Part 3

Surely no truer man or more chivalrous knight ever donned helmet or drew sword. Tradition says that the Lisbon people long assembled to sing songs and witness many miracles at his grave. But his fittest and most enduring monuments are the noble buildings of Carmo and Batalha, and, above all, a free and united Portugal.

III

PRINCE HENRY THE NAVIGATOR

(1394-1460)

Ca trabalho seria de se achar antre os vivos seu semelhante.--GOMEZ EANNEZ DE AZURARA, _Cronica de Guiné_.

Mestre insigne de toda a arte militar.--D. FRANCISCO MANOEL DE MELLO.

O homem a quem a Europa deve mais.--JOSÉ AGOSTINHO DE MACEDO, _Motim Literario_.

For some years before his death, Nun’ Alvarez might well rest satisfied with the prosperity which largely by his own exertions had fallen upon his country. Nor was it a careless or degenerate prosperity. The five noble sons of King João I and his English wife, Queen Philippa, daughter of “time-honoured Lancaster,” had grown to manhood, and the time was pregnant with great deeds. If Duarte was perhaps Nun’ Alvarez’ favourite among the princes, he certainly must have discerned in his younger brother his own successor in guiding the destinies of Portugal. Although possibly less chivalrous than Nun’ Alvarez, Prince Henry possessed his strong will and intensity of purpose, with a wider range of vision. A Portuguese writer represents him living in retirement at Sagres, his eyes fixed exclusively on Heaven; but Prince Henry believed that he could best serve Heaven by bringing to success the earthly affairs on which he had set his heart.

It was certainly with the keenness which marked the young Nun’ Alvarez that Henrique, then twenty-one, embarked with his father, King João I, and his brothers, Duarte and Pedro, in the expedition against Ceuta in 1415. He had his father’s promise that he should be the first to land, and in the storming of the town he was ever in the thickest of the fighting. The Moors defended the town obstinately, and a fresh danger arose when the victorious Portuguese dispersed to plunder. Henry, with a little band of seventeen followers, saved the situation against such odds that news was at first brought to the King that his son was dead. For his gallant behaviour on that day he was made Duke of Vizeu and Lord of Covilhã, while his brother Pedro became Duke of Coimbra.

But Henry returned from North-West Africa with perhaps a still greater prize--increased knowledge of the Dark Continent and a fixed determination to explore further a land which he now knew to be no mere sandy and unfertile desert. To this work he devoted the next forty-five years, without a shadow of turning, since political events might hamper but could not weaken his purpose, merely delaying the promised end.

It is often asked what was his object, as though the wish to win fresh knowledge, to acquire new territory for his country, and glory and riches, and to extend the Christian faith were unaccountable or unworthy aims. Rather we cannot wonder that the discoveries became the absorbing passion of his life, so that he has been blamed for his lukewarm intervention in contemporary politics and his weak defence of his brother, the Duke of Coimbra.

On the discoveries as Grand Master of the Order of Christ he spent its princely revenues, and in 1418, retiring from the Court, he settled on the Sacred Cape, or Sagres, now Cape St. Vincent. His palace and observatory soon drew a village round it, known as Terça Naval, or the Villa do Infante (Princestown). Here, as Governor of Algarve, he spent the greater part of his life, fitting out ships in Lagos harbour, welcoming travellers, poring over maps brought to him by Prince Pedro and others from their travels, observing the heavens, and watching for the return of his ships.

His keenness was not inconsistent with a certain shyness and reserve. He was a student prince, but less literary and more scientific than his brothers. All day, and often far into the night, he would be at work, an energetic hermit such as the Middle Ages had not known. His eyes in the intensity and even fierceness of their glance repelled the timid, but they also had the far-away look as of one watching and dreaming, while his firm lips and jaws were those of one planning and willing. His iron will and self-discipline curbed his equally strong temper and impatient eagerness, so that when most moved to anger he would merely say, like an Irishman, “I leave you to God.”

Courageous and persistent, he prepared all his schemes with the utmost thoroughness, and all the help that science could afford, and he carried them out with unfaltering resolution. All through his life he acted up to his French motto, _Talent de bien faire_, which we may translate by the “love of useful glory” to which, according to the poet Thomson, he roused mankind. And if we do not sit cowering before the unknown on all sides it is to Prince Henry and a few men of similarly keen intellect and stout will that we owe it.

It must not be thought that he met with no opposition, apart from the great difficulties that naturally beset all discoverers and innovators. On the one hand, the perils of navigating down the coast of Africa were considered insurmountable, and, on the other, the gains to be derived from it were held to be nugatory. It was not till the first slaves and the first gold arrived that men began to realise thoroughly that Prince Henry was something more than an empty dreamer. No one with less faith, a faith based both on religion and science, would have persevered, as Prince Henry persevered, in face of the slight support at first given by public opinion and the slight success obtained. But, although there were many disappointments and progress was slow, the mysteries of the African coast did gradually recede before his persistency, as year after year he sent out ships with definite instructions based on his maps and scientific knowledge.

The death of King João I in 1433 did not seriously interfere with his plans; his brother Duarte gave him every possible support, and the expedition against Tangier in 1437 was not an interruption but rather one aspect of his life-work. Indeed, he was the leading spirit of the enterprise. He and his younger brother, Fernando, obtained from King Duarte the consent for which they had ceased to hope from their father; but Duarte at first, and Pedro throughout, were opposed to the expedition. It set out in August, and the little army of some six thousand men disembarked at Ceuta, and, without waiting for the ships to return to Portugal for reinforcements, marched to attack Tangier.

Failing to take the place by storm, the princes settled down to blockade it. The danger of such a course was obvious, but even when the Moors, who trooped down from the hinterland, outnumbered the Christian force by twenty to one they were driven back in a series of magnificent attacks. But the Moorish host continued to grow by scores of thousands daily, and in the second week of October it became apparent even to the fiery heart of Prince Henry that he was embarked on a hopeless enterprise.

The siege was raised and the small army attempted to regain their ships. Henry with the cavalry protected their retreat. But the cowardice of some, the treachery of others, and the overwhelming number of the enemy proved too much for his splendid defence, and on October 15 he was forced to come to an agreement with the enemy. By this capitulation the Portuguese were to be allowed to re-embark without their arms, Ceuta, their twenty-two years’ possession, was to be given up, and Prince Fernando, with certain other hostages, was to remain in the hands of the enemy until the Portuguese should have evacuated the town.

Prince Henry, in his despair, fell ill at Ceuta and afterwards retired to Sagres. He would not give up Ceuta, and he could not save Fernando otherwise. King Duarte, confronted by the same cruel alternative, succumbed to grief and illness at Thomar in the following year.

To Henry’s sorrow for the death of one brother and the living death of another--the tortures of Fernando’s captivity ended in a miserable dungeon in 1443--was added the crushing of his hopes and projects. For the new King was but a boy, and it needed no peculiar foresight to prophesy impending trouble in Portugal. It required all Prince Henry’s fortitude and faith to persevere, in loneliness and remorse. Prince Pedro had strongly opposed the expedition: it was on Henry that its failure rested. Nor was he one to wish to shirk responsibility, and many an hour he must have spent brooding over the fatal effects of his rashness.

Henry is too great a man to need to have his mistakes glossed over. He had underestimated the difficulty of the enterprise, he had been rash in advancing from Ceuta without awaiting reinforcements, he had been rasher in not retiring after the first unsuccessful attempt to scale the walls of Tangier. His object certainly had been a noble one, based on no personal greed or ambition, and the results of his failure were felt by none more than by himself. In the eyes of others his magnificent courage and steadfast retreat placed him even higher than before.

Fortunately for him, there was plenty of work ready to his hand, for, although he did not personally accompany the ships of exploration, he scientifically worked out their instructions, equipped them, and followed their progress on his maps. Perhaps a certain estrangement between Pedro and Henry was natural after 1437; Henry, at least, did not very actively support his brother in his quarrel with the Queen-Regent, and failed to stand by him later when he had resigned his Regency and was venomously attacked and slandered by his enemies before his weak son-in-law, King Affonso V. When the matter came to open conflict Pedro, with his small band of followers, could not hope for victory, and again Henry did not resolutely intervene. Pedro’s tragic death at Alfarrobeira in 1449 cannot have diminished Henry’s remorse for the death of Duarte and Fernando eleven and six years earlier.

Meanwhile, his austere devotion to the work of discovery bore increasing fruit, and before he died the rich islands of the Azores, Madeira, the Canaries, and Cape Verde were discovered, and the coast of Africa explored as far as Sierra Leone, which was reached by the famous Venetian, Luigi Cadamosto, in the service of Prince Henry, nearly a quarter of a century after Gil Eannez had rounded Cape Bojador in 1434. The Infante himself had lost little of his energy, and although nearly sixty-five, accompanied his nephew Affonso V in the expedition against Morocco in 1558, and took a prominent part in the siege and capture of Alcacer.

The last two years of his life were spent at Sagres. In September 1460 he disposed of certain of his revenues, potential rather than actual, to the Order of Christ and to the State, which had hitherto recognised his right to receive the profits of the discoveries as it had allowed him to bear its burden. The burden to the day of his death was far greater than the profits. Yet he must have realised that his life’s purpose was attained, and that the rest was but a matter of time, as surely as though he had planted an orange-tree and died when it was covered with blossom. His body was taken to Batalha, and, if it was not to remain on Cape St. Vincent looking southwards over the sea to Africa, no worthier resting-place could be found for it than the splendid church built to commemorate the victory of his father and of his friend Nun’ Alvarez. Prince Henry spent himself, his time, and his revenues without stint in the service of a great idea and a high ambition. Nun’ Alvarez had worked for the independence of Portugal; Prince Henry left it well on the road to an imperishable glory.

A generation later, when the full effects of his life’s work were manifest, his countrymen and the world recognised in this strong, tenacious ascetic, with his burning zeal for God and country, his fearlessness and unwavering devotion, the inspirer and origin of Portugal’s new greatness.

IV

VASCO DA GAMA

(1460?-1524)

O qual Vasco da Gama era homem prudente e de bom saber e de grande animo para todo bom feito.--GASPAR CORREA, _Lendas da India_.

King João II pressed on vigorously with the discovery of the west coast of Africa. The year of his accession was not ended before Diogo de Azambuja set out with ten ships (1481), and after his return the King assumed the title of “Lord of Guinea.” Diogo Cam in 1484 and 1485 carried the discovery still further, past the River of Crabs (Cameroons), past Congo and Angola to Walvisch Bay, and two years later Bartholomeu Diaz rounded the Cape, and with that the problem of the sea-route to India was practically solved, so that King John died (October 1495) in sight of the promised land. Indeed, the departure of the ships which Vasco de Gama was destined to command was only delayed by the King’s death. He had given “orders for such wood to be cut in wood and forest as the carpenters and builders should desire, and this was brought to Lisbon, where at once three small ships were begun.”

In appointing Vasco da Gama, a knight of his household, to the command King Manoel showed that he knew the value of the men who had grown up in the stern school of João II. The Gamas were a distinguished family of the south of Portugal; they had already rendered good service to the State--Vasco himself may have had a part in the work of discovering the coast of Africa--and if they were at times quarrelsome and unruly their loyalty and courage were never in doubt. In 1497 the meekest of them, Paulo, Vasco’s eldest brother, was in trouble for having wounded a judge at Setubal,[5] and received the King’s pardon before he sailed as captain of one of the ships.

Vasco, a man of medium height and knightly bearing, was bold and daring in enterprise, patient and determined in adversity, but harsher and more irascible than his brother. It is a curious instance of the continuous if often slight connection between the two nations of seafarers, the English and the Portuguese, that Vasco da Gama had English blood in his veins. The name of his mother, Isabel Sodré, which survives in Lisbon’s _Caes do Sodré_, was a corruption of Sudley, her grandfather having been Frederick Sudley, of the family of the Earls of Hereford. Vasco was born probably in 1460, in the little sea-town of Sines, of which his father was _Alcaide Môr_, and in honour of which Vasco later is said to have been in the habit of firing a salute as he passed.

The third captain appointed by King Manoel was Nicolao Coelho.

The three ships, of about a hundred tons, _São Gabriel_ (Vasco da Gama), _São Raphael_ (Paulo da Gama), and _São Miguel_[6] (Nicolao Coelho), after solemn procession and leave-taking of the King, on July 8, 1497, sailed down the Tagus from Belem and rounded Cape Espichel to the south. The crews averaged little over fifty men, being perhaps 170 in all, including six convicts in each ship to be cast ashore in order to spy out the land at different points. Bartholomeu Diaz, bound for the fortress of São Jorge da Mina, accompanied them as far as the Cape Verde Islands.

In November they reached the bay of St. Helena where Vasco da Gama was slightly wounded in an affray with the natives. Hitherto their voyage had been prosperous; but they encountered heavy storms both before and after rounding the Cape of Good Hope, and it required all Vasco’s resolution and Paulo’s persuasiveness to keep the crews to their voyage. The mutinous crew of the _São Gabriel_ had counted without its host, and found Gama little less formidable than the storms of these unknown seas. Not if he were confronted with a hundred deaths, he said, and not if the ships were all filled with gold, would he go back a single yard; but he did not wholly disregard the murmurings of the men, for he clapped the mate and pilot of his ship in irons, to hold them as hostages, and, as they were the only persons who knew anything of the art of navigation, the crew was effectually cowed.

At Christmas they reached the land which to this day bears the Portuguese name, Natal, of the time of its discovery. Passing slowly north along the coast, they arrived towards the end of January at the Zambezi River, and in this shelter made a stay of several weeks; but scurvy among the crew forced them again to sea, and in the beginning of March they reached Mozambique. Here, as at Mombasa a month later, the natives received them with every appearance of friendship, but made a treacherous if rather courageous attempt to seize their ships. The King of Melinde, a little further north, was friendly and loyal, and here the Portuguese obtained pilots for the voyage to India.

The passage lasted less than a month, and on May 18 they sighted Asia, the end and object of their enterprise, and came to anchor off Calicut on the 21st. Calicut was a few miles distant, and Vasco da Gama, although implored by his brother not to risk his person by disembarking, started on the overland journey. It required some courage, for among the native sightseers who crowded round the Portuguese there were not a few armed and covertly hostile Moors.

In the minds of the Portuguese, the East had long been connected with the empire of the Christian Prester John, the half mythical ruler of Abyssinia, and they expected to find the majority of the natives Christians. Accordingly they were easily duped here (as indeed they had been in Africa) and Vasco da Gama and his companions on the way to Calicut worshipped in a Hindu pagoda. The images on the walls were unlike those of the saints to which they had been accustomed in Portugal. Some of them had four arms, the teeth of others protruded a whole inch from their mouths, and their faces were hideous as the faces of devils. Like Little Red Ridinghood, one of the Portuguese, João de Sá, was in the most serious doubt when he saw these figures, and, as he knelt down, in order to avoid any mistake, he said aloud “If this is a devil I worship the true God.” And Vasco da Gama looked across at him and smiled.

A che guardando il suo duca sorrise.

This does not tally well with the character of the disciplinarian, despotic Gama, as it is usually represented. But these qualities developed later.

The Portuguese were as ignorant about the King of the country as about its gods. For the Samuri of Calicut was no simple King of Melinde, but a great potentate accustomed to traders and to foreign civilisations. It was not without difficulty that Gama obtained an interview, and when he succeeded, the King, all aglow with jewellery, seated chewing betel, a page on either side, and his chief Brahman behind his chair, was fully a match for the haughty Gama. From one of his bracelets gleamed a priceless stone of a thumb’s thickness, his necklace was of pearls almost of the size of small acorns, and from a gold chain hung a heart-shaped jewel surrounded by pearls and covered with rubies, and in the centre a great green stone, an emerald, of the size of a large bean, belonging to the ancient treasure of the Kings of Calicut. His golden trumpets were longer by a third than those of the King of Portugal.

It appears that the Portuguese had brought no present worthy of so great a monarch. The same historian, Correa, who thus vividly describes the King’s appearance, also gives a detailed account of the present. It consisted, he says, of “a very delicate piece of scarlet, and a piece of crimson velvet, and a piece of yellow satin and a chair richly upholstered with brocade, with silver-gilt nails, and a cushion of crimson satin with tassels of gold thread, and another cushion of red satin for the feet, and a very richly wrought gilt ewer and basin, and a large and very beautiful gilt mirror and fifty red caps with buttons and veils of crimson silk and gold thread upon them, and fifty gilt sheaths of Flemish knives, which had been inlaid in Lisbon with ivory.”

The King should have been satisfied, but probably this present, if it ever existed, had dwindled in gifts to natives of Africa on the way. The question in the King’s mind was that asked once of Telemachus: Had they come as peaceful traders, or were they pirates?

Vasco da Gama, faced by a reception so courteous yet so insulting, maintained a proud, serene attitude, as he had when on his way to the palace--he is represented advancing slowly, waiting for the crowds to be cleared out of his way--and as he did later when placed under arrest by the Catual, or Governor of the city. By his resolution during the dangers and obstacles of the voyage and by his calm behaviour in Calicut he justified the King’s choice and his subsequent fame.

The Samuri himself was far more favourably inclined to the new-comers than were the Moors, who naturally resented the appearance of other traders. The Portuguese were greatly helped throughout by a Mohammedan who had learnt Spanish at Tunis, but, although Gama brought home specimens of pepper, ginger, cloves, musk, benjamin, and other spices as well as pearls and rubies, his visit to Calicut, which ended with the high-handed measure of seizing and carrying off several natives, was unsuccessful, since it resulted in no treaty of friendship or commerce.

At the end of August they started on the homeward voyage, but remained for some time off the coast of India, and in the Indian Ocean lay becalmed for many days, during which the crew again suffered terribly from scurvy, a considerable number dying. The remnant of the crews struggled on in their three ships towards Portugal; at Cabo Verde, Coelho separated from the others and carried the news to King Manoel (July 1499). Paulo da Gama was worn out by anxiety and exertions, and Vasco sailed with him north-west to the Azores, where, in the island of Terceira, Paulo died. It was not till the end of the summer that Vasco da Gama reached the Tagus.

It is said--although Coelho’s earlier arrival contradicts the story--that a Terceira trader, Arthur Rodriguez, about to sail from his island to Algarve, saw two ships at anchor and asked whence they were. “From India,” came the answer. At these magic words he set sail, not, however, to Algarve, but due East, and in four days cast anchor in the harbour of Cascaes. The King was at Sintra, and had just sat down to supper when Rodriguez hurried in with the good news.

When the few survivors[7] arrived at Lisbon (September 1499) they were given a splendid reception, and Vasco da Gama was never able to complain that his services went unrewarded. He was granted the coveted title of Dom, and became hereditary Admiral of India, while his pensions (300,000 réis a year) and facilities of trade with India made him one of the richest men in the realm. So powerful did he become in Sines that the Order of Santiago interfered, with the result that Gama was obliged to leave his native town and in 1507 went to live at Evora.[8] In November 1519 the Duke James of Braganza sold him the town of Vidigueira, of which Gama became first Count.

A large part of his triumph belonged to Prince Henry, to King João II, and to Bartholomeu Diaz, who was drowned in the following year off the Cape which he had been the first to round.