal history; his
other aims are those of his time and his nation, but they are not less a part
of his life.
And he succeeded
in them all; if in part his work was for all time and in part seemed to pass
away after a hundred years, that was due to the exhaustion of his people. What
he did for his countrymen was realised by others, but
the start, the inspiration, was his own. He persevered for fifty years
(1412-60) till within sight of the goal, and though he died before the full
result of his work was seen, it was none the less his due when it came.
We find these
results put down to the credit of others, but if Columbus gave Castille and
Leon a new world in 1492, if Da Gama reached India in 1498, if Diaz rounded the
Cape of Tempests or of Good Hope in 1486, if Magellan made the circuit of the
globe in 1520-2, their teacher and master was none the less Henry the
Navigator.
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