A Wind From the North (23 page)

Out of the twenty-two men who were in the boats, four were dead before they reached the safety of the caravel. Only two men escaped without injury, the others all being hit by arrows. Native canoes pursued them downstream, and further flights of arrows hissed about them as they clambered aboard. There were not enough unwounded to get up the anchors, so they cut the cables and let them go. Slowly the ship drifted away. Her decks littered with dead and dying, she floated out from the terrible river mouth, and gained the sea.

Nuno Tristao was dead. So were another knight, three members of Prince Henry’s household, and sixteen sailors. Out of a crew of twenty-six, only five survived. One of them was an African boy, one a sailor, one a young clerk who had been sent along to keep the log of the expedition, and two were Portuguese ship’s boys. They were 1,500 miles from home, a long way south of any other ships, and on a hostile coast. The first thing to do was to set some sail, and make an offing from the shore. It cannot have been easy working a fifty-ton vessel with only one able-bodied seaman, a youth, and three boys, but somehow or other they managed. The seaman, it turned out, had no knowledge at all of the art of navigation. At this point, by sheer good luck it turned out that the young clerk, Aires Tinoco, had been a personal attendant of Prince Henry. He had not been trained in navigation, but he had picked up enough to know that, once clear of the coast, their best course was a little east of north. So for two months the caravel stumbled back from the mouth of the river. They were too shorthanded to work the ship efficiently, and often her sails thundered when an unexpected squall hit them, or slatted idly as they rolled in the long Atlantic swell. Sometimes they saw the coast, but it was barren and featureless, and they dared not approach for fear of the natives.

“North by east!” said Aires Tinoco. They watched the Pole Star high over their port bow, and dawn after dawn they saw the sun tilt over the hidden continent of Africa to sink at dusk in the unbroken ocean.

Two months. They saw no ship, nothing—and then one day they raised a sail. They had no idea where they were, and at first they would have been glad to escape unnoticed. If they were near a coast, they thought they were off Morocco—in which case this was most probably a Moorish corsair. The unknown ship came out toward them, and then to their joy they found themselves hailed by “a Christian—an honest corsair from Gallicia.” The ship was a pirate running out of northern Spain, bent on plundering the Moors. They were just off Sines in Algarve, they were told. The Gallician piloted them into Lagos, no doubt receiving a reward for his services before going on his way.

The epic voyage of Aires Tinoco was to be paralleled by others in later years. It served to prove how fine a sea boat the caravel was, if she could be handled by so small and inexperienced a crew. It proved, also, that young Aires Tinoco had not wasted those years when he had served as a humble groom of the chamber to Prince Henry.

The survivors were rewarded and taken care of, but Henry’s feelings of responsibility did not stop at that point. He had known all the men, and some of them had been brought up at Sagres in his court. He mourned Nuno Tristao as a companion, a sailor, and a man. The relatives and dependents of all those who had lost their lives were at once taken under his care and protection. In an age when kings and noblemen forgot their retainers and men-at-arms on the conclusion of a campaign, and when ex-soldiers begged for bread as soon as their usefulness was at an end, Henry proved that he was no callous prince.

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The Canary Islands remained an irritating and unsolved problem. It was one that troubled Prince Henry to the end of his life. Now that his ships were sailing ever farther down the African coast, the advantage of a base in one of the Canaries was obvious. Lying just north of Cape Bojador, they would have provided his ships with useful harbors and anchorages, and an advance headquarters for the exploration of Africa.

As early as 1424, just after the discovery of Madeira, he had fitted out a fleet and attempted to seize the islands by force. But the cost of maintaining so many ships and men, the angry protests from Castile, and—finally—an order from his father King John to leave the islands alone, had forced him to abandon the project. Castile’s authority over the Canaries was only nominal, and the thing that must have profoundly irritated Henry was the way in which the islands were mismanaged. Only two of them, in fact, were colonized, and these were Langarote and Fuerteventura, the two nearest the African coast. The other islands were still independent, ruled by their native Guanche chiefs, and raided periodically by both Spaniards and Portuguese. Prince Henry felt that if only he had control of the islands, they would all of them follow the pattern set by Madeira and the Azores.

The matter was brought to a head shortly after the great raid on Arguim in 1445. While some of the caravels had gone on to discover more of the Guinea coast, three of them turned aside on their way back to Portugal and made a raiding expedition into the Canaries. They captured some natives from Palma and then, by an act of treachery, took a number of prisoners from the island of Gomera, whose chieftain was friendly to the flag of Portugal. If these Portuguese captains expected a warm welcome from the Prince on their return, they were mistaken.

Henry was already engaged in trying to establish friendly relations with the tribes on the African coast and, if possible, to stop the slaving parties by substituting peaceful trade. It was bad enough that Canarians had been captured, but that most of them had been treacherously seized was enough to arouse the Prince’s fury. Far from being rewarded, as perhaps they had hoped, the caravel captains concerned were severely taken to task. The Canarians, on the other hand, were made his guests, given rich presents, and sent back to their island.

The incident, nevertheless, brought the problem of the Canaries to the forefront again. Henry consulted with Prince Peter, who as regent was responsible for all matters of foreign policy. A charter was at once drawn up forbidding Portuguese subjects from going to the Canaries, either for war or for trade, without Prince Henry’s permission. A further clause gave him the right to one-fifth of any imports from the islands. This was in consideration of the expenses he had incurred in his African ventures.

It was shortly after this that Maciot de Bethencourt, the heir of the French noble who had first colonized Langarote and Fuerteventura, approached Prince Henry. He offered to lease him Langarote, and Henry readily agreed. (An annual rental was paid from then on to Maciot.) Unfortunately, Henry was unaware that Maciot had also come to a similar arrangement with the Queen of Castile.

The complications arising from this piece of double-dealing led to many incidents between Portuguese and Castilian ships in the years that followed. Incensed by the general confusion that surrounded the rights to the Canary Islands, Prince Henry was on the verge of sending an armada to take and subdue all of them. But Prince Peter managed to dissuade his brother from any further involvement in a situation that had already brought Portugal and Castile to the verge of war.

The ownership of the Canaries was never properly resolved until nearly twenty years after Prince Henry’s death, when an agreement was signed between the two countries, which laid down that all “the conquests from Cape Not as far as the Indies, with the seas and islands adjacent, shall belong to the Portuguese, but the Canaries and Granada shall remain in the possession of Castile.” This is the reason the Canary Islands are Spanish to this day, while the Azores, Madeira, and the Cape Verdes are Portuguese possessions dating back to their discovery in Prince Henry’s lifetime.

Although the Canaries never came within the Portuguese sphere of influence, they continued to attract Prince Henry’s sailors. These “Fortunate Islands” of the ancients had many claims to interest, not least of which were the inhabitants, the Guanches. The captives from Gomera, whom Henry had treated so kindly and returned to their island, were of this stock. An offshoot of the Berber race, the Guanches were for a long time considered the aboriginal inhabitants of the Canary Islands. But nearly two thousand years before, when those forerunners of the Portuguese, the Phoenicians, came to the Fortunate Islands, they recorded that they were uninhabited, although there were ruins of buildings visible on some of them. These signs of a lost civilization served to add substance to the legends, perpetuated by Plato and others, that the Canary Islands were all that remained of the fabulous lost continent of Atlantis. Prince Henry, no doubt, was familiar with the story of Atlantis, which was believed to have once existed out in the Atlantic. It is just possible that if Henry had managed to capture and colonize the Canaries, he might have encouraged his captains to sail westward into the unknown, as well as south down Africa. But that was a project to be left to the son-in-law of his governor of Porto Santo, Christopher Columbus. Even so, Portuguese caravels of his time were capable of sailing as far as America, and in 1452 one of them did go as far northwest as the Newfoundland banks.

During the last twelve years of Prince Henry’s life, when Langarote was technically under lease to him, his ships often sailed to the island, trading also with the Guanches of Teneriffe and Grand Canary. Dragon’s blood from the dragon trees of the island was one of the Canaries’ principal exports. This red-colored resin was greatly valued as an astringent medicine, and one of the few substances known to fifteenth-century surgeons that could stop bleeding and assist in healing wounds. From these voyages Henry’s captains brought back many strange stories of the customs of the Guanches, stories that retain their fascination, for these early inhabitants have entirely disappeared. Like the Caribs of the West Indies, they were decimated by the later Spanish conquest, and the strain of their blood is detectable today only by a darker coloring among some of the Spanish colonists.

Prince Henry, who described knowledge as “that from which all good arises”—a remark that in itself justifies his inclusion among the men of the Renaissance—listened with interest to reports of the manners and customs of these island dwellers.

“On Grand Canary,” he was told, “it is the custom for the ruling knights (of whom there are about two hundred) to take the virginity of all young maidens. Only after he has done with her may her father, or the knight himself, marry her off to whom he pleases. But, before they lie with them, they fatten them with milk until their skin is as plump as that of a ripe fig—for they maintain that thin maidens are not as good as fat ones. Their belief is, that in this way the bellies of the fat maidens are enlarged so that they can bear great sons. When the maiden has been fattened she is shown naked to the knight who is to take her, and he tells her father when he considers she is fat enough. After that, the mother and father make her go into the sea for a length of time every day, until all the surplus fat is lost. She is then brought to the knight and, after he has taken her virginity, her parents receive her back again into their house.”

The sea captains who brought these stories back to Prince Henry probably dined off them for months to come. But it is more than likely that the ascetic of Sagres only yearned for ships and men to subdue the islands, and teach the Guanches Christian morality. Of their other customs and methods of living, there were some that would have appealed to him—the fact, for instance, that these simple natives “disdain gold, silver and all other metals, making mock of those that covet them.” Gold and silver Henry hoped to find in Africa, but he had little personal use for such things—except in so far as they were necessary for keeping his ships at sea.

“They have many fig trees, and dragon trees and dates,” said his informants, “also a great number of sheep, goats, and swine. They shave themselves with stones, and they believe that it is a great wrong to slaughter and flay cattle.”

Although the Canarians ate meat, they considered the trade of butcher a loathsome one, and would either hire a Christian, if it was possible, or give the office to one of the island criminals. The life of these primitive inhabitants resembled in many ways that of the Polynesians of the Pacific in the days before the Europeans came. Local wars and vendettas were constant, but the indulgent climate allowed them to live without much exertion. They made primitive huts or lived in caves. In some islands they wore colored palm leaves to conceal their sex, but on the island of Gomera they went completely naked. “In Gomera,” said the Portuguese explorers, “they even make a mock of garments, saying that they are nothing but sacks in which men tie themselves up. Their women they hold in common. That is to say, when one of them goes to visit the house of another, the latter at once offers him his wife as a token of hospitality. If he fails to do this, it is taken as an unfriendly act.”

One wonders how many sailors deserted to live in indolence among the Guanches. The life of a seaman in the caravels was a hard one, and poorly paid. There must surely have been some who were tempted to stay ashore in the lazy Lotus Land. Such an outlook would have been inconceivable in the bracing air of Sagres. But climate is a great transformer of manners and morals. The Portuguese, as they sailed ever farther south into the tropics, would be the first Europeans to learn the languor of those blazing noons, the sudden flights of passion and violence, and the dark aftermath of ennui and boredom that follows so closely on their heels.

Throughout Henry’s lifetime the Canaries remained unconquered, and mostly uncolonized. Within fifty years of his death, however, the great wave of expansion and exploration, which he had set in motion, engulfed them. The last of the Guanches yielded to the swords and the priests of Spain. It was of this tall, warlike race that Azurara had commented disapprovingly: “They spend the greater part of their time in singing and dancing, for their vice is to enjoy life without labor. Their greatest happiness they find in fornication, for they have no knowledge of the law; they believe only in God.” Such a state of primitive innocence was not destined to last. By the end of the sixteenth century, the outermost islands of the globe would see the unfamiliar wings of sailing ships rise above their lonely horizons.