READING HALLTHE DOORS OF WISDOM |
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PRINCE HENRY THE NAVIGATOR
XX .THE RESULTS OF PRINCE HENRY’S WORK.
For just as we
cannot see how that work of his could have been done without each and every
part of that many-sided preparation in the history of the past, so it is quite
as difficult to see how the great achievements of the generation that followed
him and of the century, that wonderful sixteenth century, which followed the
age of Henry’s courtiers and disciples, could have been realised without the impetus he had given and the knowledge he had spread.
For it was not
merely that his seamen had broken down the middle wall of superstitious terror
and had pierced through into the unknown South for a distance of nearly two
thousand miles; it was not merely that between 1412 and 1460 Europeans passed
the limits of the West and of the South, as legend had so long fixed them; not
merely that the most difficult part of the African coast, between Bojador and the Gulf of Guinea, had been fairly passed and
that the waterway to India was more than half found. This was true enough. When
Vasco da Gama was once round the South Cape, he soon found himself not in an
unknown and untraversed ocean, but embarked upon one of the great trade routes
of the Mahometan world. The main part of the distance between the Prince's
farthest and the southern Cape of Good Hope, was passed in two voyages, in four
years (1482-6).
But there was
more than this. Henry did not only accomplish the first and most difficult
steps of his own great central project, the finding of the way round Africa to
India; he not only began the conversion of the natives, the civilisation of the coast tribes and the colonisation of certain
trading sites; he also founded that school of thought and practice which made
all the great discoveries that have so utterly eclipsed his own.
From that
school came Columbus, who found a western route to India, starting from the
suggestion of Henry's attempt by south and east; Bartholomew Diaz, who reached
and rounded the southernmost point of the old-world continent and laid open the
Indian Ocean to European sailors; Da Gama, who was the first of those sailors
to reap the full advantage of the work of ninety years, the first who sailed
from Lisbon to Calicut and back again; Albuquerque, who founded the first
colonial empire of Modern Europe, the first great out-settlement of
Christendom, the Portuguese trade dominion in the East; Magellan, who finally
proved what all the great discoverers were really assuming—the roundness of the
world; the nameless adventurers who seem to have touched Australia some time
before 1530; the draughtsmen who left us our first
true map of the globe. So it is not in the actual things done by the Prince's
efforts that we can measure his importance in history. It is because his work
was infinitely suggestive, because he laid a right foundation for the onward
movement of Europe and Christendom, because he was the leader of a true
Renaissance and Reformation, that he is so much more than a figure in the story
of Portugal.
There are
figures which are of national interest: there are others which are less than
that, figures of family or provincial importance; others again which are always
dear to us as human beings, as men who felt the ordinary wants and passions and
lived the ordinary life of men with a brilliancy and an intense power that was
all their own; there are other men who stand out as those who have changed more
or less, but changed vitally and really, the course of the world's history;
without whom the whole of our modern society, our boasted civilisation,
would have been profoundly different.
For after all
the modern Christian world of Europe has something to boast of, though its
writers spend much of their time in reviling and decrying it. It is something
that our Western world has conquered or worsted every other civilisation upon earth; that with the single exception of China, it has made everyone of the coveted tracts of Asia its own; that it has
discovered, settled, and developed a new continent to be the equal of the old;
that it has won not a complete but a good working knowledge of the whole
surface of the globe. We are at home in the world now, we say, and if we would
know what that means, we must look at the Europe of the tenth or even the
fourteenth century, look at the theoretic maps of the Middle Ages, look at the
legends and the pseudo-science of a civilisation which was shut up within itself and condemned for so long to fight in a
narrowing circle against incessant attacks from without and the barbarism which
this state of things kept alive within. Then perhaps we shall take things a
little less for granted, and perhaps also we shall begin to think that if this
great advance, the greatest thing in Modern History as we know it, that which
is the distinction and glory of the last three hundred years, is at all due to
the inspiration and the action of Henry of Portugal, an obscure Prince of the
fifteenth century, that obscure Prince may possibly belong to the rank of the
great civilisers, the men who have most altered
society and advanced it, men like Alexander and Caesar and the founders of the
great world religions.
It may be as
well to trace out very shortly the evidence for such a claim as this and to
see, how the Prince's work was followed up, first on his own lines to south and
east; second, on other lines, which his own suggested, to west and north.
1. King Affonso V, Henry’s nephew, though rather more of a hard
fighter and tournament king than a man who could fully take up his uncle's
plans, had yet caught enough of his inspiration to push on steadily, though
slowly, the advance round Africa. He had already done his best to get the great
map of Fra Mauro finished: this, which embodied all the achievements of the
Navigator and gave the most complete and perfect view of the world that had
ever yet appeared, had come out in 1459, just before Henry's death, the last
tribute of science to the Prince's work.
Now, in 1461,
left alone to deal with the discovery and conquest of Guinea, Affonso repaired Henry's fort in the Bay of Arguin and sent one Pedro de Cintra to survey the coast
beyond the Rio Grande, the farthest point of Cadamosto in his first voyage, as generally known. Pedro went six hundred miles into the
Bight of Benin, passed a mountain range called Sierra Leone from the lion-like
growl of the thunder on its summits, and turned back near the point afterwards
known as Fort La Mina (1461). Some time in the next
few years, another courtier, one Sueiro da Costa
followed Pedro de Cintra to Guinea, but without any new results; when Cadamosto left Portugal (Feb. 1, 1463), he tells us “there
were no more voyages to the new-found parts”.
The
slave-trade nearer home was now, indeed, absorbing all energies and Affonso’s main relation with African voyaging is to be
found in his regulations for the security of this trade.
But in 1471
there was another move in the line of further discovery. For exploring energy
was not dead or worn out, but only waiting a leader. Fernando Po now reached
the island in the farthest inlet of the Gulf of Guinea, which is still called
after him, finding as he went on that the eastern bend of Africa, which men had
followed so confidently since 1445, the year of the rounding of Cape Verde, now
ended with a sharp turn to the south. It was a great disappointment. But in
spite of this discouragement, at the very same time two of the foremost of the
Portuguese pilots, Martin Fernandez and Alvaro Esteeves,
passed the whole of the Guinea Coast, the Bights of Benin and of Biafra, and
crossed the Equator, into a new Heaven and a new Earth, on the edge of which
the caravels of Portugal had long been hovering, as they saw like Cadamosto, stars unknown in the Northern Hemisphere and
more and more nearly lost sight of the Northern Pole.
In 1475 Cape
St. Catherine, two degrees south of the Line, was reached and then after six
more years of languishing exploration and flourishing trade, King John II.
succeeded Affonso V. and took up the work, in the
spirit of Prince Henry the Navigator.
Now in six
short years, exploration carried out the main part of the design of so many
years, the southern Cape of Africa was rounded and the way to India laid open.
For the time had come, and the man, John, added a new chapter to discovery by
the travellers he sent across the Dark Continent and
the sailors he despatched to the Arctic Seas to find
a north-east passage to China.
He died just
as he was fitting up the expedition that was to enter upon the promised land,
and the glory of Da Gama's voyage fell to one who had not laboured,
but entered upon the fruits of the toil of other men, the palace-king, Emanuel
the Fortunate. But at least the names of Diaz, and Diego Cam, and Covilham, the rounding of the Cape of Storms, the first
journey (though an overland one), straight from Lisbon to Malabar, belong to
the second founder of Portuguese and European discovery, John the Perfect.
Less than four
months after his father's death, John, who as heir apparent, had drawn part of
his income from the African trade and its fisheries, sent out Diego de Azambuga with ten caravels to superintend three
undertakings: first the construction of a fort at St. George da Mina, to secure
the trade of the Guinea Coast; second, the rebuilding of Henry's old fort at Arguin; third, the exploration of the yet unknown coast as
far as possible. For this, stones, brick, wood, mortar, and tools for building
were sent out with the fleet, and carved pillars were taken to be set up in all
fresh discovered lands, instead of the wooden crosses that had previously done
duty. Each pillar was fourteen hands high, was carved in front with the royal
arms and on the sides with the names of the King and the Discoverer, with the
date of discovery in Latin and Portuguese.
Azambuga’s fleet sailed
on the 11th of December, 1480, made a treaty with the chief Bezeghichi,
near Cape Verde, and reached La Mina, on the south coast of Guinea, on January
19, 1482, after a year spent in fort building and treaty making with the
natives of north-west Africa. Fort and church at La Mina were finished in
twenty days, and Azambuga sent back his ships with a
great cargo in slaves and gold, but without any news of fresh discovery. John
was not disposed to be content with this. In 1484, Diego Cam was ordered to go
as far to the south as he could, and not to “wait anywhere for other matters”.
He passed Cape St. Catherine, just beyond the Line, which since 1475 had been
the limit of knowledge, and continuing south, reached the mighty river Congo,
called by the natives Zaire, and now known as the second of African rivers, the
true counterpart of that western Nile, which every geographer since Ptolemy had
reproduced and which, in the Senegal, the Gambia, and the Niger, the Portuguese
had again and again sought to find their explanation.
Cam, by
agreement with the natives, took back four hostages to act as interpreters and
next year returned to and passed the Congo, and sailed two hundred leagues
beyond, to the site of the modern Walvisch Bay (1485).
Here, as the
coast seemed to stretch interminably south, though he had now really passed
quite nine-tenths of the distance to the southern Cape, Cam turned back to the
Congo, where he persuaded the King and people to profess themselves Christians
and allies of Portugal. Already, in 1484, a native embassy to King John had
brought such an account of an inland prince, one Ogane,
a Christian at heart, that all the Court of Lisbon thought he must be the long
lost Prester John, and the Portuguese monarch, all on fire with this hope, sent
out at once in search of this great Catholic lord, by sea and land.
Bartholomew
Diaz sailed in August, 1486, with two ships, first to search for the Prester,
and then to explore as much new land and sea as he could find within his reach.
Two envoys, Covilham and Payva,
were sent on the same errand, by way of Jerusalem, Arabia, and Egypt; another
expedition was sent to ascend the Senegal to its junction with the Nile; a
fourth party started to find the way to Cathay by the North-east passage.
Camoëns has sung of
the travels of Covilham, who first saw cloves and
cinnamon, pepper and ginger, and who pined away in a state of confinement at
the Prester's Abyssinian Court, but the voyage of Diaz hardly finds a place in
the Lusiads and the very name of the
discoverer is generally forgotten. Vasco da Gama has robbed him only too
successfully.
John Diaz had
been the second captain to double Bojador; Diniz Diaz, in 1445, had been the discoverer of Senegal and
of Cape Verde; now, forty years later, Bartholomew Diaz achieved the greatest
feat of discovery in all history, before Columbus; for the Northmen's finding
America was an unknown and transitory good fortune, while the voyage of 1486
changed directly or indirectly the knowledge, the trade, the whole face of the
world at once and forever.
Sailing with “two
little friggits”, each of fifty tons burden, in the
belief that ships which sailed down the coast of Guinea might be sure of
reaching the end of the continent, by persisting to the south, Diaz, in one
voyage of sixteen months, performed the main task which Henry seventy years ago
had set before his nation.
Passing Walvisch Bay and the farthest pillar of Diego Cam, he
reached a headland where he set up his first new pillar at what is still known
as Diaz Point. Still coasting southwards and tacking frequently, he passed the
Orange River, the northern limit of the present Cape Colony. Then putting well
out to sea Diaz ran thirteen days before the wind due south, hoping by this
wide sweep to round the southern point of the continent, which could not now be
far off. Finding the cold become almost Arctic and buffeted by tremendous seas,
he changed his course to east, and then as no land appeared after five days, to
north. The first land seen was a bay where cattle were feeding, now called
Flesh Bay, which Diaz named from the cows and cowherds he saw there. After
putting ashore two natives, some of those lately carried from Guinea or Congo
to Portugal, and sent out again to act as scouts for the European colonies, the
ships sailed east, seeking in vain for the land's end, till they found the
coast tend gradually but steadily towards the north.
Their last
pillar was set up in Algoa Bay, the first land trodden
by Christians beyond the Cape. At the Great Fish River, sixty miles farther on
and quite five hundred miles beyond the point that Diaz was looking for so
anxiously, the crew refused to go any farther and the Admiral turned back, only
certain of one thing, that he had missed the Cape, and that all his trouble was
in vain. Worn out with the worry of his bitter disappointment and incessant
useless labour, he was coasting slowly back, when one
day the veil fell from his eyes. For there came in sight that “so many ages
unknown promontory” round which lay the way to India, and to find which had
been the great ambition of all enterprise since the expansion of Europe had
begun afresh in the opening years of that fifteenth century.
While Diaz was
still tossing in the storms off the Great Cape, Covilham and his friends had started from Lisbon to settle the course of the future
sea-route to India by an "observation of all the coasts of the Indian
Ocean," to explore what they could of Upper Africa, to find Prester John,
and to ally the Portuguese experiment with anything they could find of
Christian power in Greater or Middle or Further India.
As King John's
Senegal adventurers had been exploring the Niger, the Sahara caravan routes,
the city of Timbuctoo and the fancied western Nile, so the Abyssinian travellers surveyed all the ground of Africa and Malabar
which the first fleet that could round the Cape of Storms must come to. “Keep
southward”, Covilham wrote home from Cairo after his
first visit to Calicut on one side and to Mozambique on the other, “if you
persist, Africa must come to an end. And when ships come to the Eastern Ocean
let them ask for Sofala and the island of the Moon
(Madagascar), and they will find pilots to take them to Malabar”.
Yet another
chapter of discoveries was opened by King John’s Cathay fleet. He failed to get
news of a North-east passage, but beyond the north coast of Asia there was
found a frozen island whose name of Novaia Zemlaia or Nova Zembla still
keeps the memory of the first Portuguese attempts on the road where so many
Dutch and English seamen perished in after years.
The great
voyage of Vasco da Gama (1497-9), the empire founded by Albuquerque (1506-15)
in the Indian seas, were the other steps in the complete achievement of Prince
Henry’s ambition. When in the early years of the sixteenth century a direct and
permanent traffic was fairly started between Malabar and Portugal, when
European settlements and forts controlled the whole eastern and western coasts
of Africa from the mouth of the Red Sea to the mouth of the Mediterranean, and
the five keys of the Indies—Malacca, Goa, Ormuz, Aden, and Ceylon—were all in
Christian hands, when the Moslem trade between east Africa and western India
had passed into a possession of the Kings of Lisbon, Don Henry might see of the
travail of his soul and be well satisfied.
The supposed
discovery of Australia about 1530, or somewhat earlier, and the travels of
Ferdinand Mendez Pinto in Japan and the furthest East, the opening of the trade
with China in 1517, and the complete exploration of Abyssinia, the Prester’s
kingdom, in 1520, by Alvarez and the other Catholic missionaries, the millions
converted by Francis Xavier and the Jesuit preachers in Malabar, and the union
of the old native Christian Church of India with the Roman (1599), were other
steps in the same road. All of them, if traced back far enough, bring us to the
Court of Sagres, and the same is true of Spanish and
French and Dutch and English empires in the southern and eastern world. Henry
built for his own nation, but when that nation failed from the exhaustion of
its best blood, other peoples entered upon the inheritance of his work.
But though he
was not able himself to see the fulfilment of his plans, both the method of a
South-east passage, and the men who followed it out to complete success, were
his,—his workmanship and his building.
Da Gama, Diego
Cam, the Diaz family, and most of the great seamen who followed the path they
had traced, were either “brought up from boyhood in the Household of the Infant”,
as the Chronicle of the Discovery tells us of each new figure
that comes upon the scene, or looked to him as their master, owed to the School
of Sagres their training, and began their practical
seamanship under his leave and protection. Even the lines upon which the
national expansion and exploration went on were so strictly and exclusively the
same as he had followed, that when a different route to the Indies was
suggested after his death by Christopher Columbus, the Court of John II.
refused to treat it seriously. And this brings us to the other, the indirect
side of Henry's influence.
“It was in
Portugal”, (says Ferdinand Columbus, in his Life of the Admiral,
his father,) “that the Admiral began to think, that if men could sail so far
south, one might also sail west and find lands in that quarter”. The second
great stream of modern discovery can thus be traced to the generous Henry of Camoëns’ Lusiads no
less plainly, though more indirectly, than the first; the Western path was
suggested by his success in the Eastern.
But that
success had turned the heads of his own people. When Columbus, the son of the
Genoese wool-comber, who had been a resident in Lisbon since 1470, submitted to
the Court of John II some time before 1484 a proposal
to find Marco Polo’s Cipangu by a few weeks' sail
west, from the Azores, he was treated as a dreamer. John, as Henry's disciple
and successor, was, like other disciples, narrower than his master in the
master's own way.
He was ready
for any expense and trouble, but no novelty. He would only go on as he had been
taught. He had reason to be confident, and his scientific Junto of four, Martin Behaim of Nuremburg among them, to whom Columbus was
referred, were too much elated with their new improvements in the astrolabe,
and the now assured confidence that the Southern Cape would soon be passed.
They could not endure with patience the vehement dogmatism of an unknown
theorist.
But as he was
too full of his message to be easily shaken off, he was treated with the basest
trickery. At the suggestion of the Bishop of Ceuta, Columbus was kept waiting
for his answer, and asked to furnish his plans in detail with charts and
illustrations. He did so, and while the Council pretended to be poring over
these for a final decision, a caravel was sent to the Cape Verde islands to try
the route he had suggested,—a trial with the pickings of Italian brains.
The Portuguese
sailed westward for several days till the weather became stormy; then, as their
heart was not in the venture, they put back to Europe with a fresh stock of the
legends Henry had so heartily despised. They had come to an impenetrable mist,
which had stopped their progress; apparitions had warned them back; the sea in
those parts swarmed with monsters; it became impossible to breathe.
Columbus
learned how he had been used, and his wife's death helped to decide him, in his
disgust for place and people. Towards the end of 1484, he left Lisbon. Three
years later, when he had become fully as much disgusted with the dilatory sloth
and tricks of Spain, he offered himself again to Portugal. King John had
repented of his meanness; on March 20, 1488, he wrote in answer to Columbus,
eagerly offering on his side to guarantee him against any suits that might be
taken against him in Lisbon. But the Court of Castille now became, in its turn,
afraid of quite losing what might be infinite advantage; Columbus was kept in
the service of Ferdinand and Isabella; and at last in August, 1492, the
"Catholic Kings" sent him out from Palos to discover what he could on
his own terms.
What followed, the discovery of America, and all the subsequent ventures of the Cabots, of Amerigo Vespucci, of Cortés and Pizarro, De Soto and Raleigh and the Pilgrim Fathers, are not often connected in any way with the slow and painful beginnings of European expansion in the Portugal of the fifteenth century, but it is a true and real connection all the same. The whole onward and outward movement of the great exploring age was set in motion by one man. It might have come to pass without him, but the fact is simply that through him it did, as a matter of history, result. “And let him that did more than this, go before him”.
THE END
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