Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery Part 7

The expedition was as disastrous a failure as the old Athenian attack upon Sicily, and was not repeated, although fleets were sent by the Great Khan after this into the Southern Seas, which were supposed to have made a discovery of Papua, if not of the Australian Continent. "In this Sea of China, over against Mangi," Marco reported, from hearsay "of mariners and expert pilots, are 7440 islands, most of them inhabited, whereon grows no tree that yields not a pleasant smell--spices, lignum-aloes, and pepper, black and white." The ships of Zaitum (the great Chinese mart for Indian trade) knew this sea and its islands, "for they go every winter and return every summer, taking a year on the voyage, and all this though it is far from India and not subject to the Great Khan."

But not only did Polo in these sections of his Guide Book or Memories of Travel, record the main features of a coast and ocean scarcely guessed at by Europeans, and flatly denied by Ptolemy and the main traditional school of Western geography. In his service under Kublai, and in his return by sea to Aden and Suez, he opened up the eight provinces of Thibet, the whole of south-east Asia from Canton to Bengal, and the great archipelago of further India.

Four days' journey beyond the Yang-Tse-Kiang, Marco entered "the wide country of Thibet, vanquished and wasted by the Khan for the s.p.a.ce of twenty days' journey, and become a wilderness wanting inhabitants, where wild beasts are excessively increased." Here he tells us of the Yak-oxen and great Thibetan dogs as great as a.s.ses, of the musk deer, and spices, "and salt lakes having beds of pearls," and of the cruel and b.e.s.t.i.a.l idolatry and social customs of the people.

Still farther to the south-west, Commissioner Polo came to the Cinnamon river, called Brius, on the borders of the province of Caindu, to the porcelain-making districts of Carazan, governed by Kublai's son, and so to Bengal, "which borders upon India," and where Marco laughs at the tattoo customs of "flesh embroidery for the dyeing of fools' skins."

Thence back to China, the richest and most famous country of all the East, where was "peace so absolute that shops could be left open full of wares all night and travellers and strangers could walk day and night through every part, untouched and fearing none."

But the Polos wearied even of the Court favours and their celestial home; they longed to come back to earth, to Frankland and Christendom, where life was so rough, and poor, and struggling, but for whose sake they had come so far and braved so much. But the Khan was hurt at the least hint of their wishes, and it was only a fortunate chance that restored them to Europe. Twenty years after their outward start, they were dismissed for a time and under solemn promise of return, as the guides of an emba.s.sy in charge of a Mongol bride for a Persian Khan, living at Tabrez and related to Kublai himself. So, in 1292, they embarked for India at Zaitum, "one of the fairest ports in the world, where is so much pepper that what comes by Alexandria to the West is little to it, and, as it were, one of a hundred." Then striking across the Gulf of Cheinan, for fifteen hundred miles, and pa.s.sing "infinite islands, with gold and much trade,"--a gulf "seeming in all like another world"--they reached Ziambar and, after another run of the same distance, Java, then supposed by mariners to be the greatest island in the world, "above three thousand miles round and under a king who pays tribute to none, the Khan himself not offering to subject it, because of the length and danger of the voyage."

One hundred miles south-east the fleet touched at Java the Less "in compa.s.s about two thousand miles, with abundance of treasure and spices, ebony, and brazil, and so far to the south that the North Star cannot be seen, and none of the stars of the Great Bear." Here they were in great fear of "those brutish man eaters," with whom they traded for victuals and camphire and spices and precious stones, being forced to stay for five months by stress of weather--till they got away into the Bay of Bengal, the extreme point of European knowledge until this time, "where there are savages living in the deep sea islands with dogs' heads and teeth, as I was told, all naked, both men and women, and living the life of beasts (Andamans)."[26]

[Footnote 26: Probably the Andamans.]

Sailing hence a thousand miles to the west, adds Marco, is Ceylon, "the finest island in the world, 2400 miles in circuit, and once 3600, as is seen in old maps, but the north winds have made great part of it sea."

Again west for sixty miles, to Malabar, "which is firm continent in India the Greater," and where the Polos re-entered as it were the horizon of Western knowledge, at the shrine of St. Thomas, the Apostle of India.

Here we must leave the Venetians, with only a bare mention of their homeward route from Malabar by Murfili and the Valley of Diamonds, by Camari, where they had a glimpse of the Pole-Star once more, and by Guzerat and Cambay to Socotra, where Marco, in his stay, heard and wrote down the first news ever brought to Europe of the "great isle Magaster,"

or Madagascar, and of Zensibar or Zanzibar.[27]

[Footnote 27: This new knowledge had been really gained from the gradual spread of the Arab settlements down the south-east coast of Africa, during four centuries, from Guardafui, the Cape of spices, to the Channel of Mozambique.]

Of Polo's account of Hindu customs,--self-immolation and especially Suttee, of Caste, of the Brahminical "thread with one hundred and four beads by which to pray"; of their etiquette in eating, drinking, birth, marriage, and death--only the simple fact can be noticed here, that the first serious and direct Christian account of India, as of China, is also among the most accurate and well judged, and that both in what he says and what he leaves unsaid, Messer Marco is a true Herodotus of the Middle Ages.

But not only does his account discover for Europe the extreme east and south of Asia; in his last chapter he returns to the Tartars, and after adding a few words on the nomades of the central plains, gives us our first "Latin" account of Siberia, "where are found great white bears, black foxes, and sables; and where are great lakes, frozen except for a few months in the year, and crossed in sledges by the fur-traders."

Beyond this the Obscure Land reaches to the furthest North, "near which is Russia, where for the most of winter the sun appears not, and the air is thick and dark as betimes in the morning with us, where the men are pale and squat and live like the beasts, and where on the East men come again to the Ocean Sea and the islands of the Falcons."

The work of Marco Polo is the high-water mark of mediaeval land travel; the extension of Christendom after him was mainly by the paths of the sea; the Roman missions to the Tartars and to Malabar, vigorously and stubbornly pressed as they were, ended in unrelieved collapse; only by the revolt and resurrection of the Russian kingdom did the European world permanently and markedly expand on the side of Asia. But a crowd of missionaries followed the first traders to Cathay and to Mangi--Friar Odoric, John de Monte Corvino, John de Cora; statesmen like Marignolli the Papal Legate, sight-seers like Mandeville followed these; Bishop Jorda.n.u.s of Capua worked for years in Coulam near Cape Comorin (_c._ 1325-35); the martyrdom of four friars on April 1, 1322, at Tana, in India, became one of the great commemorations of the Latin Church; there seemed no cause why Christian missions which had won north and north-east Europe should not win central and eastern Asia, whose peoples seemed as indifferent, as agnostic, as our own Norse or English pagans.

"The fame of the Latins," says Jorda.n.u.s, about 1330--and he is borne out by Marino Sanuto--"is greater in India than among ourselves. Here our arrival is always looked for, and said to be predicted in their books.

Once gain Egypt and launch a fleet even of two galleys on this sea and the battle is won." As Egypt could not be gained by arms, it was turned by seamanship. Before Polo returned from China, the coasting of Africa had begun, and Italian mariners were already in search of the longer way to the East.

But there is no work of land travel after that of Messer Marco which really adds anything decisive to European knowledge before the fifteenth century; the advance of trade intercourse between India and the Italian Republics, the gradual liberation of Russia the use made of the caravan routes by some of the most active of the Western clergy, are the chief notes of the time between the Polos and Prince Henry; and the flimsy fabrications of Mandeville--"of all liars that type of the first magnitude"--would be fairly left without a word even in a minute history of discovery, if he had not, like Ktesias with Herodotus, won a hearing for himself and drawn men's minds away from the truth-telling original that he travestied, by the sheer force of impudence.

The Indian travels of the Italian Nicolo Conti and the Russian merchant Athanasius Nikitin belong to a later time, to the age of the Portuguese voyages; they are not part of the preparation for our central subject, they are only a somewhat obscure parallel to that subject.

For in the later Middle Ages the chief interest lies elsewhere. The expansion of Christendom in the fourteenth century, and still more in the fifteenth (Prince Henry's own), is the story of the ventures and the successes, not so much of landsmen, as of mariners.

CHAPTER IV.

MARITIME EXPLORATION.

CIRCA 1250-1410.

Italian, Catalan, French, and English sailors were the forerunners of the Portuguese in the fourteenth century, and the latter years of the thirteenth. And as in land travel, so in maritime, the republics of Italy, Amalphi, Pisa, Venice, and Genoa, were the leaders and examples of Europe. Just as the Italian Dante is the first great name in the new literatures of the West, so the Italian Dorias and Vivaldi and Malocelli are the first to take up again the old Greek and Phoenician enterprise in the ocean. Since Hanno of Carthage and Pharaoh Necho's Tyrians, there had been nothing in the nature of a serious trial to find a way round Africa, and even the knowledge of the Western or Fortunate Islands, so clear to Ptolemy and Strabo, had become dim. The Vikings and their crusader-followers had done nothing south of Gibraltar Straits.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE S.W., OR AFRICAN SECTION OF THE HEREFORD MAP. C.

1275-1300. (SEE LIST OF MAPS)]

But while the Crusades were still dragging along a weary and hopeless warfare under St. Louis of France and Prince Edward of England, discovery began again in the Atlantic. In 1270 Lancelot Malocello found the Canaries; in 1281 or 1291 the Genoese galleys of Tedisio Doria and the Vivaldi, trying to "go by sea to the ports of India to trade there,"

reached Gozora or Cape Non in Barbary, the southern Ultima Thule, and according to a later story "sailed the Sea of Ghinoia (Guinea) to a city of aethiopia," where even legend lost sight of them, for in 1312 nothing more had been heard. From the frequent and emphatic references to this attempt in the literature of the later Middle Ages, it is clear that the daring Genoese drew upon themselves the attention of the learned and mercantile worlds, as much as one would naturally expect. For these men are the pioneers of Christian explorations in the southern world--the precursors of all the ocean voyages that led to the discoveries of Prince Henry, Da Gama, Columbus, and Magellan,--the first who directly challenged the disheartening theories of geographers, such as Ptolemy, the inaction and traditionalism of the Arabs, and the elaborate falsities of story tellers, who, in the absence of real knowledge, had a grand opening for terrible fairy tales.

The first age, if so it may be called, of South Atlantic and African voyages was purely Italian; the second was chiefly marked by the efforts of the Spanish States to equip fleets and send out explorers under Genoese captains. In 1317 the Genoese Emmanuel Pessanha became Admiral of Portugal; in 1341 three ships manned by Portuguese and "other Spaniards" with some Italians put out from Lisbon in search of Malocello's "Rediscovered" islands, granted by the Pope to Don Luis of Spain in a Bull of November 15, 1334, and now described, from the original letters of Florentine merchants and partners in the venture of 1341, by Boccaccio. "Land was found on the fifth day after leaving the Tagus" (July 1); the fleet stayed till November, and then brought back four natives and products of the islands. The chief pilot thought these were near nine hundred miles from Seville, and we may fully suppose that the archipelago of thirteen, now first explored and described, represents the Fortunate Islands of Greek geography, the Canaries of modern maps, and that the five chief islands with their naked but not quite savage people, with excellent wood houses, and flocks of goats, palms, and figs, gardens and corn patches, rocky mountains and pine forests, were our Ferro, Palma, Gomera, Grand Canary, and Teneriffe. The last they took to be thirty thousand feet high, with its white scarped sides looking like a fortress, but terrified at signs of enchantment they did not dare to land, and returned to Spain, leaving the Islands of the Rediscovered to be visited as a convenient slave depot by merchants and pirates from the Peninsula till the Norman Conquest of Bethencourt in 1402.

The voyage of 1341 gained much by attempting little; the Catalan voyage of 1346, which followed close upon it, was something of a return to the wilder and larger schemes of the first Genoese. On August 10, 1346, Jayme Ferrer left Majorca "to go to the River of Gold," but of the said galley, says the Catalan map of 1375, no news has since been heard. On the same map, however, the explorers' boat is sketched off the "Cape Finisterre of west Africa," and there is, after all, some ground for supposing this to be nothing more than a mercantile venture to the Gold Coast of Guinea, which was becoming known to the traders of Nismes, Ma.r.s.eilles, and the Christian Mediterranean by the caravan traffic across the Sahara. Even Prince Henry began in the same way; Guinea was his half-way house for India.

About the same date (_c._ 1350) as the Catalan voyage is the Book of the Spanish Friar, "of the voyage south to the River of Gold," which gives a more than half fabulous story of travel, first by sea beyond Capes Non and Bojador, then by land across the heart of Africa to the Mountains of the Moon, the city of Melli, where dwelt Prester John, and "the Euphrates, which comes from the terrestrial Paradise," where behind some real notes of Barbary coasting, perhaps gained from the Catalans of 1346, there is little but a confused transcript of Edrisi's geography.

Yet this was one of the books which helped to fix the notion of a double Nile, Northern and Western, a Nile of Egypt and a Nile of the Blacks, with a common source in the Mountains of the Moon, upon the Christian science of the time, as the Arab geographers had fixed it upon Islam.

The next piece of Atlantic exploration was a romantic accident. In the reign of Edward III., an Englishman named Robert Machin eloped with Anne d'Arfet from Bristol (_c._ 1370), was driven from the coast of France by a north-east wind, and after thirteen days sighted an island, Madeira, where he landed. His ship was swept away by the storm, his mistress died of terror and exhaustion, and five days after Machin was laid beside her by his men, who had saved the ship's boat and now ran her upon the African coast. They were enslaved, like other Christian captives of the Barbary corsairs, but in 1416 a fellow-prisoner, one Morales of Seville, an old pilot, was ransomed with others and sent back to Spain. On his way Morales was captured by a Portuguese captain, Zarco, the servant of Prince Henry, the rediscoverer of Madeira, and through this the full story of Machin and his island, came to be known in the court of the Navigator Prince, who promptly made his gain of the new knowledge a lasting one, by the voyage of Zarco in 1420.

Last among the immediate predecessors of Prince Henry's seamen come the French. In the seventeenth century it was claimed, on newly found evidence, that between 1364 and 1410 the men of Dieppe and Rouen opened a regular trade in gold, ivory, and malaguette pepper with the coast of Guinea, and built stations at Pet.i.t Paris, Pet.i.t Dieppe, and La Mine, which they named from the precious metal found there. But all this is more than doubtful, and the genuine Norman voyage of De Bethencourt in 1402 shows us nothing but the Canaries and the north-west coast of Morocco. Cape Non, or Cape Bojador, was still the European Furthest on the African coast.

The French Seigneur was stirred up to attack the Fortunate Islands by two events. First in 1382 one Lopez, a captain of Seville sailing to Gallicia, was driven by a tempest to Grand Canary, and lived among the natives seven years till he and his men were denounced for writing home and inviting rescue. To stop this intrigue they, the "thirteen Christian brothers" whose testament reached Bethencourt twelve years later, were all ma.s.sacred. News of this and of the voyage of a Spaniard named Becarra to the same islands at the same time, reached Roch.e.l.le about 1400, and found several French adventurers ready for a trial. The chief of these, Jean de Bethencourt, Lord of Grainville, and Gadifer de la Salle, a needy knight, started in July, 1402, to conquer in the sea a new kingdom for themselves. Though the leaders quarrelled and Grand Canary beat off all attacks, the enterprise was successful in the main, and several of the islands became Christian colonies,--a first step towards the colonial empires of the great European expansion, as the record of Bethencourt's chaplains is the first chapter of modern colonial history.

But nothing is clearer in this tract than its limitations. The French colonists as late as 1425 seem to know nothing of the African coast beyond Cape Bojador; they look upon the Canaries rather as an extension of Spain and of Europe than as the beginning of a new world. They are anxious to get to the River of Gold and traffic there, but they do not know the way, save by report. De Bethencourt had been to Bojador himself, and "if things in that country are such as they are described in the Book of the Spanish Friar," he meant to open a way to the River of Gold, for, the Friar says, "it is only one hundred and fifty leagues from Cape Bojador, and the map proves the same--which is only a three days' voyage for sailing boats--whereby access would be gained to the land of Prester John, whence come so many riches." But as yet our Normans are only "eager to know the state of the neighbouring countries, both islands and _terra firma_:" they do not know the coast beyond the "Utmost Cape" of Bojador, which had taken the place of the first Arab Finisterre, Cape Non,[28] Nun, or Nam, as the limit of navigation.

[Footnote 28: Cape Non = Fish Cape. But Latini took it as = Not, "from the fact that beyond it there is _no_ return possible." And so the rhyme "Who pa.s.s Cape Non--Must turn again, _or else begone_" (lit. "_or not_,"

_i.e._, will not be able to return).]

We are now at the very time of Prince Henry himself; his first voyage was in 1412. De Bethencourt died in 1425, and it is quite needless to follow out at length the stories, however interesting, of sporadic navigation in other parts of the European Seas. Between 1380-95 the Venetian Zeni sailed in the service of Henry Sinclair, Earl of the Orkneys, to Greenland, and brought back fisher stories, which read like those of Central America, of its man-eating Caribs and splendid barbarism. Somewhat earlier, about 1349, Ivar Bardsen of Norway paid one of the last of Christian visits to the Arctic colonies of Greenland, the legacy of the eleventh century, now sinking into ruin; but neither of these voyages gives us any new knowledge of the Unknown which was now being pierced, not from the North and East, but from the South and West.

Both in land travel and sea voyages we have traced the progress of Western exploration and discovery up to its Hero, the real central figure both in the history of Portugal and of the European expansion. A little remains to be said on the other lines of preparation for his work in scientific theory and national development from the Age of the Crusades.

CHAPTER V.

GEOGRAPHICAL SCIENCE IN CHRISTENDOM FROM THE FIRST CRUSADES.

CIRCA 1100-1460.

Before the Crusades of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the scientific geography of Christendom, as we have seen, was mainly a borrowed thing. From the ninth century to the time of the Mediaeval and Christian Renaissance, in the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries, the Arabs were the recognised heirs of Greek science, and what Franks or Latins knew of Ptolemy or Strabo was either learnt or corrected in the schools of Cordova and Bagdad.

But when the Northmen and the Holy War with Islam had once thoroughly aroused the practical energies of Christendom, it began to expand in mind as well as in empire, and in the time of Prince Henry, in the fifteenth century, a Portuguese could say: "Our discoveries of coasts and islands and mainland were not made without foresight and knowledge.

For our sailors went out very well taught, and furnished with instruments and rules of _astrology_ and geometry, things which all mariners and map-makers must know."

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE WORLD ACCORDING TO MARINO SANUTO. C. 1306.

(SEE LIST OF MAPS)]