A Wind From the North (11 page)

It was in June, 1420, that Joao Gongalves Zarco, having Juan de Morales as pilot aboard his vessel, set sail from Porto Santo in the direction of the cloud. The wind was favorable, the sea calm, and the small ship soon began to drop the familiar island astern. As they drew nearer, the cloud ahead of them thickened until it seemed to the sailors as if it blotted out the whole horizon. They felt the humid mist on the decks and rigging, and crossed themselves. Zarco and Morales peered ahead. They were men of more intelligence and experience than the others, but they too had been brought up in a climate of legend and superstition.

“Do you hear anything?” asked one.

The ship had begun to lift in an uneasy way, as if she felt a new movement of the ocean. It was no longer the swell from the following wind. Her bow began to lift and bump.

“Surf?”

They were feeling the cliff wash from an unknown shore.

“The sea is boiling!” cried the sailors. “Turn back! The sea is boiling!”

But one man, calmer or more phlegmatic than the rest, shaded his eyes against the dazzle of sun on mist, and saw a line of broken water.

“Breakers ahead!”

The mist began to thin and the flapping sail to draw again in a new light air. The sound of breaking waves was all around them now.

Suddenly they slid out into the sunlight, and the land was warm ahead of them. Tall peaks were clothed with forest and twined with cloud. Streams were falling in silver ribbons down emerald green, and startled birds were rising in bright clouds. In front of them lay the friendly arm of a bay. They had discovered Madeira.

Zarco’s discovery of Madeira was the first important step in the exploration of the Atlantic. It was the first gleam of light to be cast upon the Sea of Darkness. It would be many years before Prince Henry could induce any of his mariners to round Cape Bojador and sail south of the Canaries down the African coast, but the discovery of Madeira was like the lifting of a curtain.

They called the island Madeira from the Portuguese word for “wood,” and it was the dense forests of this fertile, well-watered island that at first seemed to promise the major profit from the discovery. Wood for shipbuilding was essential for a maritime country, and its importance in a thinly forested land like Portugal had been recognized from very early days. So much was this so that, among early edicts, there is one that reads: “Whoever shall cut a pine tree, let them hang him”— pine, then as now, being of great value for the planking of boats.

Prince Henry and his father were delighted with the discovery—the former because he saw in it further proof that his ships could be made to sail where men had always maintained there was nothing but the horrors of ocean, the latter because it justified his trust in his son’s endeavors. Zarco was made a count, and the island was divided between him and his fellow captain, Tristao Vaz. The southern half of the island, with Funchal (after the Portuguese word, funcho, for fennel, which was found there) as capital, was given to Zarco. The northern half, with Machico (reputedly called after Robert Machin) as capital, was given to Tristao Vaz.

It was not for some five years after its discovery that the colonization proper of the island began. In the meantime, vast areas of the virgin forest had been devastated by a fire which, started deliberately with a view to clearing land for cultivation, soon got out of hand. The fire, so one report has it, burned steadily for seven years. Although at the time this seemed a major disaster, it proved a boon in the end. On the mountain slopes where trees had once grown, the vine took root, and in the fertile valleys enriched by the potash from the wood, the sugar cane flourished. Both of these importations were due to Prince Henry. It was he who sent to Sicily for sugar canes, and it was he who sent to distant Crete for the hardy stock of the malvasia grape. The best wine was ultimately produced near Machico, and it was this malvasia Madeira, corrupted into “malmsey,” that later became a favorite tipple of the English. It is an odd thought that countless Englishmen over the centuries have benefited from the foresight and wisdom of the nondrinking, ascetic grandson of John of Gaunt.

In his choice of sugar cane from Sicily and vines from Crete—two islands with climates and soils not so very different from those of Madeira—Henry again revealed the practical streak in his nature.

During the next twenty years, while he was devoting most of his energy to the exploration of Africa—and despite the calls made on his time by successive troubles in Portugal— he never forgot his islands. Monthly returns were expected from his captains, Zarco, Tristao Vaz, and Perestrello, as well as details of the trees, the rocks, the earth, and the progress of viticulture and sugar making. .

Only twenty years after the beginnings of colonization the Venetian Cadamosto could write of Madeira: “The whole island is a garden!” The beauty and fertility of the island were such that even the first colonizers, faced with the arduous tasks of tree felling and land cultivation, were conscious that Madeira was something of an earthly paradise. One of them, Gongalo Ferreira, the first man to have children born on the island, called his son Adam and his daughter Eve.

Despite the pleasure he took in this discovery, Prince Henry regarded it as no more than a by-product of his main ambition. It was still Africa that haunted him—Africa, and Prester John, and the building of a Portuguese Moroccan empire. For the next fourteen years, from 1420 onward, as soon as the summer season was established, he continued to send out a succession of ships. His captains’ orders were always the same— to proceed as far south as they could and bring back news of the unknown African coastline. One after another they disappointed him, returning always with the same story that beyond Cape Bojador, “the Bulging Cape,” no ship could pass.

For a man devoured by ambition Henry showed an astonishing patience. He knew the limits of his human material. He knew it was only to be expected that his captains, noblemen, and crews should wish to make a profit out of their voyages. He could hardly complain when they came back having captured and sunk Moorish merchantmen from Granada, or when they turned aside into the Mediterranean, called at Ceuta, and then went marauding among the traffic of the North African coast. It was his duty, as grand master of the Order of Christ, to harass the infidel as much as possible. As a man whose income never met his expenditure, he could not openly disapprove of captains who made their voyages pay their way.

“The Prince always welcomed the captains of his ships with great patience, never disclosing any resentment, listening graciously to the stories of their adventures, and rewarding them as men who were serving him well. But immediately he sent them back again to repeat the voyage—either them or others of his household—impressing upon them, more and more strongly, the mission he required them to accomplish…

Some historians have said that Prince Henry is undeserving of the title “the Navigator” because, except for his two voyages to Ceuta and his later expeditions to Tangier and Alcagar there is no evidence that he ever went to sea at all. But to deny him the title is as absurd as to deny the title of “general” to a modern field marshal, on the score that he does not personally lead his troops into battle. Henry, as in so much else, was in advance of his time in realizing—perhaps unconsciously—that the controlling brain needs to be remote from the day-to-day strategy.

At Sagres he correlated and combined the talents of many men and welded them into a team. Without his steady perseverance, the Portuguese would never have discovered the Madeira Islands, the Azores, the Cape Verde Islands, or the Guinea coast of Africa. Noblemen financing expeditions—as well as their captains and crews—would have been happy to remain occupied in the lucrative game of piracy on the Granada and Barbary coasts. There was no obvious or immediate profit in Africa. It is these fourteen years of almost fruitless and disillusioning quest that reveal most clearly the iron caliber of Prince Henry’s character.

The ships in which the early expeditions were made were either barks or barinales. The bark was a square-rigged trading vessel common to the period, while the barinal was a Portuguese compromise with the Venetian galley. It was an oared vessel, but one that could set a square or lateen sail when the wind blew from anywhere abaft the beam. The difficulty that Prince Henry’s mariners experienced in returning to Portugal against the prevailing north winds led to the evolution of the famous caravel.

It was not a completely new type of vessel. Like most ships, it had a long ancestry behind it, and was the product of evolution rather than a startling departure from conventional ship design. One can see today on the Tagus and the Douro small sailing boats that have sometimes been claimed as descendants of the caravel. These are broad-beamed, shallow-draught craft, pine-planked on oak frames, and used for the transport of wine, oil, and general cargo. Sometimes, at sea off the coast of Portugal, one sees them stooping and soaring over the Atlantic rollers, their lateen sails curved above a short mast. They are open boats, or half-decked. Their sailors are short and swarthy, native to the sea, who tend to keep aloof and live somewhat apart from their fellow Portuguese. Unlike the fishermen and sailors of most countries, they do not seem to have been assimilated into the twentieth century. Like the mariniers of the Rhone barges in France, they are aware of an ancestry and a dedication to a craft that go back over thousands of years.

It seems more likely that these modem craft are not so much a descendant of the caravel as an ancestor. Although beamier, they are very similar to the feluccas of the Arabic Mediterranean, and the dhows of the Red Sea. The lateen sail itself is an Arabic invention.

The vessel native to northern Europe is the high-pooped bark, and to the Mediterranean the oared galley. Both of these have little in common with the caravel, either in rig or in hull shape. The felucca and the dhow, however, do seem closely related. It is very likely that the caravels of Prince Henry’s day were derived from these ancient Arabic types of sailing vessel. An early sixteenth-century painting by Gregorio Lopez in the Convent of Madre de Deus, shows a vessel that is probably similar to the caravels in which the early navigators made their epic voyages. The stem is quite graceful, almost yachtlike, with a certain amount of overhang. The general line of the bulwarks shows a gentle sheer. The stern is built up into a poop with an aftercastle, in which is stepped a mizzenmast. The mainmast is a little abaft the center line of the boat, and the vessel has two lateen sails.

Sailing with a lateen rig is comparatively easy compared to working with square sails, with gaff-rigged sails, or even with the modern Bermudian rig. The long wooden yard, which supports the head of the sail, is hoisted on a simple block and tackle. The sail is easily controlled, and one or two men can handle quite a large area of canvas.

Caravels had no topsails to worry about. They had no complicated system of braces as did square-rigged ships, and no intricate sheeting of sails. It was—and is—an efficient rig, as anyone who has ever seen an Arab dhow can confirm. Until the introduction of the fore-and-aft sail plan many centuries later, the lateen was the most efficient rig for small boats. As the Venetian Cadamosto remarked of Prince Henry’s caravels, they were “the most seaworthy vessels of their time.”

The word “caravel” has passed into modem English usage as “carvel,” the term used to denote boats built with flush planking as opposed to “clinker” (with overlapping planking). Caravels were small vessels, and the name was applied to ships of one hundred tons or less. (Columbus applied it to ships of forty tons.) The word “caravel,” denoting a small sailing ship, is found as early as the thirteenth century in a Portuguese naval classification. Historians often seem to have been amazed at the smallness of these vessels in which the early navigators made their ocean voyages. The fact is, they were well designed and seaworthy, with a good, easily worked rig. Size has little to do with seaworthiness. (Yachts of ten tons and less quite often cross the Atlantic nowadays.)

The pine, with which they were built, had long been a protected tree in Portugal. This was partly on account of its use in shipbuilding, and partly because the land of Portugal, without its defensive barrier of pine trees, would be invaded by the sand, driven inshore on the steady Atlantic winds. The stone pine was native to the country, and it was particularly suitable for ribs, strakes, and curved pieces. The cluster pine was an importation, traditionally supposed to have been introduced by Isabella, the wife of King Diniz, “the Farmer King,” in the thirteenth century. Valuable for its resin, which was used in calking the hulls, the cluster pine also provided good straight wood for planking. As in England, oak was used for the keels. Lisbon, Porto, and Lagos—close to Sagres—were the main shipbuilding centers, noisy with the thud of adzes on wood, and lively with attendant trades like sailmaking and ropemaking.

The early caravels were probably between forty and one hundred tons. But, even before the death of Prince Henry, they had increased in size, and when they exceeded one hundred tons or more, often stepped a third and even a fourth mast. These later vessels had a composite rig—lateen on the mizzen and main masts, and square sails on the foremast. Sixty to ninety feet long, with a beam of twenty to thirty feet, caravels were well-proportioned ships. Their broad beam allowed them to be comparatively shallow-drafted, and this was to prove an enormous advantage when working along the African shore in uncharted and often shallow waters. So efficient were they that in later years a legend grew up that only Portuguese-built ships were capable of navigating off the African coast. It was a legend that remained unassailed until the Elizabethan adventurers took their West-country ships into those waters, and challenged the Portuguese supremacy.

If the caravel owed something of its rig to the Arabs, and its hull form to the working boats of the Tagus and Douro, it probably owed its axled, hinged rudder to the north. (This great advance in ship design seems to have originated in the Baltic.) The axled rudder made for easy maneuverability, and the helmsman could be sited below, or under cover. The caravel seems, in fact, to have been a brilliant composite: adapting local shipbuilding methods and hull design to modifications learned from both north and south.