HENRY'S SETTLEMENT AT SAGRES AND FIRST DISCOVERIES.
1418-28.
Whatever the Prince owed to his stay at Ceuta beyond the general
suggestion and encouragement to take up a life-profession of discovery,
it was at any rate put into practice on his second and last return
(1418). From that time to the end of his life he became a recluse from
the Court life of Lisbon, though he soon gathered round himself a rival
Court, of science and seamanship.
The old "Sacred Cape" of the Romans, then called Sagres, now the "Cape
St. Vincent" of Nelson and modern maps, was his chosen home for the next
forty years, though he seems to have passed a good deal of his time in
his port of Lagos, close by.
In 1419 King John made him Governor for life of the Algarves (the
southern province of Portugal) and the new governor at once began to
rebuild and enlarge the old naval arsenal, in the neck of the Cape, into
a settlement that soon became the "Prince's Town." In Lagos, his ships
were built and manned; and there, and in Sagres itself, all the schemes
of discovery were thought out, the maps and instruments corrected, and
the accounts of past and present travellers compared by the Prince
himself. His results then passed into the instructions of his captains
and the equipment of his caravels. The Sacred Cape, which he now
colonised, was at any rate a good centre for his work of ocean voyaging.
Here, with the Atlantic washing the land on three sides, he was well on
the scene of action. There were buildings on Sagres headland as old as
the eleventh century; Greek geography had made this the starting-point
of its shorter and continental measurements for the length of the
habitable world, and the Genoese, whose policy was to buy up points of
vantage on every coast, were eager to plant a colony there, but Portugal
was not ready to become like the Byzantine Empire, a depot for Italian
commerce, and Henry had his own reasons for securing a desolate
promontory.
On this he now built himself a palace, a chapel, a study, an
observatory--the earliest in Portugal--and a village for his helpers and
attendants. "In his wish to gain a prosperous result for his efforts,
the Prince devoted great industry and thought to the matter, and at
great expense procured the aid of one Master Jacome from Majorca, a man
skilled in the art of navigation and in the making of maps and
instruments, and who was sent for, with certain of the Arab and Jewish
mathematicians, to instruct the Portuguese in that science." So at
least, says De Barros, the "Livy of Portugal." At Sagres was thus
founded anew the systematic study of applied science in Christendom; it
was better than the work of the old Greek "University" at Alexandria
with which it has been compared, because it was essentially practical.
From it "our sailors," says Pedro Nunes, "went out well taught and
provided with instruments and rules which all map-makers should know."
We would gladly know more of Henry's scientific work; a good many
legends have grown up about it, and even his foundation of the Chair of
Mathematics in the University of Lisbon or Coimbra, our best evidence of
the unrecorded work of his school, has been doubted by some modern
critics, even by the national historian, Alexander Herculano. But to
Prince Henry's study and science two great improvements on this side may
be traced: first in the art of map-making, secondly in the building of
caravels and ocean craft.
The great Venetian map of Fra Mauro of the Camaldolese convent of
Murano, finished in 1459, one year before the Navigator's death, is
evidence for the one; Cadamosto's words, as a practical seaman, of
Italian birth, in Henry's service, that the "caravels of Portugal were
the best sailing ships afloat," may be proof sufficient of the other.
On both these lines, Henry took up the results of Italians and worked
towards success with their aid. As Columbus and the Cabots and Verazzano
in later times represented the intellectual leadership of Italy to other
nations--Spain, England, and France; but had to find their career and
resources not in their own commercial republics, but at the Courts of
the new centralised kingdoms of the West, where a paternal despotism
gave the best hope of guiding any popular movement, social or religious
or political or scientific,--so in the earlier fifteenth century,
mariners like Cadamosto and De Nolli, scientific draughtsmen like Fra
Mauro and Andrea Bianco, looked from Venice and Genoa to the Court of
Sagres and to the service of Prince Henry as their proper sphere, where
they would find the encouragement and reward they sought for at home and
often sought in vain.
Henry's settlement on Cape St. Vincent was not long without results. The
voyage of his captain, John de Trasto, to the "fruitful" district of
Grand Canary in 1415 was not in any sense a discovery, as the conquest
of John de Béthencourt in 1402 had made these "Fortunate" islands
perfectly well known, but the finding of Porto Santo and Madeira in
1418-20 was a real gain. For the Machin story of the English landing in
Madeira was a close secret, which by good fortune passed into the
Prince's keeping, but not beyond, so that as far as general knowledge
went, the Portuguese were now fairly embarked upon the Sea of Darkness.
First came the sighting of the "Holy Haven" in 1418. In this year, says
Azurara, two squires of the Prince's household, named John Gonsalvez
Zarco and Tristam Vaz, eager for renown and anxious to serve their lord,
had set out to explore as far as the coast of Guinea, but they were
caught by a storm near Lagos and driven to the island of Porto Santo.
This name they gave themselves "at this very time in their joy at thus
escaping the perils of the tempest."
Zarco and Vaz returned in triumph to Sagres and reported the new-found
island to be well worth a permanent settlement. Henry, always
"generous," took up the idea with great interest and sent out Zarco and
Vaz with another of his equerries, one Bartholomew Perestrello, to
colonise, with two ships and products for a new country; corn, honey,
the sugar cane from Sicily, the Malvoisie grape from Crete, even the
rabbit from Portugal.
On his first return voyage Zarco had captured the pilot Morales of
Seville, and from him the Prince had gained certain news of the English
landing in Madeira. So it was with a definite purpose of further
discovery that his captains returned to Porto Santo in 1420, with
Morales as their guide. Now, as before, Zarco appears as chief in
command; he had won himself a name at Ceuta, and if the tradition be
true, had just brought in the first use of ship-artillery; the finding
of Porto Santo was mainly credited to him.
Sailing from Lagos in June, 1420, he had no sooner reached once again
the "Fair Haven" of his first success, than he was called to note a dark
line, like a mark of distant land, upon the south-west horizon. The
colonists he had left on his earlier visit had watched this day by day
till they had made certain of its being something more than a passing
appearance of sea or sky, and Morales was ready with his suggestion that
this was Machin's island. The fog that hung over this part of the ocean
would be natural to a thick and dank woodland like that on the island
of his old adventure.
Zarco resolved to try: After eight days' rest in Porto Santo he set
sail, and, observing that the fog grew less toward the east of the cloud
bank, made for that point and came upon a low marshy cape, which he
called St. Lawrence Head. Then, creeping round the south coast, he came
to the high lands and the forests of Madeira,--so named here and now,
either as De Barros says, "from the thick woods they found there," or,
in the form of Machico, from the first discoverer, luckless Robert
Machin. For on landing the Portuguese, guided by Morales, soon found the
wooden cross and grave of the Englishman and his mistress, and it was
there that Zarco, with no human being to dispute his title, "took
seizin" of the island in the name of King John, Prince Henry, and the
Order of Christ.
Embarking once more, he then coasted slowly round from the "River of the
Flint" to "Jackdaw Point," and the "Chamber of the Wolves," where his
men started a herd of sea-calves. So he came to the vast plain overgrown
with fennel or "Funchal," where the chief town of after days grew up. A
party sent inland to explore, reported that on every side the ocean
could be seen from the hills; and Zarco, after taking in some specimens
of the native wood and plants and birds at Funchal, put back in the last
days of August to Portugal.
He was splendidly received at Court, made a count--"Count of the Chamber
of the Wolves,"--and granted the command of the island for his own
life. A little later, the commandership was made hereditary in his
family. Tristam Vaz, the second in the Prince's commission, was rewarded
too: the northern half of Madeira was given him as a captaincy, and in
1425 Henry began to colonise in form. Zarco, as early as May, 1421, had
returned with wife and children and attendants, and begun to build the
"port of Machico," and the "city of Funchal," but this did not become a
state affair until four years more had gone by.
But from the first, the island, by its export of wood and dragon's blood
and wheat, began to reward the trouble of discovery and settlement.
Sugar and wine were brought to perfection in later years, after the
great "Seven years' fire" had burnt down the forests and enriched the
soil of Madeira. It was soon after Zarco's return to Funchal that he
first set fire to the woods behind the fennel fields of the coast, to
clear himself a way through the undergrowth into the heart of the
island; the fire blazed and smouldered till it had taken well hold of
the entire mass of timber that covered the upper country, nothing in the
feeble resources of the first settlers could stop it, and Madeira
lighted the ships of Henry on their way to the south, like a volcano,
till 1428. This was at least the common story as told in Portugal, and
it was often joined with another--of the rabbit plague, which ate up all
the green stuff of the island in the first struggling years of Zarco's
settlement, and so prevented the export of anything but timber. So much
of this was brought into Portugal that Henry's lifetime is a landmark in
the domestic architecture of Spain, and from the trade of the "Wood
Island" is derived the lofty style of building that now began to replace
the more modest fashion of the Arabs.
A charter of Henry's, dated 1430, ten years after the rediscovery of
Madeira, and reciting the names of some of the first settlers, and his
bequest of the island, or rather of its "spiritualties," to the Order of
Christ on September 18, 1460, just before his death, are the chief links
between this colony and the home country in the next generation--but in
the history of institutions there are few more curious facts than the
insistence of the Prince on a census for his little "Nation." From the
first, the family registers of the colonists were carefully kept, and
from these we see something of the wonder of men who were beginning
human life, as it were, in a new land. The first children born in
Madeira--a son and daughter of Ayres Ferreira, one of Zarco's
comrades--were christened Adam and Eve.[36]
[Footnote 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.]