A Wind From the North (20 page)

Now, out of the five sons whom Queen Philippa had borne, only Peter and Henry were left. Prince Peter, busy with affairs of state, alternated between Coimbra, Lisbon, and Porto. His enigmatic motto Desir had led him a long way from the youthful triumph at Ceuta, throughout most of the Near East and almost all the courts of Europe, to bring him finally to the regency of Portugal. He was not ambitious for power, a reluctant philosopher-statesman rather, who would have been happier in his library than in court and council.

If Peter was deeply moved by the pathos and shame of Fernando’s death in Fez, he had the comfort of a wife and children. It is not difficult to imagine the feelings of Prince Henry, alone on the promontory of Sagres. The words that Shakespeare makes the Duchess of Gloucester say to John of Gaunt might almost have been written for him:

Ah, Gaunt! His blood was thine: that bed, that womb,

That metal, that self-mould, that fashion’d thee 

Made him a man; and though thou liv’st and breath’st 

Yet art thou slain in him… .

From 1443, the year of Fernando’s death, he rarely ventured outside Sagres and the province of Algarve. It was as if he were determined to efface the tragedy of Tangier in a victory not only over the ocean and Africa, but over himself as well.

The fame of Henry’s ocean voyages, the news that his sailors were uncovering the coastline of the unknown continent, had now spread through the courts of Europe. It was rumored that far to the south on a lonely headland at the end of Portugal, something strange was taking place. Ships were being launched into the immensity of the Atlantic and were coming back with reports of unknown islands, of a huge coastline, and of races of men whom no one had ever seen before.

Something of the jealously guarded mystery that today surrounds Cape Canaveral was attached to Sagres. The knowledge gained in the Portuguese voyages was closely kept from the seamen of other nations. The additions to the charts were known only to the Prince, his captains, and his cartographers. The courses steered, the instruments used, even the new types of ship, were all Portuguese secrets.

In 1443 the mysterious headland attracted a German nobleman, Balthasar, a courtier in the household of the Emperor Frederick III. Throughout history the Germans have been drawn as if by a magnet to the sun and the south, and Balthasar was no exception. He had a good passport to Prince Henry’s affections, for he had taken part in the attack on Ceuta and had been knighted for his services on that day. Balthasar had a favor to ask of the Prince. Might he be allowed to go on one of the voyages down to Africa? He wanted to see once more that strange continent, and, above all, he wanted to see something of the ocean. He had heard of its great storms. He had seen a little bad weather during those days when the Portuguese invasion fleet had nearly come to grief in the Strait of Gibraltar, but this time he hoped to see the Atlantic in the full sweep of its fury. A romantic character, like many of his race, he had courage too, as he hoped to prove again on a voyage into the unknown.

Prince Henry readily granted his request. Balthasar was the kind of man whom he was only too pleased to have in his service. He often wished that there were more noblemen in the Portuguese court ready to give up pleasure and place seeking for the profound excitement of going where no man had ever been before. Balthasar was given a berth in the ship belonging to Antao Gongalves, who was on his way back to the Rio de Ouro to put Adahu, the Berber chief, ashore and to receive a ransom for his return. Adahu had been pining for his native country for many months. He had no more information of use to the Prince, and he had assured the Portuguese that his people would be happy to pay a ransom for him as well as for two young Berbers who had been captured with him.

In the early summer Gongalves set off from Lagos in his barinal. There was room aboard for about twelve men—a small covered forecastle forward for the sailors, and cramped quarters aft for himself, his sailing master, and his guest, Balthasar. They spread an awning over the deck abaft the mainmast, and there Adahu and the two young Moorish boys spent most of their time. The barinal was an oared vessel, but she also set two square sails, one from the mainmast and the other from a small foremast near the decked-in forecastle. With the northeasterlies blowing from astern they had no need to row, and in the warm summer weather there was no discomfort in having to live mostly on the open deck. As they left Lagos, to the shouts and cheers of the dockside workers and the flutter of scarves from the houses, Balthasar recaptured something of the emotion he had felt that day, twenty-eight years before, when he had sailed from Lisbon for Ceuta. The sounds of the ship brought back the old memories. All the time there was the purring lisp of water, the creak of the tackles that restrained the full-bellied sails, and that strange smell of a sailing boat—a compound of tar, wet rope, canvas, and pitch pine.

They ran out from the coast and dropped the town astern of them. Looking back, he saw the shine of its white houses and the tawny walls of the two forts that guarded the approaches. Ahead lay the ocean. The barinal went well downwind, but, as no doubt Gongalves explained to his German guest, coming back to Portugal was another thing altogether. The seamen had to spend back-breaking hours sweating over the oars, while the master had to use every trick of current, and work every swirl round bay or headland that could help them against the wind. The caravel was the ship for this African work, he was told. He would see one later in the year when Nuno Tristao came down to join them off the Rio de Ouro.

Balthasar’s wish to see a gale was soon granted. (One cannot help wondering whether he had been rash enough to mention this hope within earshot of the crew. He would certainly have earned the reputation of a Jonah if he had.) One evening, when they were well south of Portugal, they ran out of their favorable wind. An ominous swell began to lift under their bows, a slow deep-breathing movement of the ocean. It came from the southwest. An apricot light flickered along the cloud base, and the sea was the color of gun metal. It may be that Balthasar heard some of the old sailors’ lore about wind and weather— sayings like those that King Edward had once collected and set down among his writings: “When the new moon is red, it signifies much wind,” and “If the moon sparkle like the water raised by oars, it means there will soon be a storm.”

They labored with difficulty into a rising sea, and then, a few hours later, the wind began to sound in the rigging. Before many hours were out, the small boat was staggering in a big sea. The spray whipped over the bulwarks like a handful of flint chips slung against the face. The waves gradually built up and came with a sliding rush, seeming to stand high over the boat’s mast. There was that numbing minute when it seemed as if the barinal
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s stem would never rise to the great mass of water, and then the quick glissade as she ran down the steep face of the sea. The sails were lashed down, and the oars had long since been boated and stowed. They were running back now under bare poles before the wind and weather. From the stem, perched uneasily some four feet above the water, Balthasar saw twenty-foot waves that looked like smoking gray walls. He looked up, but all he could see was the wild welter of the sky, and beneath him were two thousand fathoms of ocean. The helmsman braced his feet against the thwarts, steering to keep the boat’s stem presented squarely to the following sea. Weeping streamers of nimbus cloud, the rain bearer, swept over them. Ropes parted, gear was swept from side to side in the dark rush of bilge water, and the Africans abandoned hope. Yet still the seas built up, and the wind came at them with a driving shout.

At times it seemed as if there was no hope. Only the experience of the crew, men who had learned their hard craft on the Atlantic coast, could bring them to safety. Balthasar learned the truth of the saying “It’s not the ships that count, but the men in them.” If the sailors had weakened or lost their heads, then the boat would certainly have been overwhelmed. If the helmsman had panicked as one of the great rollers swept under their stern, the barinal would have broached to. It would have been rolled over and over in the great mass of water, weighing hundreds of tons, that smoked and sizzled in every wave crest.

With their provisions ruined, and damage to boat and gear, they came running back to Portugal. The wind died, and the swell was easing by the time they raised the bleak headland of St. Vincent. Adahu and the two Berber boys were still prostrate with fear and sickness as they crossed the hundred-fathom line, and the sailors got out their oars to shape a course back to Lagos. It would be several days’ work before the damage could be made good, and it would be many years before Balthasar would forget his baptism of fire at sea. The wind’s high pipe in the rigging, the rush of great seas against their thin plank sides, the scouring rattle of rain on deck, and the sighing advance of the huge Atlantic rollers—these were things he would remember and tell to admiring circles in the Emperor’s court on his return.

He insisted on staying with the ship when they set out again. He had been through a storm at sea, and now he was determined to see the hot sands of the Sahara and to pass the cape that had once marked the end of the world. This time they had no trouble, and Balthasar saw the flying fish rise in the fair weather, and heard the eternal rumor of the cliff wash off Bojador. The sea birds spread their wet wings to the sun along deserted beaches. He learned the dull, woody taste of water that has been long in cask, and the monotony of biscuit, salted cod, and meat—broken occasionally by a ration of fruit, or fresh fish. During the hot hours after noon, he lay and watched the shadow of the awning sway like a pendulum across the deck to the boat’s steady roll.

One day Antao Gongalves pointed ahead. A long sandy arm ran out from the coast, and inside it lay the deep well-sheltered anchorage of the Rio de Ouro. Balthasar was the first man other than a Portuguese to see this new world. They quickly lowered a boat and set Adahu ashore to arrange his ransom and that of the two young boys. For a whole week they waited swinging to the tides in the blue bay, while the sailors fished or went after the sea lions that lived in great colonies along the sandy inlet. Adahu did not return, and the Portuguese cursed themselves for having put their trust in a heathen. Then a caravan made its way across the desert and signaled them. There was no ransom for the man who had sat in Prince Henry’s company and told him all he knew about the continent. (Perhaps Adahu felt he had more than bought his freedom by giving away this information to foreigners.) But ten adult Negroes were handed over in return for the two young Berbers. Some gold dust, a native shield, and a number of ostrich eggs completed the transaction. Gongalves could, after all, feel pleased with the result of his voyage. He was not only the first man to bring back Negro slaves; he was the first to bring back gold from the new territory.

The attitude of Christian Europe to the slave trade is something that seems puzzling and profoundly depressing to a modem. With what justification could Christians take slaves back into their countries and feel apparently no twinge of conscience? Since it was the Portuguese who began to import West African slaves into Europe and into their colonies, and since Prince Henry has been harshly criticized by some historians on this score, it is important to try to understand the fifteenth-century outlook.

To begin with, slavery was nothing new. It had always existed in Africa and among the Arabs—and still does to this day. A raiding African tribe would appropriate what women they fancied from their neighbors, and would then sell the rest, together with the men and children, to the traders who came down from Morocco. The Roman Empire had been founded on slavery, and Christianity had grown up in a society that accepted the slave as the basic machinery around which civilization revolved. Slavery was a hazard that every Christian risked who sailed in Mediterranean waters, where the Moorish pirates had their eyes on the value of the captives almost as much as the cargo of a ship. Every man who fought at Ceuta or Tangier knew just what his fate would be if he were taken prisoner—unless he could find a ransom. We know from the story of Prince Fernando that there was no hope of anything but a life of slavery unless a ransom was forthcoming.

Prince Henry’s own attitude to the slave trade is made abundantly clear in Azurara’s chronicle. He knew that there was little or no hope of converting the Moors from the religion of Mahomet, but he saw every heathen Negro as a potential Christian. His aim was to create a Christian kingdom in Africa. It has been succinctly put by E. J. Payne in the Cambridge Modern History: “Dom Henrique was not a mere slave-trader. The capture of slaves was destined to serve a greater purpose— the conversion of Bilad Ghana (Guinea) into a Christian dependency of Portugal, to be administered by the military order of Jesus Christ … the project was in substance similar to that carried out by the Teutonic Order in conquering and christianising the heathen Prussians.”

When the first Portuguese ships returned with Negro prisoners aboard them, there was rejoicing in their conversion and acceptance of the Christian faith. There was no conception of “color bar.” The Africans were freely permitted to intermarry with the Portuguese, always provided that such marriages were Christian ones. It was not until much later that a cynical approach to the slave trade infected nearly all of Europe. But it was traders from Liverpool and Bristol, from Spain, and from the Breton ports of France who made the slave trade a stain on the European conscience. These later adventurers had no interest in their unfortunate captives except for their cash value in the slave markets of the West Indies and America. This was never the outlook of Prince Henry, whatever his individual captains may have felt on the subject.

It was in this same year, 1443, while Balthasar was embarked with Antao Gongalves in his barinal, that Nuno Tristao set out again in his caravel. Tristao was the kind of captain Henry admired, for on every voyage he managed to go a little farther than before. He was not content to stay in familiar anchorages like the Rio de Ouro, and this time he went on to pass Cape Blanco, and to sail into one of the largest bays on the west coast of Africa. Levrier Bay, which he discovered, is about thirty miles wide, with Cape Blanco at the northern end and the low hump of Cape St. Anna at the southern. Fierce tides disturb the bay, and even when the wind is light, the water is lumpy and snarls with tide rips. When the trade wind blows strongly from the north, the air is full of driven sand, the capes vanish, and leading marks are obscured.