VOYAGES OF 1446-8.
And yet, but for the enterprise of Zarco's crew, this expedition of 1445
that began with so much promise, and on which so much time and trouble
had been spent, was almost fruitless of "novelties," of discoveries, of
the main end and object of all the Prince's voyages.
The next attempt, made by Nuno Tristam in 1446, ended in the most
disastrous finish that had yet befallen the Christian seamen of Spain.
Nuno, who had been brought up from boyhood at the Prince's court,
"seeing how earnest he was that his caravels should explore the land of
the Negroes, and knowing how some had already passed the River of Nile,
thought that if he should not do something of right good service to the
Infant in that land, he could in no wise gain the name of a brave
knight.
"So he armed a caravel and began sail, not stopping anywhere that he
might come straight to the Black Man's land. And passing by Cape Verde
he sailed on sixty leagues and found a river, where he judged there
ought to be some people living. So he bade them lower two small boats
and put ten men in the one and twelve in the other, which pulled
straight towards some huts they sighted ahead of them. But before they
could jump on shore, twelve canoes came out on the other side, and
seventy or eighty Blackmoors in them, with bows in their hands, who
began to shoot at our people." As the tide rose, one of the Guinea boats
passed them and landed its crew, "so that our men were between a fire
from the land and a fire from the boats." They pulled back as hard as
they could, but before they could get on board, four of them were lying
dead.
"And so they began to make sail home again, leaving the boats in that
they were not able to take charge of them. For of the twenty-two who
went to land in them there did not escape more than two; nineteen were
killed, for so deadly was the poison that with a tiny wound, a mere
scratch that drew blood, it could bring a man to his last end. But above
and beyond these was killed our noble knight, Nuno Tristam, earnestly
desiring life, that he might die not a shameful death like this, but as
a brave man should." Of seven who had been left in the caravel, two had
been struck by the poisoned arrows as they tried to raise the anchors,
and were long in danger of death, lying a good twenty days at the last
gasp, without the power to raise a finger to help the others who were
trying to get the caravel home, so that only five were left to work the
ship.
Nuno's men were saved by the energy and skill of one--a mere boy, a page
of the Infant's House--who took charge of the ship, and steered its
course due north, then north by east, so that in two months' time they
were off the coast of Portugal. But they were absolutely helpless and
hopeless, knowing nothing of their whereabouts, for in all those two
months they had had no glimpse of land,--so that when at last they
caught sight of an armed fusta, they were "much troubled," supposing it
to be a Moorish cruiser. When it came near and shewed itself to be a
Gallician pirate, the poor fellows were almost wild with delight, still
more when they found they were not far from Lagos. They had had a
terrible time; first they were almost poisoned by the dead bodies of
Nuno Tristam and the victims of the savages' poisoned arrows; then, when
at last they had "thrown their honour to the winds and those bodies to
the fishes," shamefaced and utterly broken in spirit, the five
wretchedly ignorant seamen, who were now left alone, drifted, with the
boundless and terrible ocean on one side, and the still more dangerous
and unknown coast of Africa on the other, for sixty days. A common
sailor, "little enough skilled in the art of sailing"; a groom of the
Prince's chamber, the young hero who saved the ship; a negro boy, who
was taken with the first captives from Guinea; and two other "little
lads small enough,"--this was the crew. As for the rest, Beati mortui
qui in Domino moriuntur, Blessed are the dead that die in the Lord,
cries the chronicler in that outburst of bewildered grief with which he
ends his story. There were widows and orphans left for the Prince to
care for, and "of these he took especial charge."
But all people were not so unlucky as Nuno Tristam. The caravel of Zarco
of Madeira, which under Zarco's nephew, Alvaro Fernandez, had already
passed beyond every other in the year of the great armada, 1445, was
sent back again on its errand "of doing service in the unknown lands of
Guinea to the Lord Don Henry," in the black year, 1446. Its noble and
valiant owner now "charged the aforesaid" Alvaro Fernandez, with the
ship well armed, to go as far as he could, and to try and make some
booty, that should be so new and so splendid that it would be a sign of
his good-will to serve the Lord who had made him. So they sailed on
straight to Cape Verde, and beyond that to the Cape of Masts (or Spindle
Palms), their farthest of the year before, but they did not turn back
here, in spite of unfriendly natives and unknown shores. Still coasting
along, they found tracks of men, and a little farther on a village,
"where the people came out as men who shewed that they meant to defend
their homes; in front of them was a champion, with a good target on his
arm and an assegai in his hand. This fellow our captain rushed upon, and
with a blow of his lance struck him dead upon the ground. Then, running
up, he seized his sword and spear, and kept them as trophies to be
offered to the Lord Infant." The negroes fled, and the conquerors turned
back to their ship and sailed on. Next day they came to a land where
they saw certain of the women of those negroes, and seized one who was
of age about thirty, with her child a baby of two, and another, a young
girl of fourteen, "the which had a good enough presence and beauty for
that country"; but the strength of the woman was so wonderful, that she
gave the three men who held her trouble enough to lift her into the
boat. And seeing how they were kept struggling on the beach, they feared
that some of the people of the country might come down upon them. So one
of them put the child into the boat, and love of it forced the mother to
go likewise, without much more pushing.
Thence they went on, pursues the story, till they came to a river, into
which they made an entrance with a boat, and carried off a woman that
they found in a house. But going up the river somewhat farther, with a
mind to make some good booty, there came out upon them four or five
canoes full of negroes, armed as men who would fight for their country,
whose encounter our men in the boat did not wish to await in face of the
advantage of the enemy, and fearing above all the great peril of
poisoned arrows. So they began to pull down stream as hard as they could
towards the caravel; but as one of the canoes distanced the others and
came up close to them, they turned upon it and in the fight one of the
negroes shot a dart, that wounded the captain, Alvaro Fernandez, in the
foot. But he, as he had been already warned of the poison, drew out the
arrow very quickly and bathed it with acid and oil, and then anointed it
well with theriack, and it pleased God that he passed safely through a
great trouble, though for some days he lay on the point of death. And so
they got back to the caravel.
But though the captain was so badly wounded, the crew did not stop in
following the coast and went on (all this was over quite new ground)
till they came to a certain sand-spit, directly in front of a great bay.
Here they launched a boat, and rowed out to see the land they had come
to, and at once there came out against them full 120 negroes, some with
bows, others with shields and assegais, and when they reached the edge
of the sea, they began to play and dance about, "like men clean wearied
of all sadness, but our men in the boat wishing to be excused from
sharing in that festival of theirs, turned and rowed back to the ship."
Now all this was a good 110 leagues,--320 miles beyond Cape Verde,
"mostly to the south of the aforesaid cape" (that is, about the place of
Sierra Leone on our maps), and this caravel remained a longer time
abroad and went farther than any other ship of that year, and but for
the sickness of the wounded captain they would not have stopped there.
But as it was they came straight back to the Bank of Arguin, "where they
met that chief Ahude Meymam, of whom we have spoken before," in the
story of Joan Fernandez. And though they had no interpreter, by whom
they might do their business, by signs they managed so that they were
able to buy a negress, in exchange for certain cloths that they had with
them. And so they came safe home. There was not much trouble now in
getting volunteers for the work of discovery, and a reward of 200
doubloons--100 from Prince Henry, 100 more from the Regent Don Pedro--to
the last bold explorers who had got fairly round Senegambia, added zest
to enterprise.
In this same year 1446-7, no fewer than nine caravels sailed to Guinea
from Portugal in another armada, on the track of Zarco's successful
crew. At Madeira they were joined by two more, and the whole fleet
sailed through the Canary island group to Cape Verde. Eight of them
passed sixty leagues, 180 miles, beyond, and found a river, the Rio
Grande, "of good size enough," up which they sailed, except one ship,
belonging to a Bishop--the Bishop of Algarve--"for that this happened to
run upon a sand-bank, in such wise, that they were not able to get her
off, though all the people on board were saved with the cargo. And while
some of them were busy in this, others landed and found the country just
deserted by its inhabitants, and going on to find them, they soon
perceived that they had found a track, which they had chanced on near
the place where they landed."
They followed this track recklessly enough, and nearly met the fate of
Nuno Tristam. "For as they went on by that road, they came to a country
with great sown fields, with plantations of cotton trees and rice plots,
in a land full of hills like loaves, after which they came to a great
wood," and as they were going into the wood, the Guineas came out upon
them in great numbers, with bows and assegais and saluted them with a
shower of poisoned arrows. The first five Europeans fell dead at once,
two others were desperately wounded, the rest escaped to the ships, and
the ships went no farther that year.
Still worse was the fate of Vallarte's venture in the early months of
1448. Vallarte was a nobleman of the Court of King Christopher of
Denmark, who had been drawn to the Court of Henry at Sagres by the
growing fame of the Prince's explorations, and who came forward with the
stock request, "Give me a caravel to go to the land of the negroes."
A little beyond Cape Verde, Vallarte went on shore with a boat's crew
and fell into the trap which had caught the exploring party of the year
before. He and his men were surrounded by negroes and were shot down or
captured to a man. But one escaped, swimming to the ship, and told how
as he looked back over his shoulder to the shore, again and again, he
saw Vallarte sitting a prisoner in the stern of the boat.
"And when the chronicle of these voyages was in writing at the end of
the self-same year, there were brought certain prisoners from Guinea to
Prince Henry, who told him that in a city of the upland, in the heart of
Africa, there were four Christian prisoners." One had died, three were
living, and in these four, men in Europe believed they had news of
Vallarte and his men.
But between the last voyage of Zarco's caravel in 1446 and the first
voyage of Cadamosto in 1455, there is no real advance in exploration.
The "third armada," as it was called, that is the fleet of the nine
caravels of 1446-7, the voyage of Gomes Pires to the Rio d'Ouro at the
same time, the trading ventures of the Marocco coast which were the
means of bringing the first lion to Portugal in 1447, the expeditions
to the Rio d'Ouro and to Arguin in the course of the same year, are not
part of the story of discovery, but of trade. There is hardly a
suspicion of exploring interest about most of them. Even Vallarte's
venture in 1448 has nothing of the novelty which so many went out to
find "for the satisfaction of the Lord Henry." Guinea voyages are
frequent, almost constant, during these years, and this frequency has at
any rate the point of making Europeans thoroughly familiar with the
coast already explored, if it did little or nothing to bring in new
knowledge.
But the value and meaning of Henry's life and work was not after all in
commerce, except in a secondary sense; and these voyages of purely
trading interest, with no design or at any rate no result of discovery,
do not belong to our subject. Each one of them has its own picturesque
beauty in the pages of the old chronicle of the Conquest of Guinea, but
measured by its importance to the general story of the expansion of
Europe, there is no lasting value in any one of the last chapters of
Azurara's voyages,--his description of the Canaries, and of the
"Inferno" of Teneriffe, "of how Madeira was peopled, and the other
islands that are in that part, of how the caravel of Alvaro Dornellas
took certain of the Canarians, of how Gomes Pires went to the Rio d'Ouro
and of the Moors that he took, of the caravel that went to Meça (in
Marocco) and of the Moors that were taken, of how Antam Gonsalvez
received the island of Lançarote in the name of the Prince."
Only the chronicler's summary of results, up to the year 1446, the year
of Nuno Tristam's failure, is of wider interest. "Till then there had
been fifty-one caravels to those parts, which had gone 450 leagues (1350
miles) beyond the Cape (Boyador). And as it was found that the coast ran
southward with many points, the Prince ordered these to be added to the
sailing chart. And here it is to be noted, that what was clearly known
before of the coast of the great sea was 200 leagues (600 miles), which
have been increased by these 450. Also what had been laid down upon the
Mappa Mundi was not true but was by guess work, but now 't is all from
the survey by the eyes of our seamen. And now seeing that in this
history we have given account sufficient of the first four reasons which
brought our noble Prince to his attempt, it is time we said something of
the accomplishment of his fifth object, the conversion of the Heathen,
by the bringing of a number of infidel souls from their lands to this,
the which by count were nine hundred and twenty-seven, of whom the
greater part were turned into the true way of salvation. And what
capture of town or city could be more glorious than this."