A Wind From the North (12 page)

The two-masted caravel was very similar to the modem ketch rig, with its divided sail area, and the ketch—as amateur sailors can confirm—is perhaps the best design for oceangoing small boats. In windward work, the caravel was far superior to any sailing vessel of its time. It was this that enabled Prince Henry’s ships not only to coast down Africa, but also to sail back again against the prevailing winds. Once Cape Bojador had been rounded, and once the caravel had been evolved, its windward ability must have increased the sailors’ confidence. They no longer felt that they were condemned to blow down in front of the wind without hope of return.

What instruments and what charts had these early seafarers? For centuries, Mediterranean sailors had practiced coastal navigation in known waters. Rarely out of sight of land, they had reasonably accurate charts of the Mediterranean, and they relied on those three stand-bys of pilotage—log, lead, and look-out. For centuries too, seamen had been running between the Mediterranean and northern countries like England, Holland, and the Baltic states. Again, the shape of the Atlantic coastline of Europe was well known. But when it came to venturing south into the Atlantic, along a coastline of which there was no verbal record—let alone any charts—the problems became increasingly difficult. As the ships ran ever farther and farther south, the question of knowing their latitude accurately became all-important.

In the Mediterranean, most of the sailing was east and west. The sea being comparatively narrow from north to south, latitude had never been a major problem. Again, on the northern route between the Spanish peninsula and Britain, the ship’s captain knew that so long as he did not diverge too far west from his north-south line, he was bound to sight the expected coast. (It was a divergence too far west that, if one credits the story, led to Robert Machin’s discovery of Madeira.) But latitude was a problem that Henry’s navigators had to solve. Longitude did not trouble them so much—and longitude in any case would not be accurately measured until the eighteenth century, when the English horologist John Harrison perfected his marine chronometer. Apart from the need to know their latitude, ships’ captains also had to know their compass course.

By Prince Henry’s time the compass was quite efficient. Many countries have laid claim to being the birthplace of the magnetic compass—Arabia, China, France, Greece, Italy, and Palestine, among them. All that can be said with any certainty is that it probably originated in the Orient and that the knowledge of it infiltrated from the Levant throughout the European maritime nations. England, curiously enough, which has never made any claims to being the compass’s country of origin, has left us the first written description of a compass. It is to be found in the work of the twelfth-century monk Alexander Neckham. In two of his treatises he describes a pivoted compass needle, and it is probable that he gained his information at the University of Paris, where he studied between 1180 and 1186.

Prince Henry’s navigators would have had a simple magnetic compass in a binnacle—bitacula is the Portuguese word, probably from the Latin habitaculum, “a little dwelling.” They were also familiar with the constancy of the Pole Star as a northern reference point, for men had been using the Pole Star in navigation since classical times.

The compass in a caravel was kept in a small wooden binnacle, lit at night by a lamp burning whale or olive oil. Nearby, and often enclosed in the binnacle itself, was the hourglass— the only time-keeping device then available at sea. Clocks had been in use for over a century, but they were still rarities —and still totally unsuited for use in a small vessel. A ship’s boy kept a watch alongside the helmsman. It was his duty to maintain the lamps and the binnacle light, as well as to watch the hourglass; reversing it when the sand had run out and calling out the hour. A grave offense, and punishable by flogging, was the trick of “warming the glass,” when the boy either held the hourglass near the lamp or put it inside his shirt to warm.

The result was that the thin glass expanded, the sand ran through faster—and the long, tedious watch was shortened.

The Pole Star was known to sailors as the Stella Maris (Star of the Sea), and this name was often given to the compass itself. Felix Faber, a monk writing about twenty years after the death of Prince Henry, described a voyage he made to Palestine, and the way in which the vessel was steered.
⁶⁶
… They have a compass, a Stella Maris, near the mast, and a second one on the topmast deck of the poop. Beside it all night long a lantern burns. There is a man constantly watching the Star (the compass card) and he never takes his eyes off it. He sings out a pleasant tune, telling that all goes well, and in the same chant directs the man at the tiller, telling him how to turn the rudder. The helmsman dares not move the tiller in the slightest degree, except at the orders of the man who watches the Stella Maris…

If the compass was a familiar instrument in Prince Henry’s time, it was still held in some awe by the superstitious seamen. Many legends were attached to the lodestone itself. If it was placed beneath the pillow of an adulterous wife, it would make her confess her guilt. It was also used in the treatment of various illnesses, and was reputed to be efficacious as a contraceptive. It was sometimes maintained that the lodestone’s powers were nullified by garlic, and it had even been suggested that sailors should be forbidden to eat that sovereign plant, so dear to Latin hearts.

If the compass still retained something of its aura of legend, the craft of the navigator was suitably dignified by being termed an art and mystery. Reasonably accurate charts of the Mediterranean and of the Atlantic seaboard of Europe had been current for a good many years. The oldest surviving maritime chart is the Carta Pisana dated about 1275. Even by this time, a scale and a wind rose were provided by the cartographer, so we know that a ruler and dividers had already become part of the navigator’s equipment.

By the early fourteenth century the chartmakers of Genoa were well known throughout Europe, and the Catalan Jews of Mallorca were equally famous for their scientific knowledge and accurate draftsmanship. An outstanding figure of the period just prior to Prince Henry was Abraham Cresques of Mallorca, described as “Magister Mappamundorum et Buxa-loruma “master of charts and compasses.” His son Jaime Cresques was one of the leading cartographers whom Henry induced to come and settle at Sagres. Jaime Cresques joined the Prince’s court a year or so after the discovery of Madeira. From then on he was engaged in research, in chart making, and in helping the Prince to correlate the information brought in by his sea captains. There is no doubt that he would also have brought with him from Mallorca mathematical tables, similar to those mentioned by Ramon Lull a century earlier, with which—by the calculation of rhumb lines—sailors could work out their mileage while at sea.

Henry’s captains and navigators had in the seaman’s astrolabe a fairly efficient instrument for obtaining their position by sun or star altitudes. Like so much else connected with the mathematical sciences, the astrolabe may have originated with the Arabs. We know from Marco Polo in the early fourteenth century that the Arabs had long been using a simple instrument called the kamal for star observations.

The astronomer’s astrolabe was a costly and elaborate but accurate instrument. It was well known by the fifteenth century, but was unsuited for use at sea. From it was developed a seaman’s version, with a simple scale of degrees for measuring the height of sun or star. It was this type of instrument that the Portuguese navigators used in their Atlantic and African explorations.

This was the beginning of a new era of navigation. At Lagos, Lisbon, or Sagres, the navigator became familiar with the tools of his trade, and took altitudes of the sun or stars at his home port. Then, as he sailed south, he noted the changing altitudes at various points along his route. As new capes, headlands, and bays were discovered, so Prince Henry’s navigators “fixed” them for latitude. At a later date, they were also provided with a. table of daily solar noon altitudes at their point of departure. By comparing the difference in the sun’s altitude at noon between his home port and his present position, he was able to work out his difference in latitude. For longitude he was still compelled to rely on dead reckoning—his own estimation, from log and sea knowledge, of his ship’s position.

The Portuguese navigators still hugged the coast as much as possible. Their instruments were not reliable, they were constructing their charts as they went along, and their shallow-draft vessels allowed them to work close inshore. When they came to a new point or headland, the obvious thing was to go ashore, with astrolabe and tables, and take the sun’s altitude at noon from dry land. The heaving deck of a caravel was no place for accurate measurement with an awkward instrument. Even today, with the simple modem sextant, easy astronomical tables, and accurate charts, taking a star or sun sight can be difficult in a small boat.

These were the ships and these the navigational aids with which the Portuguese opened up the world. With each new voyage, their captains were gradually learning their deep-sea trade, and their crews were growing used to the wide spaces of the unknown ocean. Yet fourteen years went by, and the success of which Prince Henry dreamed continued to evade him. Cape Bojador, the Outstretcher, still barred the way, and still his seamen maintained that beyond that point no ship could sail.

Farther from the mainland than any other group of Atlantic islands, the Azores lie 800 miles almost due west from Cape St. Vincent. They lift their rocky, volcanic heads out of the depths of the Atlantic. Part of neither Europe, nor Africa, nor America, they are the peaks of immense volcanoes rising sheer out of the sea. Like Madeira and Porto Santo, their existence had been known in the fourteenth century. But they too had remained as no more than a hazard marked on one or two charts —a hazard that had been forgotten until Prince Henry’s cartographers brought it to his notice.

It was in 1431 that he sent out Gongalo Velho Cabral, with orders to find the missing islands. It was the fair summer season with the northerly winds broad on the beam, an easy point of sailing, so seamen call it a “soldier’s wind.” Hour after hour they sailed due west into the Atlantic, and every evening the sun went down ahead of them, in line with the ship’s bows.

Several days and nights went by and the crew grew uneasy. Then, one morning, they sighted curling mists, and heard the hiss of breakers on rocks. They had chanced upon the easternmost of the Azores, the lonely barren rock of Formigas. Cabral circled the area cautiously and then put about. He returned to Sagres and reported that he had found only this rocky outcrop. He suggested that the large islands of which they had been told must be a myth. Now Gongalo Cabral was a man of courage and ability, and he had every reason to believe that the Prince’s instructions were based on solid fact. It seems more than likely, therefore, that it was a reluctant or mutinous crew that forced him to retire after this first encounter with the outriders of the Azores.

Prince Henry thanked him, rewarding him and his company for their discovery.

“But next year you must go back again,” he said. “Now that you know land exists in that part of the ocean, you must search farther.”

Rich and fertile Madeira had been discovered only after the small and somewhat disappointing island of Porto Santo. If there were rocks out there in the ocean, then that was an indication of some land mass rising to the surface. No doubt, before he left Formigas, Cabral’s sailors would have taken soundings round the rocks, and everywhere they would have reported “No bottom.” This might have convinced him that it was an isolated peak. But the absence of soundings would not really have been surprising, for the volcanic peaks of the Azores rise almost sheer out of two and a half miles of ocean.

In 1432 Cabral sailed for the second time into the summer Atlantic. He had been urged to try farther west. He made his landfall correctly—proof of the accuracy of his navigation, for Formigas is only the smallest spot in the Atlantic. (It would hardly be a disgrace for a small-boat sailor to fail to make such a landfall today.) Then they freed the sheets, and cast off a little to the southwest. Soon they saw cloud ahead of them, the soft drifting cloud that denotes land and humid earth. Twenty miles west of Formigas they found a fertile island. It was warm under the sun, barren of life save birds, but rich like Madeira in trees. Water came tumbling down the hillsides, and there were valleys where com and crops might ripen. They raised the new island on August 15, the feast of the Assumption, and they called it Santa Maria.

Santa Maria was the first of the nine principal islands of the Azores to be discovered by Prince Henry’s navigators. It may well be that Genoese, or other seamen on the northern route, had sighted the islands centuries before. The fact remains that it was not until Cabral and his successors reached them that the islands were accurately charted, made use of, and colonized. The Portuguese called them the A gores, from the word for “hawks,” for which they mistook the sea birds that were hovering over the headlands.

During the years that followed, first one island and then another was dredged out of the uncertain limits of the Atlantic. As in the case of Madeira, Prince Henry’s policy was a completely practical one. Cattle, crops, and men were sent out to populate the islands. Within a few years, not one ship, but many, grew to know the way the clouds swaggered over the mountain peaks. The men became familiar with those soft warm seas where the whale and porpoise foam out of the wave crests.

By 1457, three years before Prince Henry’s death, the last of the main islands—the northern group of Corvo and Flores —had been added to the charts. While the colonization of Madeira went steadily ahead, and while Henry was often involved in campaigns abroad or in home politics, the Azores continued to be transformed. From virgin soil, benefited by an indulgent climate, they became rich in cattle, fruit, and vines. Small towns grew up, the port of Horta in Fayal—the best natural harbor in the islands—and Villa Franca (later to be destroyed by earthquake) in San Miguel. The volcanic soil was excellent for vine growing, and in the extinct craters of the islands there were lakes of crystal-clear water. As well as whale, porpoise, and dolphin, the sea was well stocked with tunny, bonito, and mullet. The pine, introduced from Portugal, the poplar, elm, and oak took root and flourished. Life was harsh for the early settlers, and the volcanic nature of the islands often made it terrifying, but the mild climate compensated for many things. Peasant farmers found the land as easy to work as their native fields, and the fishermen learned that— except when the westerlies blew—it was ideal for coastal fishing. The islands were steep-to, gales comparatively rare, and the light land and sea breezes, drawing between one rocky island and another, made small-boat sailing easy.