MARITIME EXPLORATION.
CIRCA 1250-1410.
Italian, Catalan, French, and English sailors were the forerunners of
the Portuguese in the fourteenth century, and the latter years of the
thirteenth. And as in land travel, so in maritime, the republics of
Italy, Amalphi, Pisa, Venice, and Genoa, were the leaders and examples
of Europe. Just as the Italian Dante is the first great name in the new
literatures of the West, so the Italian Dorias and Vivaldi and Malocelli
are the first to take up again the old Greek and Phoenician enterprise
in the ocean. Since Hanno of Carthage and Pharaoh Necho's Tyrians, there
had been nothing in the nature of a serious trial to find a way round
Africa, and even the knowledge of the Western or Fortunate Islands, so
clear to Ptolemy and Strabo, had become dim. The Vikings and their
crusader-followers had done nothing south of Gibraltar Straits.
[Illustration: THE S.W., OR AFRICAN SECTION OF THE HEREFORD MAP. C.
1275-1300. (SEE LIST OF MAPS)]
But while the Crusades were still dragging along a weary and hopeless
warfare under St. Louis of France and Prince Edward of England,
discovery began again in the Atlantic. In 1270 Lancelot Malocello found
the Canaries; in 1281 or 1291 the Genoese galleys of Tedisio Doria and
the Vivaldi, trying to "go by sea to the ports of India to trade there,"
reached Gozora or Cape Non in Barbary, the southern Ultima Thule, and
according to a later story "sailed the Sea of Ghinoia (Guinea) to a city
of Æthiopia," where even legend lost sight of them, for in 1312 nothing
more had been heard. From the frequent and emphatic references to this
attempt in the literature of the later Middle Ages, it is clear that the
daring Genoese drew upon themselves the attention of the learned and
mercantile worlds, as much as one would naturally expect. For these men
are the pioneers of Christian explorations in the southern world--the
precursors of all the ocean voyages that led to the discoveries of
Prince Henry, Da Gama, Columbus, and Magellan,--the first who directly
challenged the disheartening theories of geographers, such as Ptolemy,
the inaction and traditionalism of the Arabs, and the elaborate
falsities of story tellers, who, in the absence of real knowledge, had a
grand opening for terrible fairy tales.
The first age, if so it may be called, of South Atlantic and African
voyages was purely Italian; the second was chiefly marked by the efforts
of the Spanish States to equip fleets and send out explorers under
Genoese captains. In 1317 the Genoese Emmanuel Pessanha became Admiral
of Portugal; in 1341 three ships manned by Portuguese and "other
Spaniards" with some Italians put out from Lisbon in search of
Malocello's "Rediscovered" islands, granted by the Pope to Don Luis of
Spain in a Bull of November 15, 1334, and now described, from the
original letters of Florentine merchants and partners in the venture of
1341, by Boccaccio. "Land was found on the fifth day after leaving the
Tagus" (July 1); the fleet stayed till November, and then brought back
four natives and products of the islands. The chief pilot thought these
were near nine hundred miles from Seville, and we may fully suppose that
the archipelago of thirteen, now first explored and described,
represents the Fortunate Islands of Greek geography, the Canaries of
modern maps, and that the five chief islands with their naked but not
quite savage people, with excellent wood houses, and flocks of goats,
palms, and figs, gardens and corn patches, rocky mountains and pine
forests, were our Ferro, Palma, Gomera, Grand Canary, and Teneriffe. The
last they took to be thirty thousand feet high, with its white scarped
sides looking like a fortress, but terrified at signs of enchantment
they did not dare to land, and returned to Spain, leaving the Islands of
the Rediscovered to be visited as a convenient slave depot by merchants
and pirates from the Peninsula till the Norman Conquest of Béthencourt
in 1402.
The voyage of 1341 gained much by attempting little; the Catalan voyage
of 1346, which followed close upon it, was something of a return to the
wilder and larger schemes of the first Genoese. On August 10, 1346,
Jayme Ferrer left Majorca "to go to the River of Gold," but of the said
galley, says the Catalan map of 1375, no news has since been heard. On
the same map, however, the explorers' boat is sketched off the "Cape
Finisterre of west Africa," and there is, after all, some ground for
supposing this to be nothing more than a mercantile venture to the Gold
Coast of Guinea, which was becoming known to the traders of Nismes,
Marseilles, and the Christian Mediterranean by the caravan traffic
across the Sahara. Even Prince Henry began in the same way; Guinea was
his half-way house for India.
About the same date (_c._ 1350) as the Catalan voyage is the Book of the
Spanish Friar, "of the voyage south to the River of Gold," which gives a
more than half fabulous story of travel, first by sea beyond Capes Non
and Bojador, then by land across the heart of Africa to the Mountains of
the Moon, the city of Melli, where dwelt Prester John, and "the
Euphrates, which comes from the terrestrial Paradise," where behind some
real notes of Barbary coasting, perhaps gained from the Catalans of
1346, there is little but a confused transcript of Edrisi's geography.
Yet this was one of the books which helped to fix the notion of a double
Nile, Northern and Western, a Nile of Egypt and a Nile of the Blacks,
with a common source in the Mountains of the Moon, upon the Christian
science of the time, as the Arab geographers had fixed it upon Islam.
The next piece of Atlantic exploration was a romantic accident. In the
reign of Edward III., an Englishman named Robert Machin eloped with Anne
d'Arfet from Bristol (_c._ 1370), was driven from the coast of France by
a north-east wind, and after thirteen days sighted an island, Madeira,
where he landed. His ship was swept away by the storm, his mistress died
of terror and exhaustion, and five days after Machin was laid beside her
by his men, who had saved the ship's boat and now ran her upon the
African coast. They were enslaved, like other Christian captives of the
Barbary corsairs, but in 1416 a fellow-prisoner, one Morales of Seville,
an old pilot, was ransomed with others and sent back to Spain. On his
way Morales was captured by a Portuguese captain, Zarco, the servant of
Prince Henry, the rediscoverer of Madeira, and through this the full
story of Machin and his island, came to be known in the court of the
Navigator Prince, who promptly made his gain of the new knowledge a
lasting one, by the voyage of Zarco in 1420.
Last among the immediate predecessors of Prince Henry's seamen come the
French. In the seventeenth century it was claimed, on newly found
evidence, that between 1364 and 1410 the men of Dieppe and Rouen opened
a regular trade in gold, ivory, and malaguette pepper with the coast of
Guinea, and built stations at Petit Paris, Petit Dieppe, and La Mine,
which they named from the precious metal found there. But all this is
more than doubtful, and the genuine Norman voyage of De Béthencourt in
1402 shows us nothing but the Canaries and the north-west coast of
Morocco. Cape Non, or Cape Bojador, was still the European Furthest on
the African coast.
The French Seigneur was stirred up to attack the Fortunate Islands by
two events. First in 1382 one Lopez, a captain of Seville sailing to
Gallicia, was driven by a tempest to Grand Canary, and lived among the
natives seven years till he and his men were denounced for writing home
and inviting rescue. To stop this intrigue they, the "thirteen Christian
brothers" whose testament reached Béthencourt twelve years later, were
all massacred. News of this and of the voyage of a Spaniard named
Becarra to the same islands at the same time, reached Rochelle about
1400, and found several French adventurers ready for a trial. The chief
of these, Jean de Béthencourt, Lord of Grainville, and Gadifer de la
Salle, a needy knight, started in July, 1402, to conquer in the sea a
new kingdom for themselves. Though the leaders quarrelled and Grand
Canary beat off all attacks, the enterprise was successful in the main,
and several of the islands became Christian colonies,--a first step
towards the colonial empires of the great European expansion, as the
record of Béthencourt's chaplains is the first chapter of modern
colonial history.
But nothing is clearer in this tract than its limitations. The French
colonists as late as 1425 seem to know nothing of the African coast
beyond Cape Bojador; they look upon the Canaries rather as an extension
of Spain and of Europe than as the beginning of a new world. They are
anxious to get to the River of Gold and traffic there, but they do not
know the way, save by report. De Béthencourt had been to Bojador
himself, and "if things in that country are such as they are described
in the Book of the Spanish Friar," he meant to open a way to the River
of Gold, for, the Friar says, "it is only one hundred and fifty leagues
from Cape Bojador, and the map proves the same--which is only a three
days' voyage for sailing boats--whereby access would be gained to the
land of Prester John, whence come so many riches." But as yet our
Normans are only "eager to know the state of the neighbouring countries,
both islands and _terra firma_:" they do not know the coast beyond the
"Utmost Cape" of Bojador, which had taken the place of the first Arab
Finisterre, Cape Non,[28] Nun, or Nam, as the limit of navigation.
[Footnote 28: Cape Non = Fish Cape. But Latini took it as = Not, "from
the fact that beyond it there is _no_ return 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).]
We are now at the very time of Prince Henry himself; his first voyage
was in 1412. De Béthencourt died in 1425, and it is quite needless to
follow out at length the stories, however interesting, of sporadic
navigation in other parts of the European Seas. Between 1380-95 the
Venetian Zeni sailed in the service of Henry Sinclair, Earl of the
Orkneys, to Greenland, and brought back fisher stories, which read like
those of Central America, of its man-eating Caribs and splendid
barbarism. Somewhat earlier, about 1349, Ivar Bardsen of Norway paid one
of the last of Christian visits to the Arctic colonies of Greenland, the
legacy of the eleventh century, now sinking into ruin; but neither of
these voyages gives us any new knowledge of the Unknown which was now
being pierced, not from the North and East, but from the South and West.
Both in land travel and sea voyages we have traced the progress of
Western exploration and discovery up to its Hero, the real central
figure both in the history of Portugal and of the European expansion. A
little remains to be said on the other lines of preparation for his work
in scientific theory and national development from the Age of the
Crusades.