A Wind From the North (18 page)

Apart from the Queen, only Prince Peter was with him at his deathbed. Prince John and the Count of Barcellos were away on their estates. Prince Henry, after his summer meeting with Edward at Portel, had retired again to Sagres.

There, beneath the ramparts of his rising fortress, he watched the long undulating plains of the Atlantic. Ships were busy in the bay beneath him. They brought him news of the Azores—of further islands being uncovered out of the obscure ocean—and of the steady progress in Madeira. At Sagres he still felt the pulse of Africa. From his own ships returned from raids along the coast, or from Moors come to do business with him, he tried to assess the extent of his defeat and the possible chances of rescuing his brother.

Some men are crippled by failure. With a few it happens that the broken limbs heal harder and stronger than with the others. Tangier had brought Henry to the only physical and mental collapse in the course of his life. When he came back to Sagres after the long months in Ceuta, it was seen, though, that it had not weakened him. His failure in generalship had taught him a lesson; it had not led to his retirement from the field of action. The loss of his brother had caused him acute suffering; it had not weakened his resolve.

However much the common people might dislike him for what they saw as his inhumanity, he knew that one man was not worth a city. If he had been asked by Sala-ben-Sala why he would not give up Ceuta, he would have replied that the city was not his to surrender. His answer would always have been the same: “It belongs to God, and not to me!”

The event seemed a small thing at the time, but it was to have an impact on European history, and to lay on almost all the maritime nations a burden and a guilt from which they still suffer. The first ship returned to Portugal with captive Negroes four years after Tangier. These were the first slaves ever taken by the Portuguese on the west coast of Africa.

In the summer of 1441 Prince Henry had fitted out a small bark and sent it south under the command of a young man called Antao Gongalves. For once, he had not given any orders for a voyage of exploration, but had contented himself with telling Gongalves to go to the Rio de Ouro. There he was to take aboard a cargo of oil and pelts from the sea lions that were plentiful in the bay. Gongalves was young and inexperienced, and this was to be a “working-up” cruise for him.

Close on Gongalves’s heels Henry sent a second ship commanded by a tried veteran, Nuno Tristao. In his case the orders were as usual—to proceed as far south as possible, and try to capture some of the natives. Nuno Tristao’s command was a caravel. This is the first time we come upon the word that ever afterward is to be associated with the Portuguese voyages of discovery. Azurara introduces the term “caravel” quite casually into his narrative. By the time he was writing his Chronicle of the Conquest and Discovery of Guinea in 1453, “caravel” had become a household word in Portugal. He also mentions that it was an “armed” vessel, so one may assume that it was not only built to the new design, but was intended further as a warship capable of attacking any Moorish ships it might encounter. Nuno Tristao’s caravel was probably no more than fifty tons. She had the advantage over every other type of vessel that had so far sailed down the African coast, in her ability to work well to windward. With her ease of handling she could tack and go about quickly—an important consideration when working in uncharted waters. Her shallow draft was also a great advantage in the shoal waters off the sandy headlands of Morocco.

When Nuno Tristao brought his new ship down the coast and anchored near the bark, he found that young Gongalves had anticipated him. Having taken aboard all they could carry in the way of pelts and oil, Gongalves and his companions had gone ashore in a raiding party, and had managed to capture a Berber man and a Negro woman.

Prince Henry, with a view to getting immediate information from the natives, had sent a Bedouin Arab in the caravel to act as interpreter. It was soon found that neither the Berber nor the Negro woman could understand Arabic. Determined to capture some more inhabitants, Nuno Tristao organized a further raiding party. This time they were more successful, and after a skirmish in which four unfortunate natives were killed, the Portuguese managed to take ten prisoners. Among them was a tall Berber called Adahu. He was of superior caste and intellect to the others, had traveled in Morocco, and was able to speak Arabic with their Bedouin interpreter. Gongalves was knighted by Nuno Tristao for his part in the affair and was then sent back to Portugal with his captives.

The caravel sailed on down the coast. Almost effortlessly they worked their way southward, leaving behind them Galley Rock, so called from its shape, and then another small cape, which ran out to break the monotony of the desert. As far as they could see, there was only the steady rise, dip, and fold of a waterless landscape. At length they raised a further headland, a real landmark this time. The coast here was rockier than it had been farther north, and a few dark shadings of desert grass showed up against the interminable sand. Beyond the rocks and the red glow of the shore, a long white plateau tumbled precipitously into the sea.

“The White Cape!”

Cape Blanco lies 320 miles south of Cape Bojador, a cliff of crumbling rock that changes shape year by year, as first one hanging ledge and then another crashes into the shallow sea. Beyond it opened out a large bay, one of the largest on the west coast of Africa, and scoured by crosscurrents. It was here that Nuno Tristao called a halt to the year’s voyaging. He and his crew could feel pleased with the results. They had taken useful prisoners, they had gone farther south than man had ever been before, and their new ship had shown how adept it was in these waters. Easy to handle, sea-kindly in the long surge of the Atlantic, she was clearly the ideal vessel for circumnavigating an unknown continent.

They had another proof of the caravel’s ability to voyage far from home ports when they found it necessary to careen her. They were well over a thousand miles from Portugal, and no vessel had ever before attempted any major repairs when away on the African coast. It may be they had touched a rock or sandbank; it may be that some of the calking had spewed out in the tumble of the Atlantic; or it may have been no more than the fact that the hull was beginning to grow foul with weed after long weeks at sea. At any rate, Nuno Tristao ordered the caravel to be “drawn up a shore, where it was cleaned and repaired while waiting for the tide. Just as though he had been in Lisbon harbor. It was a feat whose boldness aroused the admiration of his men.” It would have been difficult, if not impossible, with a barinal or with a bark. The barinol, built on Venetian galley lines, was destined to be hauled ashore on a cradle. The bark, on the other hand, was an awkward-shaped vessel, which a small crew would have found difficult to careen in those waters.

Not until men return from space, or from visiting other planets, will anyone be able to experience the emotions of these early Portuguese navigators. They were venturing where man had never gone before. They were learning to adapt themselves to an unfamiliar element—the vast ocean. They were experimenting with new designs in transport, and they were using navigational instruments that were still in their infancy. Every day, as the sails shook and the ship leaned to the wind, they were seeing a new world.

At dawn they opened their eyes to the first sunrise over a virgin sea. The capes and coves and headlands that lifted out of the dew haze on a summer morning were being created by their vision. The flare of sunlight on the water, the rushing crystal of a wave—even these seemed new. Astern of them at night the North Star began to settle lower in the sky. Homer had written: “Alone of all the stars, the Pole wheels round and round in one place, and never takes a bath in the Ocean.” But it is probable that there were some among Nuno Tristao’s crew who would be the first Europeans in history to catch sight of the Southern Cross in the seas below the equator. Among them were men of whom it could truly be said that they hove the Cross to heaven and sank The Pole Star underground.

They saw the moon over bare desert hills, and the sea like sheets of glass on a dazzling morning. At dawn the rigging hung with strands of light like a spider’s web, and at night the ship’s track was a sword across the water. The phosphorescence off that coast was even more vivid than in the summer Mediterranean. It swirled round the rudder, and when a wave lipped over the gunwhale and ran along the deck, it was fiery, and quick as mercury. At night Nuno Tristao consulted the first manual that had been drawn up for the use of navigators. (It was being altered and improved with every year that passed.) He grew familiar with the “Rules for Observing the North Star”—“the Regiment of the North,” as it was called. At noon he waited for the sun’s meridian altitude—the moment when the sun seems to tremble in the heavens before beginning its slow decline.

After several days at sea, beating to windward against the prevailing breeze, they came back again to waters that were already becoming familiar. They passed Cape Bojador, now only another headland on the chart—and soon they saw the outermost of the Canary Islands lifting out of the sea. (They kept clear of the Canaries, for the Prince had instructed his captains not to meddle in the affairs of Castile.) They ran on up the coast and passed Cape Not—it was difficult to believe that this had once been the outermost limit of the world. Soon they saw the wine-red glow in the shallows where the Sahara sand colored the sea. They turned more northerly, heading home for Portugal and leaving the coast at Safi, where the sardine shoals were leaping under the sun.

They found Prince Henry and the court at Sagres eagerly awaiting them. For four years there had been few voyages, and the initial excitement of discovering new islands and of rounding Cape Bojador had died away. But the arrival of the first captives changed everything. The visible proof that there were other men living in those remote regions aroused the interest of even the most skeptical, and the Berber chief, Adahu, became the focus of attention. Prince Henry was soon engaged in finding out from him all he could about the desert lands and those that lay beyond them.

Now he heard at first hand of the caravan routes that crossed the remote valleys and plains, as Adahu told him of the gold that came overland from Wangara, and of the fertile country that lay somewhere far to the south. Beyond the Sahara, he said, the sandy wastes were transformed into a rich green delta—land surrounding a great river. Henry heard the name of the mysterious city that was to haunt European imagination for centuries—Timbuktu. This was the “meeting place of the camel and the canoe,” for on one side lay the desert caravan routes, and on the other were navigable channels leading to the Niger. Adahu knew of the gold trade that made Timbuktu rich, but he knew little of its source, and of the vast extent of Africa he was probably quite ignorant. But it may well have been from Adahu that Henry heard tales of how the Nile flowed westward into the Atlantic. (It had long been a belief that one branch of the Nile flowed across the continent and emptied into the western ocean.) It would be many years before the sources of great rivers like the Senegal and Gambia were discovered, but their existence was confirmed by early captives like this Berber chief.

“… So the Prince learned many things about the country that Adahu inhabited. And realizing that armed ships carrying his men must often go there, Prince Henry immediately prepared to send an embassy to the Pope… .”

He petitioned His Holiness for all the new territory beyond Cape Bojador to be conceded to the crown of Portugal. He also asked that the Order of Christ might have spiritual jurisdiction over these new lands, and over all converts made to the Christian faith. He asked that any of his men who died on these voyages of exploration might be granted the same indulgences as if they had fallen in a crusade. It was natural that Henry, as grand master of the Order of Christ, should apply to the Pope for his blessing on the expeditions. The Pope was head of Christendom, King above all kings, and God’s representative on earth. Only he could say with authority to whom a particular territory belonged by right of conquest and conversion.

Pope Eugenius IV was deeply concerned at this time about the Turkish threat to eastern Europe. He was overjoyed, therefore, at the news of these maritime successes on the western flank of Moslem power. Tangier had proved a setback that Christendom could ill afford—which was the main reason he could in no way consider giving up Ceuta. But the fact that the ships of this Portuguese prince appeared to be sailing beyond the confines of the Moors was an immense encouragement. In 1445 he issued a bull confirming all that Prince Henry had asked.

The wind was set fair. It was more than twenty years since Prince Henry had first sighted the spray-whitened rock of Sagres and had known his destiny. They had been long years, calling for endurance and constancy in the face of many profitless voyages and popular skepticism. But now, as they always will when a great man has shown them the way, the people began to follow him. “… They confessed their former foolishness and admitted their ignorance of the very things which previously they had never taken seriously. Now they said openly that the Prince was none other than a second Alexander.”

His brother Prince Peter, regent of Portugal, granted Henry a charter, which allowed him one-fifth of the profit from the expeditions—a right normally belonging to the crown. Bearing in mind that for twenty years Henry had paid the whole cost of the expeditions, he also issued a mandate which stated that “no one might sail down the African coast without permission from the Prince Navigator.”

In 1441 Prince Henry could feel the steady trade wind of success blowing behind his enterprise. Had it not been for the thought of his younger brother Fernando still a captive of the Moors, he would have had every reason to rejoice. He could look back on the four barren years that had followed the disaster of Tangier as no more than a desert through which he had had to make his way. Now he could see the promised land.