A Wind From the North (22 page)

Prince Henry heard further confirmation of the rich land of the Negroes that lay to the south, and how the Tuaregs raided them, carrying off the prisoners for sale to the merchants who came from Tunis. Fernandes told him that desert travel was rather like life at sea. The camel caravans were guided by the wind, the stars, and the flights of birds. Sometimes they would be traveling for days on end between one well and another, scorched at noon and frozen at night, for the desert got very cold as soon as the sun had set. But it was not all desolation; life existed in this strange world.

“There are many ostriches,” said Fernandes, “antelopes and gazelles, partridges and hares as well. And the swallows which leave our country in the summer pass the winter among these sands. So do many other small birds.” But he had watched the storks flying overhead, going south, even farther south. “They go to the Land of the Negroes and pass the winter there.”

The Portuguese were on the verge of breaking through into this long-sought country. Only Henry’s insistence that they should carry on had forced them as far as the Bay of Arguim and its populated shore. Now all the signs were that year by year they were leaving the barren desert behind them, and were nearing fertile land. Fernandes’s account of his travels served to confirm other reports that Henry had been receiving ever since Adahu had first come to Sagres. There was no longer any doubt that not so many miles ahead lay a great river—the western Nile, he believed it to be—and possibly, not so far beyond that, the southernmost point of Africa.

It is important to remember that Prince Henry’s conceptions of Africa were largely based on the stories of Arab geographers. The Arabs believed that the Senegal River originated in a lake in Central Africa, and that this was also the source of the Egyptian Nile. For this reason the Senegal was known as the western Nile. Prince Henry probably dreamed that by Christianizing this river up to its source, he would be able to link up with Prester John, or the Christian King of Abyssinia in his kingdom on the eastern Nile. By 1460, the year of his death, he may well have been under the impression that the end was in sight and that, after a few more voyages, Africa would be rounded. By this time the caravels had passed the Senegal, doubled Cape Verde, and were off the mouth of the River Gambia. But it was not, in fact, until 1487 that Bartolomew Dias, a descendant of one of Prince Henry’s most skilled navigators, rounded the Cape of Good Hope and burst into the Indian Ocean.

It was in 1444 that Denis Dias, a Lisbon noble and an ancestor of the famous Bartolomew, discovered the green world that lay beyond the desert. Dias was older than most of Prince Henry’s captains (he had been at the court of King John), but “he was unwilling to let himself grow soft in well-being and repose, for he was a man who wanted to see new things.”

Denis Dias was given command of a caravel, and it is worth noting that from about 1442 onward, we hear no further mention of barchas or barinales. The ideal vessel for the Atlantic and for the exploration of Africa had been evolved, and caravels were building fast in the yards of Lagos, Lisbon, and Porto. In Madeira too, the colonists were felling trees and building the new design of boat on the beaches of Funchal and Machico. Wood from Madeira was beginning to supplement the timber of Portugal, and in the Azores the pines were already growing that would furnish later generations with planking for their ships.

Denis Dias scorned the easy pickings of the Bay of Arguim. As he sailed past, he could see other ships at anchor, busy sending raiding parties ashore. But he kept on south and dropped down the coast to pass Cape Resgate. Cape Blanco was 300 miles astern, when on a fair day he reached Cape Verde—the Green Cape.

The twin humps of Les Mamelles, “The Breasts,” which broke the sky line above the cape, were pale with grass. All innocence, a native canoe came paddling out to meet them.

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These were golden years. The troubles of the regency seemed over, and every new cape won out of the ocean helped to efface the memory of Tangier. This was true victory, this discovery of a continent. It was a victory of the spirit as well, for the prisoners were saved from that hell reserved for heathen, and converted to the true faith. Guilds of merchant-adventurers were formed in Lisbon and Lagos, and the shipyards were busy with orders for caravels. There was no longer anyone to be heard deploring the Prince’s extravagance on useless expeditions.

Courted and flattered, he was greeted with acclamation when he rode between Sagres and Raposeira, or through the streets of Lagos. In 1442 King Henry VI of England had made Prince Henry a knight of the Garter. He was not changed by success. In the year that Denis Dias discovered Cape Verde he was fifty, an age at which men are set in their characters. For many years now he had drunk no wine, and he fasted almost half of every year. As he grew older he became even more devout. He “was obedient to all the commands of the Holy Church and attended her offices with great devotion. In his private chapel these offices were performed with as much solemnity and ceremony as in the chancel of any great cathedral… .”

Such a man was unlikely to be spoiled by success, any more than he had been deterred by failure. His dream was always of the next island—of the headland beyond the one that could be seen. In his dealings with the men who served him he remained just, and astonishingly patient—even when he saw that most of those who were commissioning caravels, and asking for his license to sail to Africa, were interested solely in their own profit. “To such a temper, all activities divorced from religion are brutal or dead, but none are too mean to be beneath or too great to be above it… .” Prince Henry never made the error of despising the human material through which he worked. Often, though, he must have wished that he could make the merchants, captains, and sailors see that peaceful commerce was preferable to warlike raiding parties.

But now that the whole coastline from Cape Blanco to Cape Verde was roused against the foreign invader, there seemed to be no other solution than to impose peace by force. Once that had been done, it would be possible for a permanent trading station to be established. The death of Gongalo de Cintra brought matters to a head. A delegation from Lagos, led by Langarote, asked for permission to send a strong force into the Bay of Arguim to subdue the islands.

“If you will allow us,” they said, “we will arm our ships against them, and by death or imprisonment break their strength and power.” They did not forget to add, “And if God wills that this undertaking ends in victory we shall be able to take a valuable number of captives.”

The argument was cynical, but sound. Arguim Bay was the first and only place within a thousand miles of Portugal where ships could safely anchor, careen, repair, and draw water. On the barren coast of Morocco there was no other natural harbor. It was true that the caravels now used Madeira as a regular port of call, but Madeira was rapidly being left behind. What was needed was a base on the mainland of Africa, and Arguim Bay was the answer.

On August 10, 1445, a fleet of twenty-six ships sailed from Lagos and Lisbon to carry out the pacification of the bay. Times had changed greatly since the days when one or two ships were all that could be mustered for the Prince’s voyages. Their arrival off the coast was a welcome sight to three other caravels, which had preceeded them. The sailors cheered when they saw the dipping lateen sails lift over the horizon.

The combined force soon cleared Arguim Island, the Isle of Herons, and the other off-lying islets and coastal regions of the bay. A number of captives were taken and sent back to Portugal on ships returning home. Within a year or two the fort on Arguim Island began to rise, the first of so many similar forts and trading posts that would mark Portuguese progress round the globe from Africa, to India, to the Spice Islands, and as far east as China. The policy they inaugurated in Arguim Bay was one that would be followed by the other nations of Europe. A century or so later nearly all the islands and continental coastlines of the world would be studded with these small stone-built fortifications, which symbolized power and trade borne on the lifelines of the sea.

It was nearly autumn when the great raid on Arguim Bay came to an end, and most of the ships turned for home. Only six caravels, one of them under Langarote, who had played so large a part in financing the expedition, decided to continue on south to the land of the Negroes. Their wonder at the new coastline and at the marvels that confronted them every day still speaks through the quiet voice of Azurara. The historian, who had never been to these far shores, caught something of the excitement that gripped the men whose reports he heard. It was not only new bays and inlets, but new birds and beasts and fish that they were discovering. They watched the birds that had come south from Europe building their nests in Africa, and thus, as with the rounding of Cape Bojador, centuries-old legends about the migration of birds were dispelled at a blow. They saw the hombills, “the neck so great that it can contain the leg of a man… .” They saw flamingos like elegant dancers, idling over their reflections in the lagoons; and curiosities like the remora, or suckerfish, which attaches itself to a large parent fish by the “crown” in its head.

After the salty cleanness of the sea wind and the dry dust of the Sahara, the scent of the fertile land seemed heavy, rich with fruits. “… On coming to it by sea the perfume gave them the impression that they had been carried into a beautiful orchard.”

So they drew near the mouth of the Senegal, and a long way out from the shore they could see where the river laid its mark across the Atlantic. It stained the blue waves with a broad muddy track, and the change of color made the sailors think that they were nearing shoal ground. The leadsman ran forward and took a cast—no bottom! And then, happening to wipe his mouth with the back of his hand, he paused.

“Here is a new marvel!” he cried. “The water is fresh!” They lowered a wooden bucket over the side.

“Sweet water! We must be near the mouth of the River Nile! ” The caravels turned and tacked toward the coast, following the brown stain of the river. It was the rainy season when they discovered the Senegal, and they had no difficulty in negotiating the river mouth. Had they arrived a month or so earlier, they would have been confronted by a great sand bar cutting them off entirely from the entrance. (Annually this bar builds up in the dry season, and annually it is washed away again when the rains come.)

Beyond the Senegal they sailed on south until they reached Cape Verde, and there they saw the sails of another caravel ahead of them. Landing on a small island near the cape, they found carved upon a tree the arms and the device of Prince Henry. It was a way the caravel captains had of telling their successors that the ships of the Prince had already marked and charted this point. Nowhere in his life’s story does one feel more deeply the singular greatness of Prince Henry than in this scene of men landing on the beach of a tropical island off West Africa and seeing his arms carved upon a giant tree. “Talent de bien faire!” If ever a man justified his motto and aspirations, Prince Henry did. The words of William Mickle, the eighteenth-century translator of Camoens’s Lusiads, are not exaggerated: “What is Alexander in all his glories crowned with trophies at the head of his army, compared with Henry contemplating the ocean from his window on the rock of Sagres?”

The caravel that Langarote and his ships had seen belonged to a nephew of Joao Gongalves Zarco, the discoverer of Madeira. Zarco had built and fitted out the ship at his own expense. Unlike most others at the time, he had told his nephew to sail as far south as he could, and to bring back a useful report of the country to Prince Henry. In this way Zarco repaid the Prince for his trust in him in the early days, and for his governorship of Madeira. Zarco’s nephew sailed on beyond Cape Verde, and about sixty miles to the south reached a cape, which he called the Cape of Masts, because it was covered with stark palm trees that had been stripped in a tropical tornado. Prince Henry’s ships were now only about 14 degrees, 840 miles, north of the equator.

The dangers and hazards attendant on these early voyages are nowhere more clearly seen than in the tragic story of Nuno Tristao. The first man on record to have commanded a caravel, the discoverer of Cape Blanco and of Arguim Bay, Tristao was the ideal explorer—the man who is not content to rest until he has gone farther than all others. He sailed from Portugal in 1446, again determined to bring back news of unknown territory. Cape Bojador, Cape Blanco, Cape Verde—all the old landmarks were left behind. Day after day he worked his ship farther down the coast, making use of the diurnal onshore and offshore winds. He dropped the Cape of Masts astern and came down on a long, low coast, dense with umbrella trees and palms. A bald cape broke the western end of the shore, and patches of red cliff shone against the dark green of the jungle. The mouth of a great river beckoned him.

Dropping anchor just off the shore, and eager to explore the estuary, Nuno Tristao lowered two boats. He and most of his crew got into them and made off upstream on the flood of the tide. The trees closed over their heads. They saw for the first time the green darkness of Africa, and the river-light pearly with heat haze.

It was there, in the humid darkness, that Nuno Tristao came to the end of all his voyages. The two Portuguese rowing boats had not gone far upstream when they found themselves surrounded by canoes. A shower of arrows whispered through the air. They made a light sound like the mosquitoes of the delta, but they were twice as deadly. Nuno Tristao and his crew had discovered the mouth of the River Gambia—and the natives of that area steeped their arrowheads in poison. These were no simple natives like those of Arguim Bay, who could be rounded up like sheep. The inhabitants of the Gambia delta had no doubt heard, if not of the white men, at any rate of the Berber slavers who preyed along their boundaries. To them all strangers were enemies, and this first encounter proved that these white men were as mortal as any other.