CAPE BOJADOR AND THE AZORES.
1428-1441.
But in spite of Zarco's success, Cape Bojador had not yet been passed,
though every year, from 1418, caravels had left Sagres, "to find the
coasts of Guinea."
In 1428, Don Pedro, Henry's elder brother, had come home from his
travels, with all the books and charts he had collected to help the
explorers--and it is practically certain that the Mappa Mundi given him
in Venice acted as a direct suggestion to the next attempts on west and
south--westward to the Azores, southward towards Guinea.
Kept in the royal monastery of Alçobaça till late in the sixteenth
century, though now irrecoverably lost, this treasure of Don Pedro's,
like his "manuscripts of travel," would seem to have been used at the
Sagres school till Prince Henry's death, and at least as early as 1431
its effect was seen in the first Portuguese recovery of the Azores. All
the West African islands, plainly enough described in the map of 1428,
were half within, half without the knowledge of Christendom, ever and
anon being brought back or rediscovered by some accident or enterprise,
and then being lost to sight and memory through the want of systematic
exploration. This was exactly what the Portuguese supplied. The Azores,
marked on the Laurentian Portulano of 1351, were practically unknown to
seamen when, after eighty years had passed, Gonzalo Cabral was sent out
from Sagres to find them (1431). He reached the Formiga group--the Ant
islands,--and next year (1432) returned to make further discoveries,
chiefly of the island Santa Maria. But the more important advances on
this side were made between 1444-50, after the first colony had been
planted twelve or fourteen years, and were the result of the Prince's
theoretical correction of his captains' practical oversight. From a
comparison of old maps and descriptions with their accounts, he was able
to correct their line of sail and so to direct them to the very islands
they had searched for in vain.
But as yet these results were far distant, and the slow and sure
progress of African coasting towards Cape Bojador was the chief outcome
of Pedro's help. In 1430, 1431, and 1432, the Infant urged upon his
captains the paramount importance of rounding the Cape, which had
baffled all his caravels by its strong ocean currents and dangerous
rocks. At last this became the Prince's one command: Pass the Cape if
you do nothing beyond; yet the years went by, King John of good memory
died in 1433, and Gil Eannes, sent out in the same year with strong
hopes of success, turned aside at the Canaries and only brought a few
slaves back to Portugal. A large party at Court, in the Army, and among
the nobles and merchant classes, complained bitterly of the utter want
of profit from Henry's schemes, and there was at this time a danger of
the collapse of his movement. For though as yet he paid his own
expenses, his treasury could not long have stood the drain without any
incoming.
Bojador, the "paunch" or "bulging Cape," 180 miles beyond Cape Non, had
been, since the days of the Laurentian Portulano (1351), and the Catalan
and Portuguese voyages of 1341 and 1346, the southmost point of
Christian knowledge. A long circuit was needed here, as at the Cape of
Good Hope, to round a promontory that stretched, men said, fully one
hundred miles into the ocean, where tides and shoals formed a current
twenty miles across. It was the sight or the fancy of this furious surge
which frightened Henry's crews, for it plainly forbade all coasting and
compelled the seamen to strike into the open sea out of sight of land.
And though the discovery of Porto Santo had proved the feasibility and
the gain of venturing boldly into the Sea of Darkness, and though since
that time (1418) the Prince had sent out his captains due west to the
Azores and south-west to Madeira, both hundreds of miles from the
continent, yet in rounding Bojador there were not only the real terrors
of the Atlantic, but the legends of the tropics to frighten back the
boldest.
Most mariners had heard it said that any Christian who passed Bojador
would infallibly be changed into a black, and would carry to his end
this mark of God's vengeance on his insolent prying. The Arab tradition
of the Green Sea of Night had too strongly taken hold of Christian
thought to be easily shaken off. And it was beyond the Cape which
bounded their knowledge that the Saracen geographers had fringed the
coast of Africa with sea-monsters and serpent rocks and water unicorns,
instead of place names, and had drawn the horrible giant hand of Satan
raised above the waves to seize the first of his human prey that would
venture into his den. If God made the firm earth, the Devil made the
unknown and treacherous ocean--this was the real lesson of most of the
mediæval maps, and it was this ingrained superstition that Henry found
his worst enemy, appearing as it did sometimes even in his most trusted
and daring captains.
And then again, the legends of Tropical Africa, of the mainland beyond
Bojador, were hardly less terrible than those of the Tropical Ocean. The
Dark Continent, with its surrounding Sea of Darkness, was the home of
mystery and legend. We have seen how ready the Arabs were to write
Uninhabitable over any unknown country--dark seas and lands were simply
those that were dark to them, like the Dark Ages to others, but nowhere
did their imagination revel in genies and fairies and magicians and all
the horrors of hell, with more enthusiastic and genial interest than in
Africa. Here only the northern parts could be lived in by man. In the
south and central deserts, as we have heard from the Moslem doctors
themselves, the sun poured down sheets of liquid flame upon the ground
and kept the sea and the rivers boiling day and night with the fiery
heat. So any sailors would of course be boiled alive as soon as they got
near to the Torrid Zone.
It was this kind of learning, discredited but not forgotten, that was
still in the minds of Gil Eannes and his friends when they came home in
1433, with lame excuses, to Henry's Court. The currents and south winds
had stopped them, they said. It was impossible to get round Bojador.
The Prince was roused. He ordered the same captain to return next year
and try the Cape again. His men ought to have learned something better
than the childish fables of past time. "And if," said he, "there were
even any truth in these stories that they tell, I would not blame you,
but you come to me with the tales of four seamen who perhaps know the
voyage to the Low Countries or some other coasting route, but, except
for this, don't know how to use needle or sailing chart. Go out again
and heed them not, for by God's help, fame and profit must come from
your voyage, if you will but persevere."
The Prince was backed by the warm encouragement of the new King, Edward,
his eldest brother, who had only been one month upon the throne when he
bestirred himself to shew his favour to a national movement of
discovery. King John had died on August 14, 1433 (the anniversary of
Aljubarrota), and on September 26th, of the same year, by a charter
given from Cintra, King Edward granted the islands of Madeira and Porto
Santo, with the Desertas, to Henry as Grand Master of the Order of
Christ.
With this encouragement the Infant sent out Gil Eannes in 1434 under the
strongest charge not to return without a good account of the Cape and
the seas beyond. Running far out into the open, his caravel doubled
Bojador, and coming back to the coast found the sea "as easy to sail in
as the waters at home," and the land very rich and pleasant. They landed
and discovered no trace of men or houses, but gathered plants, "such as
were called in Portugal St. Mary's roses," to present to Don Henry. Not
even the southern Cape of Tempests or Good Hope was so long and
obstinate a barrier as Bojador had been, and the passing of this
difficulty proved the salvation of the Prince's schemes. Though again
and again interrupted by political troubles between 1437 and 1449, the
advance at sea went on, and never again was there a serious danger of
the failure of the whole movement through general opposition and
discontent.
In 1435 Gil Eannes was sent out again to follow up his success with
Affonso Baldaya, the Prince's cupbearer, in a larger vessel than had yet
been risked in exploration, called a varinel, or oared galley. The two
captains passed fifty leagues--one hundred and fifty miles--beyond the
Cape, and found traces of caravans, reached as far as an inlet they
named Gurnet Bay, from its shoals of fish, and again put back to Lagos,
early in the year.
There were still several months left for ocean sailing in 1435, and
Henry at once despatched Baldaya again in his varinel, with orders to go
as far as he could along the coast, at least till he could find some
natives. One of these he was to bring home with him. Baldaya accordingly
sailed 130 leagues--390 miles--beyond Cape Bojador, till he reached an
estuary running some twenty miles up the country and promising to lead
to a great river. This might prove to be the western Nile of the
Negroes, or the famous River of Gold, Baldaya thought, and though it
proved to be only an inlet of the sea, the name of Rio d'Ouro, then
given by the first hopes of the Portuguese, has outlasted the
disappointment that found only a sandy reach instead of a waterway to
the Mountains of the Moon and the kingdom of Prester John.
Baldaya anchored here, landed a couple of horses which the Infant had
given him to scour the country, and set "two young noble gentlemen" upon
them to ride up country, to look for signs of natives, and if possible
to bring back one captive to the ship. Taking no body-armour, but only
lance and sword, the boys followed the "river" to its source, seven
leagues up the country, and here came suddenly upon nineteen savages,
armed with assegais. They rode up to them and drove them out of the open
up to a loose mound of stones; then as evening was coming on and they
could not secure a prisoner, they rode back to the sea and reached the
ship about the dawn of day. "And of these boys," says the chronicler, "I
myself knew one, when he was a noble gentleman of good renown in arms.
His name was Hector Homen, and you will find him in our history well
proved in brave deeds. The other, named Lopez d'Almeida, was a nobleman
of good presence, as I have heard from those who knew him."
This first landing of Europeans on the coasts of unknown Africa, since
the days of Carthaginian colonies, is one of the great moments in the
story of Western expansion and discovery. For it means that Christendom
on her Western side has at last got beyond the first circle of her
enemies, the belt of settled Moslem ground, and has begun to touch the
wider world outside, on the shore of the ocean as well as along the
Eastern trade routes. And it almost seemed to be of little practical
value that Marco Polo and the friars and traders who followed him had
passed Islam in Asia, and reached even furthest Tartary, for it only
made more clear that Asia was not Christian, and that there would have
to be a deadly struggle before European influence could be restored on
this side to what it had been under Alexander; but on the west, by the
Atlantic coasts, once Morocco had been passed, there were only scattered
savage tribes to be dealt with. Baldaya had now reached the pagans
beyond Islam; the rival civilisation of the Arabs and their converts had
been almost outflanked by Don Henry's ships; and the boys who rode up
the Rio d'Ouro beach in 1435 were the first pickets of a great army.
Their charge upon a body of grown men ten times their number, was a
prophecy of the coming conquests of Christian Europe in the new worlds
it was now in search of, in south and east and west.
Now Baldaya instantly followed up his pioneers. He took a party in his
ship's boat and rode up the stream to the scene of the fight, with the
boys on horseback riding by the bank and shewing him the stone-heap
where the natives had rallied on the day before. But in the night they
had all fled farther up country, leaving most of their miserable goods
behind. All these were carried off, and the Portuguese left the Bay of
the Horses, as they called this farthest reach of the Rio d'Ouro, and
pulled back to the varinel, without any further success than a wholesome
disappointment. They must go farther southward if they were to find the
western Nile and the way round Africa.
Still Baldaya was not content. He wished to carry back a prisoner, as
Henry had charged him, and so he coasted along fifty leagues more, from
the Rio d'Ouro to the Port of Gallee, a rock that looked like a galley,
where there was a more prominent headland than he had passed since
Bojador. Here he landed once again, and found some native nets, made of
the bark of trees, but none of the natives who made them.
In the early months of 1436 he and his varinel were again in Portuguese
waters; but the land had now been touched that lay three hundred miles
beyond the old African Finisterre, and in two years (1434-6) Portugal
and all the Christian nations, through Henry's work, had entered on a
new chapter of history. The narrower world of the Roman Empire and the
Mediæval Church was already growing into the modern globe in the break
up of that old terror of the sea which had so long fixed for men the
bounds that they must not pass. The land routes had been cleared to
Western knowledge, though not mastered, by the Crusades; now the far
more dreaded and unknown water-way was fairly entered. For up to this
time there is no fair evidence that either Christian or Moorish
enterprise had ever rounded Bojador, and the theoretical marking of it
upon maps was a very different thing from the experience that it was
just like any other cape, and no more an end of the world than Cape St.
Vincent itself. Neither Genoese, nor Catalans, nor Normans of Dieppe,
nor the Arab wanderers of Edrisi and Ibn Said were before Don Henry now.
His discoveries of the Atlantic islands were findings, rediscoveries;
his coast voyages from the year 1433 are all ventures in the true
unknown.
But from 1436 to 1441, from Baldaya's second return to the start of Nuno
Tristam and Antam Gonsalvez for Cape Blanco, exploration was not
successful or energetic. The simple cause of this was the Infant's other
business. In these years took place the fatal attempt on Tangier, the
death of King Edward, and the troubles of the minority of his child,
Affonso V.--Affonso the African conqueror of later years.
True it is, we read in our _Chronicle of the Discovery of Guinea_, that
in these years there went to those parts two ships, one at a time, but
the first turned back in the face of bad weather, and the other only
went to the Rio d'Ouro for the skins and oil of sea wolves, and after
taking in a cargo of these, went back to Portugal. And true it is, too,
that in the year 1440 there were armed and sent out two caravels to go
to that same land, but in that they met with contrary fortune, we do not
tell any more of their voyage.