IIIPRINCE HENRY THE NAVIGATOR
(1394-1460)
Ca trabalho seria de se achar antre os vivos seu semelhante.—Gomez Eannez de Azurara,Cronica de Guiné.Mestre insigne de toda a arte militar.—D. Francisco Manoel de Mello.O homem a quem a Europa deve mais.—José Agostinho de Macedo,Motim Literario.
Ca trabalho seria de se achar antre os vivos seu semelhante.—Gomez Eannez de Azurara,Cronica de Guiné.
Mestre insigne de toda a arte militar.—D. Francisco Manoel de Mello.
O homem a quem a Europa deve mais.—José Agostinho de Macedo,Motim Literario.
For some years before his death, Nun’ Alvarez might well rest satisfied with the prosperity which largely by his own exertions had fallen upon his country. Nor was it a careless or degenerate prosperity. The five noble sons of King João I and his English wife, Queen Philippa, daughter of “time-honoured Lancaster,” had grown to manhood, and the time was pregnant with great deeds. If Duarte was perhaps Nun’ Alvarez’ favourite among the princes, he certainly must have discernedin his younger brother his own successor in guiding the destinies of Portugal. Although possibly less chivalrous than Nun’ Alvarez, Prince Henry possessed his strong will and intensity of purpose, with a wider range of vision. A Portuguese writer represents him living in retirement at Sagres, his eyes fixed exclusively on Heaven; but Prince Henry believed that he could best serve Heaven by bringing to success the earthly affairs on which he had set his heart.
It was certainly with the keenness which marked the young Nun’ Alvarez that Henrique, then twenty-one, embarked with his father, King João I, and his brothers, Duarte and Pedro, in the expedition against Ceuta in 1415. He had his father’s promise that he should be the first to land, and in the storming of the town he was ever in the thickest of the fighting. The Moors defended the town obstinately, and a fresh danger arose when the victorious Portuguese dispersed to plunder. Henry, with a little band of seventeen followers,saved the situation against such odds that news was at first brought to the King that his son was dead. For his gallant behaviour on that day he was made Duke of Vizeu and Lord of Covilhã, while his brother Pedro became Duke of Coimbra.
But Henry returned from North-West Africa with perhaps a still greater prize—increased knowledge of the Dark Continent and a fixed determination to explore further a land which he now knew to be no mere sandy and unfertile desert. To this work he devoted the next forty-five years, without a shadow of turning, since political events might hamper but could not weaken his purpose, merely delaying the promised end.
It is often asked what was his object, as though the wish to win fresh knowledge, to acquire new territory for his country, and glory and riches, and to extend the Christian faith were unaccountable or unworthy aims. Rather we cannot wonder that the discoveries became the absorbing passion of his life, so that he has beenblamed for his lukewarm intervention in contemporary politics and his weak defence of his brother, the Duke of Coimbra.
On the discoveries as Grand Master of the Order of Christ he spent its princely revenues, and in 1418, retiring from the Court, he settled on the Sacred Cape, or Sagres, now Cape St. Vincent. His palace and observatory soon drew a village round it, known as Terça Naval, or the Villa do Infante (Princestown). Here, as Governor of Algarve, he spent the greater part of his life, fitting out ships in Lagos harbour, welcoming travellers, poring over maps brought to him by Prince Pedro and others from their travels, observing the heavens, and watching for the return of his ships.
His keenness was not inconsistent with a certain shyness and reserve. He was a student prince, but less literary and more scientific than his brothers. All day, and often far into the night, he would be at work, an energetic hermit such as the Middle Ages had not known. His eyes in the intensity and even fierceness of theirglance repelled the timid, but they also had the far-away look as of one watching and dreaming, while his firm lips and jaws were those of one planning and willing. His iron will and self-discipline curbed his equally strong temper and impatient eagerness, so that when most moved to anger he would merely say, like an Irishman, “I leave you to God.”
Courageous and persistent, he prepared all his schemes with the utmost thoroughness, and all the help that science could afford, and he carried them out with unfaltering resolution. All through his life he acted up to his French motto,Talent de bien faire, which we may translate by the “love of useful glory” to which, according to the poet Thomson, he roused mankind. And if we do not sit cowering before the unknown on all sides it is to Prince Henry and a few men of similarly keen intellect and stout will that we owe it.
It must not be thought that he met with no opposition, apart from the great difficulties that naturally beset all discoverersand innovators. On the one hand, the perils of navigating down the coast of Africa were considered insurmountable, and, on the other, the gains to be derived from it were held to be nugatory. It was not till the first slaves and the first gold arrived that men began to realise thoroughly that Prince Henry was something more than an empty dreamer. No one with less faith, a faith based both on religion and science, would have persevered, as Prince Henry persevered, in face of the slight support at first given by public opinion and the slight success obtained. But, although there were many disappointments and progress was slow, the mysteries of the African coast did gradually recede before his persistency, as year after year he sent out ships with definite instructions based on his maps and scientific knowledge.
The death of King João I in 1433 did not seriously interfere with his plans; his brother Duarte gave him every possible support, and the expedition against Tangier in 1437 was not an interruption but ratherone aspect of his life-work. Indeed, he was the leading spirit of the enterprise. He and his younger brother, Fernando, obtained from King Duarte the consent for which they had ceased to hope from their father; but Duarte at first, and Pedro throughout, were opposed to the expedition. It set out in August, and the little army of some six thousand men disembarked at Ceuta, and, without waiting for the ships to return to Portugal for reinforcements, marched to attack Tangier.
Failing to take the place by storm, the princes settled down to blockade it. The danger of such a course was obvious, but even when the Moors, who trooped down from the hinterland, outnumbered the Christian force by twenty to one they were driven back in a series of magnificent attacks. But the Moorish host continued to grow by scores of thousands daily, and in the second week of October it became apparent even to the fiery heart of Prince Henry that he was embarked on a hopeless enterprise.
The siege was raised and the small army attempted to regain their ships. Henry with the cavalry protected their retreat. But the cowardice of some, the treachery of others, and the overwhelming number of the enemy proved too much for his splendid defence, and on October 15 he was forced to come to an agreement with the enemy. By this capitulation the Portuguese were to be allowed to re-embark without their arms, Ceuta, their twenty-two years’ possession, was to be given up, and Prince Fernando, with certain other hostages, was to remain in the hands of the enemy until the Portuguese should have evacuated the town.
Prince Henry, in his despair, fell ill at Ceuta and afterwards retired to Sagres. He would not give up Ceuta, and he could not save Fernando otherwise. King Duarte, confronted by the same cruel alternative, succumbed to grief and illness at Thomar in the following year.
To Henry’s sorrow for the death of one brother and the living death of another—thetortures of Fernando’s captivity ended in a miserable dungeon in 1443—was added the crushing of his hopes and projects. For the new King was but a boy, and it needed no peculiar foresight to prophesy impending trouble in Portugal. It required all Prince Henry’s fortitude and faith to persevere, in loneliness and remorse. Prince Pedro had strongly opposed the expedition: it was on Henry that its failure rested. Nor was he one to wish to shirk responsibility, and many an hour he must have spent brooding over the fatal effects of his rashness.
Henry is too great a man to need to have his mistakes glossed over. He had underestimated the difficulty of the enterprise, he had been rash in advancing from Ceuta without awaiting reinforcements, he had been rasher in not retiring after the first unsuccessful attempt to scale the walls of Tangier. His object certainly had been a noble one, based on no personal greed or ambition, and the results of his failure were felt by none more than by himself.In the eyes of others his magnificent courage and steadfast retreat placed him even higher than before.
Fortunately for him, there was plenty of work ready to his hand, for, although he did not personally accompany the ships of exploration, he scientifically worked out their instructions, equipped them, and followed their progress on his maps. Perhaps a certain estrangement between Pedro and Henry was natural after 1437; Henry, at least, did not very actively support his brother in his quarrel with the Queen-Regent, and failed to stand by him later when he had resigned his Regency and was venomously attacked and slandered by his enemies before his weak son-in-law, King Affonso V. When the matter came to open conflict Pedro, with his small band of followers, could not hope for victory, and again Henry did not resolutely intervene. Pedro’s tragic death at Alfarrobeira in 1449 cannot have diminished Henry’s remorse for the death of Duarte and Fernando eleven and six years earlier.
Meanwhile, his austere devotion to the work of discovery bore increasing fruit, and before he died the rich islands of the Azores, Madeira, the Canaries, and Cape Verde were discovered, and the coast of Africa explored as far as Sierra Leone, which was reached by the famous Venetian, Luigi Cadamosto, in the service of Prince Henry, nearly a quarter of a century after Gil Eannez had rounded Cape Bojador in 1434. The Infante himself had lost little of his energy, and although nearly sixty-five, accompanied his nephew Affonso V in the expedition against Morocco in 1558, and took a prominent part in the siege and capture of Alcacer.
The last two years of his life were spent at Sagres. In September 1460 he disposed of certain of his revenues, potential rather than actual, to the Order of Christ and to the State, which had hitherto recognised his right to receive the profits of the discoveries as it had allowed him to bear its burden. The burden to the day of his death was far greater than the profits.Yet he must have realised that his life’s purpose was attained, and that the rest was but a matter of time, as surely as though he had planted an orange-tree and died when it was covered with blossom. His body was taken to Batalha, and, if it was not to remain on Cape St. Vincent looking southwards over the sea to Africa, no worthier resting-place could be found for it than the splendid church built to commemorate the victory of his father and of his friend Nun’ Alvarez. Prince Henry spent himself, his time, and his revenues without stint in the service of a great idea and a high ambition. Nun’ Alvarez had worked for the independence of Portugal; Prince Henry left it well on the road to an imperishable glory.
A generation later, when the full effects of his life’s work were manifest, his countrymen and the world recognised in this strong, tenacious ascetic, with his burning zeal for God and country, his fearlessness and unwavering devotion, the inspirer and origin of Portugal’s new greatness.