A Wind From the North (13 page)

In 1433 King John of Portugal died. He was seventy-seven. His reign had been one of almost continuous success, not only on the field of battle, but also in domestic politics and in the increasing prosperity of Portugal. In some respects he resembles Henry VII of England for the way in which he welded together a nation, and created security for his country. His achievements in other spheres were equally important. He had founded some of the finest buildings in Portugal: the Church of Our Lady of Batalha, in memory of the victory of Aljubarrota; the palaces of Cintra, Lisbon, and Santarem; and the Franciscan monastery of Camota. He had reformed the country’s laws, caused the gospels to be translated into Portuguese, and had been a Latin scholar in his own right. He left behind him five sons who were respected and loved throughout the country. His private life had been happy. His death came at a moment of further achievement, when his favorite son’s ships had just uncovered new islands in the Atlantic. Legend has it that, with his last words, he exhorted Prince Henry to continue his explorations into Africa and the war against the infidel.

Henry had loved his father, but he had felt his ambition increasingly restrained by him in his later years. That canny ability to know just when “enough is enough” had served King John in good stead all his life. It had also become—to Prince Henry’s mind—a die-hard conservatism that militated against his own ambitious schemes. It was King John who had ordered him to leave Gibraltar alone after the second expedition to Ceuta. It was King John who had prevented him from making an armed expedition against the Canaries and winning them for the Portuguese crown. Now that the restraining influence of his father was removed, Prince Henry saw in his brother Edward a king who was more pliable.

After King Edward’s coronation, Henry returned once more to Sagres. He was thirty-nine years old, in the prime of his life, a man of power—Governor of Ceuta, Governor of the Algarve province, Lord of Covilham, and Duke of Viseu—and a man with a mission. In his maturity he felt even more the certainty of purpose that he had known so many years ago when, as a young prince, he had urged his father to the conquest of Ceuta. Azurara, who entered the Royal Library early in the reign of King Edward, described Prince Henry at this period of his life:

“He was a thickset man, of medium height, with large powerful limbs and thick hair. His skin was white, but the hardship and battles of life altered it as the years went by. Those who met him for the first time were struck by the austerity of his face. When he was seized by anger—which happened rarely—his expression was awe-inspiring. He had intelligence and strength of mind to a high degree, and his desire to achieve great deeds was without comparison. Avarice and lust never obtained a hold on his heart. As for the second of these vices, he was so continent that he preserved the most perfect chastity all his life. His body was virgin when it was laid in the earth. What can I say of his magnificence, which was exceptional among all the world’s princes! In his house every man of the realm who had any merit was always welcomed. This was equally the case with distinguished foreigners, for he nearly always had men from different countries in his company. Some of them came from very distant lands, and all of them held him in admiration. Nor did any of them ever leave his service without receiving many benefits.

“All his days were filled with ceaseless labor. I am sure that among all the nations of mankind one would not be able to find another man so trained in self-discipline. It would be hard to count the nights during which he never slept, and his body was so subjected to self-denial that it seemed to find a new nature for itself. His perseverance in his work was such that, even as the poets have imagined Atlas sustaining the heavens on his shoulders, so the people of Portugal regarded the labors of this prince as surpassing even the highest mountains. Things which seemed impossible to other men were rendered easy by his steady persistence. A man of excellent counsel and of authority, he was slow in certain things—perhaps because his nature was phlegmatic, or because those about him did not always understand his motives. Quiet in manner and calm in speech, he was constant in adversity and humble in prosperity.”

The ideal of the ascetic life, which Prince Henry held before him, is remote from our own age. More and more the world inclines to the view that the aim of human life is comfort, sensual pleasure, and material acquisitions. The medieval Christian belief that mortification of the flesh, asceticism, and celibacy were aids in training the spirit, tends to be regarded as a mental aberration in the twentieth century. But without some knowledge of the climate of thought in which Prince Henry was raised, it is impossible to understand him. Although the achievements of his life played an important part in the Renaissance of Europe, he was medieval in his faith. He would almost certainly have agreed with Honorius of Augsburg, who described the economic life of man as “nothing but the struggle of wolves over carrion”—Honorius, who thought that men of business could hardly be saved, for they lived by cheating and profiteering. Henry would no doubt also have agreed that “it is monasticism par excellence which, by repudiating the prizes and temptations of the material world, is the true life of religion.” If he sought a material empire in Africa, it would not be untrue to say that he sought it largely because in that way he could win souls.

It was in the summer after his father’s death that Prince Henry called before him a native of Lagos, Gil Eannes, a squire in his court at Sagres. Gil Eannes had been sent on a mission of exploration the previous year. Like so many of the Prince’s captains, he had disappointed his master, turning aside to carry out a little piracy in the Canary Islands and to capture some of the unfortunate natives. Gil Eannes, and others before him, had already disproved the old legends attached to the once invincible Cape Nam or Not. He had sailed past it by 30 miles, but he had shirked his prince’s order to continue south and round Cape Bojador.

It is easy to deride the superstitions and credulity of these early sailors, yet even today the Sahara coast is one of the bleakest and most uninviting parts of the world. Under the burning sun of noon the vast plateau heaves and shimmers with mirage. Barren and burned, devoid of almost all vegetation, the land runs down in a glow of ocherish sand to the sea. In places it ends in sandy cliffs, which, disturbed by strong winds, fall with a rumbling crash into the Atlantic and stain the sea with red. The waters are shallow, the depths constantly shifting, and ships still give the coast a wide berth. After one of the constant cliff falls, the sea seems to boil until the debris slowly dissolves. Currents are strong and uncertain, the winds light—or hot and violent, when the harmattan whirls off the desert. It is a cruel landscape, and it is not difficult to believe that in this region life has come to an end. There is no indication that hundreds of miles to the south a green and well-watered land surrounds great rivers like the Senegal.

Eannes, no doubt, produced the arguments with which Prince Henry had long been familiar—how the sea was too shallow for navigation, and how the water boiled as you neared Cape Bojador. As is often the case with old legends, there was a substratum of truth to this—for the sea does sometimes seem to boil just off Cape Bojador. At the foot of the cape there is a reef over which the sea breaks even in calm weather, and— when the northerly swell meets the offshore breeze—the breakers burst and spout in high foaming clouds. Running down from the north, with the land quivering with heat on the one hand and the limitless ocean on the other, it is easy to understand how the lifting swell and foam off the redoubtable cape seemed like an ocean that was steaming. The second curious phenomenon along this part of the coast is due to the great shoals of sardine that suddenly rise, bright and silver, to the surface. The dappling hiss and flicker of a large sardine shoal can be heard and seen some distance away, and the sea seethes like water in a caldron.

Gil Eannes had probably seen some of these occurrences along that desolate shore. He would certainly have heard of others. No doubt he produced them all in support of his argument that the cape was impassable.

Prince Henry heard him out and replied:

“If there were any authority for these stories, I could find some excuse. But I am amazed at your taking them seriously! What surprises me is that you should pay any attention to the reports of a few sailors—the type of men who know only the coast of Flanders and one or two well-known ports—men who are too ignorant to be able to navigate by compass or by chart!”

He reminded Eannes it was because he had confidence in him that he had given him the captaincy of this ship.

“Go back again,” he said. “I want only one thing from you —that you pass Cape Bojador. If you do no more than that you will have both honor and reward.”

In the summer of 1434 the ship slipped away from Portugal and sailed for Cape Bojador. After a few days the long and level coast came up ahead. From Sagres to Cape Not is 500 miles, about a week’s sail in the small barcha commanded by Gil Eannes.

Day by day as they drew farther south, the sun stood higher overhead at noon, the pitch turned tacky in the deck planking or rose up in shining black bubbles along the topsides. Under the shadow of the sails the men took their rest and ate their meals. They had lemons and olives in barrels, wine, dried fish, salted meat, cheese, and ship’s biscuits. Biscuit was a staple part of the sailor’s diet, and the royal ovens at Lisbon produced a thousand tons yearly—a man’s daily ration of biscuits being about two pounds. It was a thirsty diet, but not too ill-designed for hot weather, for the fruit and wine balanced the salty meat, and fresh fish could always be caught.

As they neared Cape Not, Gil Eannes and his veterans knew where they were without reference to chart or sights. The water took on a red, muddy color as if they were off shoal ground, although the leadsman continued to report plenty of water under the keel. Just below the cape, a river, spawned in the Atlas Mountains 500 miles away, washes down the red Sahara sand into the sea. The daily offshore breeze adds a further sprinkling of sand, so that a ship’s track is visible in the water, like the mark of a stick dragged through mud.

They noticed now how the current set them down toward the cape, and they altered course seaward to clear it. The nights were fine and the stars brilliant. Their wake was a milky pathway of phosphorescence, and porpoises leapt alongside the ship with long snorting sighs.

The water changed again as they ran farther down and neared the high sand hills of the next cape. Here it was a strange bottle-green in color, for the sea bed was formed of a dark, almost black, sand—quite unlike the rest of the coastline. Day and night the flying fish were with them. They saw few birds, though, until they were near the latitude of the Canary Islands. Then they sighted the nearest island, Fuerte-ventura, dark as a whale’s back on the western horizon. To the east the sand still shimmered, and the heat blew off the desert in hot dry blasts like the opening of an oven door.

Now they were at the limits of man’s knowledge, bound for the dreaded Outstretcher, Bojador, the last arm of land in all the world. One hundred miles south of the Canary Islands it lies, a low sandy cape, deep red under the sun, and sliding into the sea in a confusion of breaking waves.

When the cape came in sight, Gil Eannes gave the orders for the ship to stand well out from the coast. Whatever unnatural hazards might lie ahead, at any rate he was not going to lose his ship through running onto a sandbank. So they sailed on a day and a night further, and then altered course and tacked back toward the shore. As they ran in again, on a hot midsummer day with only the sound of the sea and the sigh of the wind in the shrouds, the sailors gathered in the bows and shaded their eyes. Slowly the coast came up ahead of them, the same coast it seemed that they had known for days. As they drew nearer and nearer, they saw that there was one great difference. Away to the south of them the land ran on, flat, sandy, and shining under the sun—a level land with no cape breaking its steady sweep. They looked north and saw that they had passed the impassable limit! They had rounded Cape Bojador!

It was almost as if a wall had fallen down—a barrier to man’s progress that had held him back for centuries. Sailing down this coast today, Cape Bojador seems to be no more than another bleak headland interrupting a coastline that is as monotonous as the desert dunes. But it was what the cape had represented that was important. If the discovery and charting of Madeira had marked a great advance in man’s knowledge of his planet, the rounding of Bojador altered his whole approach to life. More than a cape was passed by Gil Eannes. A whole era of superstition fell away—much as the sand cliffs along this coast collapse and vanish without trace into the ocean.

They crossed the hundred-fathom line and came into soundings. The leadsman stood on the swaying deck of the small ship, while Gil Eannes and the helmsman watched the compass. They looked ahead and saw the water change color—first deep blue, then blue, then pale, then sand-and-white where the swell burst on the shore. They dropped anchor off the silent beach. The ship turned and swung, lying part to the wind and part to the current that sweeps along that coast. A boat was lowered and Gil Eannes was rowed ashore.

There was no sign of life. As far as the eye could see, the desert shook under the sun. The boat’s keel scraped a thin wavering track in virgin sand. They looked about them and saw nothing. And then, clustered along a ridge of sand, Gil Eannes noticed a line of frail plants twisting in the wind. He went over to them, stooped—and recognized them. They were the plants known in Portugal as the roses of St. Mary. They seemed little enough return, perhaps, for all the effort, the expense, and all the fear that rounding Cape Bojador had entailed. He bent down and picked them. They were proof at any rate that, barren though the land was, it was still a land, not so unlike his own. He showed them to the sailors.