A Wind From the North (10 page)

The men who manned Prince Henry’s ships in these early days were not native to the sea, as their descendants became. Most of them came from a peasant background, strong stock that had survived centuries of Moorish domination, misrule, civil warfare, and the inevitable hardships of medieval peasant life. Some of them had an apprenticeship to the ocean, for coastal fishing had long played an important part in Portugal’s economy. But there is a great difference between coastal work and deep-sea sailing, and that difference was even more pointed in days when navigation and ocean seamanship were in their infancy. If ancestry means anything, however, the blood that flowed in Portuguese veins came not only from Visigoths, Suevi, and Iberians, but from two of the greatest maritime peoples in history. The Phoenicians had used the Portuguese ports on their trading runs to England and the north, and after them had come the Vikings, bound for the Mediterranean. A Viking and Phoenician ancestry should be enough to give a man “an itch in the blood,” but the most famous seaman of all was supposed to have founded Lisbon. Olisipo, Lisbon’s ancient name, was derived from its legendary founder, Ulysses.

It seems only fitting that there should be a link, however tenuous, between Ulysses and Henry the Navigator. Lord Tennyson’s poem about the Homeric hero could almost apply to Prince Henry and his navigators:

… Come, my friends,

’Tis not too late to seek a newer world.

Push off, and sitting well in order smite 

The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds 

To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths 

Of all the western stars, until I die.

If the human material with which Prince Henry had to work was relatively unacquainted with the sea, his sailors had one of the most important of all qualities—a deep inbred endurance arising from centuries of back-breaking struggle on a hard land and a harsh coastline. On this first voyage of exploration their endurance was to be tested, for within a few days of leaving harbor the two ships ran into an Atlantic gale. In the driving murk of blown nimbus cloud they lost sight of one another. While one of the ships battled with the storm, hove to or driving before it, the other was carried away to the southwest—out into the Sea of Darkness. This second ship was to make nautical history.

The days went by and Prince Henry, his attendants, and the sailors of Sagres waited to see the ships return. When dawn broke, the Prince strained his eyes over the lightening rim of the Atlantic. He saw the deep base of the midsummer clouds catch fire as the sun came up over the land behind him. He heard the hollow boom as the onshore swell piled up against the headland, and the long withdrawn sigh as the blowhole spouted water over the bleached rock. He was not always at Sagres, though, in these early days. While his new buildings were rising on the headland, he often lodged in a small house in the village of Raposeira, a few miles inland. At other times he was at Lagos, farther down the coast, supervising the construction of ships, listening to the reports of men who had returned from Ceuta, or questioning captured Arabs and prisoners from Moorish galleys.

At last, one summer morning, one of the ships came creeping back over the horizon. As soon as she had dropped anchor, her captain came ashore to report to the Prince. The news was bad. Running down toward the coast of Morocco, they had fallen foul of this gale from the northeast, and the two vessels had lost sight of one another. His own ship had been hove to for several days, and had put about as soon as the wind was fair. He had seen no more of his companion since the first day of the gale, and he thought it likely that she had been lost with all hands.

Such are the normal hazards of the sea. But Henry—after rewarding the men and paying tribute to their courage—knew that this first disaster would increase their reluctance to venture south again. And then—a few days later—the second ship was sighted, bearing up toward the bay. Even before her anchor was down, her captain’s boat was being lowered. The men at the oars were shouting the news before their captain had stepped ashore. They had discovered an island!

Running under bare poles before the gale, they had been carried more than 400 miles southwest into the Atlantic beyond Cape St. Vincent. They had given themselves up for lost. The sailors had cried out that it was all true—the sea ran downhill, and there was no return! But one morning, after the gale had died away, they had seen something ahead of them. The dawn clouds were lifting, and there on the horizon lay a small mountainous island, with the siin bright on its bare beaches. They had dropped anchor in the sandy bay, and in gratitude for their deliverance they had called it Porto Santo.

It was in this way that the smaller of the two main Madeira islands was rediscovered. It was believed at the time to be a completely new discovery, but we now know (from an Italian map of 1351) that the Genoese had come across the Madeiras some time early in the fourteenth century. Beyond recording them on their charts, however, they had done nothing about them. The Genoese were traders running between the Mediterranean and northern Europe. The Madeiras meant no more to them than a navigational hazard, or a place in which a ship might possibly take aboard water and wood. If it had not been for the presiding genius of Prince Henry, there is little doubt that this second accidental discovery would also have been dismissed—as of no importance except to mariners.

He learned from the captain and sailors that the soil was good, and that there were plants growing on the island. Among them were the juniper and the dragon tree—the latter was much valued in Europe at that time as the source of an astringent medicine. Henry questioned them more closely about the position of the island. It lay southwest of Cape St. Vincent nearly 500 miles from Portugal. There was no doubt, then, that this island had no connection with the Canaries. The fact pleased him, for the ownership of the Canaries was bedeviled by conflicting claims, Castile having the major interest. He had already approached the King of Castile and inquired whether he would be prepared—for a sum—to cede his interests to Portugal, and had been politely told to mind his own business. So the news that this island was alone in the Atlantic, and entirely uninhabited, encouraged his dreams. He saw that it would provide another base from which his ships might carry on their exploratory voyages down the coast of Africa.

The masters of the ships engaged in this first expedition were two squires attached to Henry’s court, Joao Gongalves Zarco and Tristao Vaz Teixeira. They were young men, had served at Ceuta, and were members of the poorer nobility. They were very typical of the men who would lead expeditions for Prince Henry during the next thirty years, belonging to a class that had little opportunity for advancement in the settled Portugal of King John. Such men normally found their employment and wealth in warfare, but now that there was peace with Castile, and internal peace in Portugal, there was little for them to do but return to their farms and small holdings. (Men of similar caliber were the minor squirearchy and younger sons of nobility who later served England so well in the reign of Elizabeth I.) Bearing in mind his mother’s injunction to look after the nobly born, Henry was always willing to employ men like Zarco and Teixeira in command of his ships. They were sufficiently intelligent to understand the objectives that he set them, and later—as the science of navigation developed—they were more capable of learning the uses of astrolabe, compass, and chart than fishermen sailing-masters.

With Prince Henry, to think was to act. No sooner had he visualized the potential importance of this new discovery than he sent his two captains back again. King John, who had been told the news—as well as reassured that there could be no Castilian claim to the island—also saw the strategic value to Portugal of a colony and outpost in the Atlantic. He gave his son permission to go ahead with the colonization of Porto Santo. It was in this matter of colonization that a new development began in European history. The Genoese might have been content to record the existence of the Madeira group, but it took the visionary of Sagres to see that an island with good earth could be cultivated and populated.

A third ship, under the captaincy of another minor nobleman, Bartolomew Perestrello, accompanied Zarco and Teixeira. Perestrello was later to be made governor of Porto Santo. His name will be remembered in history because a daughter of his was one day to marry a Genoese, Christopher Columbus, and Columbus for a brief period of his life would live in Porto Santo. There he would learn all that the old seafarer had known of Portuguese navigational methods and cartography. If Columbus has become one of those names with which the whole world is familiar, the fact remains that the seed of his knowledge was planted many years before by a Portuguese prince who refused to accept legends as truth, or superstition as geography.

Driving out into the Atlantic, the three small ships made their landfall successfully at Porto Santo. This time they took with them seeds and plants, and also a pregnant doe rabbit in a cage. (The introduction of rabbits many centuries later to the subcontinent of Australia was to prove a disaster that might have been foreseen if the history of Porto Santo had been better known.) On a small island where there were no predators, no other animals at all, the rabbits multiplied at an astronomical rate. For the remainder of his life Perestrello was to battle against the ever-increasing hordes, which devastated not only the native vegetation of Porto Santo but the newly planted crops as well.

The island was a little over six miles long, by three wide, and the ships did not take long to circumnavigate it. They charted its bays and coves, recorded its high peaks at either end, and sounded the small bay of Porto Santo, where they established their base. It was during this period that first one man and then another noticed the cloud. It looked rather like a fog bank lying across the sea, to the south of the island.

“That is where the vapors begin,” whispered a sailor. “We are at the outermost limits of the world.”

“That is no ordinary mist,” said another. “Beyond it lies the darkness of which we have been told. Beyond that mist begins the great rush of waters that roar at the world’s end.” The three captains in charge of the expedition also noticed the cloud. There was something curious about it, something that had perhaps evaded the sailors.

“This cloud,” they told Prince Henry on their return from the second expedition, “is strangely shaped. And it stays in the same place—always southwest of Porto Santo.”

Clouds mean islands. Clouds mean night mists rising off wooded slopes, or condensation from the ocean hovering above mountain peaks. Prince Henry knew this; so perhaps did his captains. But—whereas it was comparatively easy for him to command, “Go south! Go farther! I must know more!”—his captains had the difficult task of persuading superstitious and reluctant crews to sail into unknown regions. The sailors would have been only too pleased to be assigned to the ships engaged in harrying the Moorish coast and its merchantmen. They were familiar with the normal risks of warfare, and in warfare there was always the chance of plunder. It was the unknown that terrified them, and—as far as they could see—gave little in return except their poor food and small wages.

It was at about this time that Prince Henry may have heard the remarkable story of the Englishman Robert Machin. Among the sailors in the crew of Joao Gongalvez Zarco there was a Spaniard named Juan de Morales, who had at one time been a prisoner of the Moors. During his captivity, so he told Zarco, he had heard from some English fellow prisoners of their accidental discovery of an island in the Atlantic. It was completely uninhabited, they said, fertile, well wooded, and quite large. This description aroused Zarco’s interest—for no one could call Porto Santo fertile and well wooded, nor was it large. The Canaries, for their part, were all inhabited. This sounded like an unknown island. The English sailors told Morales that they had been serving aboard a ship out of Bristol. It had been chartered by a young man of good family, called Robert Machin, who was eloping with a married woman named Anne d’Arfet. Machin chartered the boat to take him and his mistress to Spain. Anne d’Arfet’s family was a powerful one, and the lovers could not remain together in England. Robert Machin had already been imprisoned by her parents for refusing to cease seeing her.

Not far out from the Bristol Channel, their ship had run into a heavy gale from the northeast. Day after day they had run before it, until they were carried a long way off their course—well to the west of the Bay of Biscay. Then, one morning, after thirteen days at sea, they had found themselves bearing down on a large, well-wooded island. They had anchored there and stayed for several days, making good the damage arising from the storm. Robert Machin and Anne d’Arfet had gone ashore, together with some sailors from the ship, to explore a nearby beach. The ship meanwhile cruised down the coast to make a survey. It was at this moment that another northeaster sprang up, and unable to come back for those ashore, the ship had gone on her way to Spain. Juan de Morales’s fellow prisoners were the same men who had been left behind on the island. Anne d’Arfet, they said, had died from exposure and mental distress, and had been buried at the foot of an altar, which they had erected on first landing. A few days later her lover, Robert Machin, also died, and the sailors buried him next to his mistress. Then, having embarked in the ship’s boat from which they had landed, they had been carried south by the prevailing winds. They had finally fetched up on the coast of Morocco, where they had been taken prisoner by the Arabs.

If this extraordinary story had fascinated first Morales, and then Zarco, there is no doubt what effect it must have had on Prince Henry. A large, fertile island—and uninhabited— far out in the Atlantic! Such a place would make an ideal base for his ships. His ambitions were still centered on Africa, but already he saw how even an island like Porto Santo could help his purpose.

The combination of the story of Robert Machin and Zarco’s report of the cloud on the horizon further determined Prince Henry to send his captain to investigate. It must be remembered that Henry had only the devotion of some of his followers and—to a limited extent—the support of his father in these early ventures. All the time there was a party at court that disliked and distrusted this strange recluse of a prince. His withdrawal to Sagres, his asceticism, and his interest in astronomy and allied sciences seemed an affront to people whose colorful lives were lived in the splendor of the moment. The common people too—even the sailors who worked for him—were uneasy with a personality so alien to their own ways of thinking. It would be many years before the tangible fruits of his genius would be seen in trade with islands and coastlines as yet unknown. By then, both court and commonalty would have acclaimed the “Prince Navigator,” and would be eager to join his expeditions—always provided there was the possibility of making some profit out of them. “The genius raids but the common people occupy and possess,” wrote T. E. Lawrence, a man who might well have felt some kinship with Prince Henry. But without the raids of genius, the unknown shores, whether spiritual or terrestrial, would never emerge from the darkness.