FOOTNOTES:

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.

AFFONSO D' ALBUQUERQUE.

While Diaz was still tossing in the storms off the Great Cape, Covilham and his friends had startedfrom 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 inthe 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 theChronicle of the Discoverytells 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 hisLife 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'Lusiadsno 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'sCipangu 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.

MAP OF 1492.

MAP OF 1492.(see list of maps)

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."

FOOTNOTES:[1]From a water-colour.[2]From Major'sLife of Henry the Navigator.[3]From the Hakluyt Society'sSelect Letters of Columbus.[4]From the Hakluyt Society's edition ofThree Voyages of Vasco da Gama.[5]From the Hakluyt Society's edition of Albuquerque'sCommentaries.[6][Missing] (Please see theTranscriber's Note.)[7]Compare Archer and Kingsford,The Crusades, in theStories of the Nations.[8]Rejecting the old idea of an encircling ocean as the girdle or limit of the known world, and replacing it with a new fancy of unbounded continent (on all sides except the north-west)—a fancy which the vast extension of Roman Dominion under the Empire may have fostered.[9]In using the expressions "Chart," or "Map" of Strabo's description (c.a.d.20), it is not meant to imply that Strabo himself left more than a written description from which a plan was afterwards prepared: "The world according to Strabo." The same applies to Eratosthenes (c.b.c.200) and all pre-Ptolemaic Greek geographers. Ptolemy's Atlas, probably, and the Peutinger Table, more certainly, are maps really drawn by ancient designers; but these are the only ones that have survived from a much larger number.[10]In which the habitable quarter of the world, situated mainly in the Northern Hemisphere, was just about twice as long as it was broad.[11]In Columbus' letters to Queen Isabella in 1498, we catch, as it were, the last echo of the Arabicmélangeof Moses and Greek geography, along with the results of Roger Bacon's corrections of Ptolemy. "The Old Hemisphere," he writes "which has for its centre the isle of Arim, is spherical, but the other (new) Hemisphere has the form of the lower half of a pear. Just one hundred leagues west of the Azores the earth rises at the Equator and the temperature grows keener. The summit is over against the mouth of the Orinoco."[12]"The Obliquity of the Ecliptic, the Eccentricity of the Sun, the Precession of the Equinoxes."[13]"With the Sinbad story is connected the historical extension of the Arab settlements in the East African coast through the enterprise of the Emosaid family."[14]The school of Persian mathematicians who produced the maps of Alestakliry-Ibn-Hankal, the book of latitudes and longitudes, ascribed by Abulfeda to Alfaraby the Turk, was the immediate descendant of Albyrouny.[15]The world he divided by climates in the Greek manner, taking no account of political divisions, or of those resting on language or religion. Each climate was further subdivided into ten sections. In the shape of Africa he followed Ptolemy.[16]Yacout "the ruby," originally a Greek slave, who made a brave but fruitless attempt to change his name into Yacoub or Jacob, became one of the greatest of Arab encyclopædists, was checked by the hordes of Genghiz-Khan in his exploration of Central Asia, and died 1229.[17]By some supposed to be S. Carolina, by others the Canaries.[18]From St. James of Compostella.[19]Unless White Man's Land and Great Ireland are the Canaries. See above, p. 63.[20]Camoëns,Lusiads, (Barton's trans.).[21]And a certain number of Viking sailors seem to have preceded Ohthere on his voyage to the Dwina.[22]As completed abouta.d.1000-1040.[23]As in 1071, when they crushed Romans and the Byzantines in the battle of Manzikert.[24]"Tartari fecerunt equos nostros trotare."[25]In Xanadu did Kublai KhanA stately pleasure-dome decree,Where Alph, the sacred river, ran,Through caverns measureless to man,Down to a sacred sea.Coleridge:Kublai Khan.[26]Probably the Andamans.[27]This new knowledge had been really gained from the gradual spread of the Arab settlements down the south-east coast of Africa, during four centuries, from Guardafui, the Cape of spices, to the Channel of Mozambique.[28]Cape Non = Fish Cape. But Latini took it as = Not, "from the fact that beyond it there isnoreturn possible." And so the rhyme "Who pass Cape Non—Must turn again,or else begone" (lit. "or not,"i.e., will not be able to return).[29]Of1306, 1351, 1367, 1375, 1380, 1436, 1448, 1459.[30]See Note 1, page 137.[31]W.H. Lecky,Rationalism.[32]See Note 2, page 137.[33]Except the draughtsmen of the Portolani.[34]City of "Seven" Hills, as some have derived it.[35]The attempts of Henry and his family to conquer a land-empire in northern Africa are not to be separated from the maritime and coasting explorations. They were two aspects of one idea, two faces of the same enterprise.In the same way the new bishopric of Ceuta, now founded, was a first step towards the organised conversion of the Heathen of the South. The Franciscans had founded the See of Fez and Morocco in 1233, but it had not till now been followed up.[36]In 1418 and 1424-5 Henry purchased and tried to secure certain rights of possession in the Canaries, conceded by De Béthencourt; and these attempts were repeated in 1445 and 1446.[37]Camoëns'Lusiads, iv., 52.[38]The date of this voyage is brought down as late as 1447 by Santarem Oliveiro Martins.

[1]From a water-colour.

[2]From Major'sLife of Henry the Navigator.

[3]From the Hakluyt Society'sSelect Letters of Columbus.

[4]From the Hakluyt Society's edition ofThree Voyages of Vasco da Gama.

[5]From the Hakluyt Society's edition of Albuquerque'sCommentaries.

[6][Missing] (Please see theTranscriber's Note.)

[7]Compare Archer and Kingsford,The Crusades, in theStories of the Nations.

[8]Rejecting the old idea of an encircling ocean as the girdle or limit of the known world, and replacing it with a new fancy of unbounded continent (on all sides except the north-west)—a fancy which the vast extension of Roman Dominion under the Empire may have fostered.

[9]In using the expressions "Chart," or "Map" of Strabo's description (c.a.d.20), it is not meant to imply that Strabo himself left more than a written description from which a plan was afterwards prepared: "The world according to Strabo." The same applies to Eratosthenes (c.b.c.200) and all pre-Ptolemaic Greek geographers. Ptolemy's Atlas, probably, and the Peutinger Table, more certainly, are maps really drawn by ancient designers; but these are the only ones that have survived from a much larger number.

[10]In which the habitable quarter of the world, situated mainly in the Northern Hemisphere, was just about twice as long as it was broad.

[11]In Columbus' letters to Queen Isabella in 1498, we catch, as it were, the last echo of the Arabicmélangeof Moses and Greek geography, along with the results of Roger Bacon's corrections of Ptolemy. "The Old Hemisphere," he writes "which has for its centre the isle of Arim, is spherical, but the other (new) Hemisphere has the form of the lower half of a pear. Just one hundred leagues west of the Azores the earth rises at the Equator and the temperature grows keener. The summit is over against the mouth of the Orinoco."

[12]"The Obliquity of the Ecliptic, the Eccentricity of the Sun, the Precession of the Equinoxes."

[13]"With the Sinbad story is connected the historical extension of the Arab settlements in the East African coast through the enterprise of the Emosaid family."

[14]The school of Persian mathematicians who produced the maps of Alestakliry-Ibn-Hankal, the book of latitudes and longitudes, ascribed by Abulfeda to Alfaraby the Turk, was the immediate descendant of Albyrouny.

[15]The world he divided by climates in the Greek manner, taking no account of political divisions, or of those resting on language or religion. Each climate was further subdivided into ten sections. In the shape of Africa he followed Ptolemy.

[16]Yacout "the ruby," originally a Greek slave, who made a brave but fruitless attempt to change his name into Yacoub or Jacob, became one of the greatest of Arab encyclopædists, was checked by the hordes of Genghiz-Khan in his exploration of Central Asia, and died 1229.

[17]By some supposed to be S. Carolina, by others the Canaries.

[18]From St. James of Compostella.

[19]Unless White Man's Land and Great Ireland are the Canaries. See above, p. 63.

[20]Camoëns,Lusiads, (Barton's trans.).

[21]And a certain number of Viking sailors seem to have preceded Ohthere on his voyage to the Dwina.

[22]As completed abouta.d.1000-1040.

[23]As in 1071, when they crushed Romans and the Byzantines in the battle of Manzikert.

[24]"Tartari fecerunt equos nostros trotare."

[25]In Xanadu did Kublai KhanA stately pleasure-dome decree,Where Alph, the sacred river, ran,Through caverns measureless to man,Down to a sacred sea.Coleridge:Kublai Khan.

[25]

In Xanadu did Kublai KhanA stately pleasure-dome decree,Where Alph, the sacred river, ran,Through caverns measureless to man,Down to a sacred sea.

Coleridge:Kublai Khan.

[26]Probably the Andamans.

[27]This new knowledge had been really gained from the gradual spread of the Arab settlements down the south-east coast of Africa, during four centuries, from Guardafui, the Cape of spices, to the Channel of Mozambique.

[28]Cape Non = Fish Cape. But Latini took it as = Not, "from the fact that beyond it there isnoreturn possible." And so the rhyme "Who pass Cape Non—Must turn again,or else begone" (lit. "or not,"i.e., will not be able to return).

[29]Of1306, 1351, 1367, 1375, 1380, 1436, 1448, 1459.

[30]See Note 1, page 137.

[31]W.H. Lecky,Rationalism.

[32]See Note 2, page 137.

[33]Except the draughtsmen of the Portolani.

[34]City of "Seven" Hills, as some have derived it.

[35]The attempts of Henry and his family to conquer a land-empire in northern Africa are not to be separated from the maritime and coasting explorations. They were two aspects of one idea, two faces of the same enterprise.In the same way the new bishopric of Ceuta, now founded, was a first step towards the organised conversion of the Heathen of the South. The Franciscans had founded the See of Fez and Morocco in 1233, but it had not till now been followed up.

In the same way the new bishopric of Ceuta, now founded, was a first step towards the organised conversion of the Heathen of the South. The Franciscans had founded the See of Fez and Morocco in 1233, but it had not till now been followed up.

[36]In 1418 and 1424-5 Henry purchased and tried to secure certain rights of possession in the Canaries, conceded by De Béthencourt; and these attempts were repeated in 1445 and 1446.

[37]Camoëns'Lusiads, iv., 52.

[38]The date of this voyage is brought down as late as 1447 by Santarem Oliveiro Martins.

decorative illustration

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