A Wind From the North (29 page)

It was on October 3 that Henry looked down from his windows on Sagres and saw the King’s fleet come sailing round the headland. The bulk of the Algarve fleet was lying off Lagos, but some of the ships were at anchor in Sagres Bay, and he must have felt a strange pride when he gazed out and saw the whole sea twisting with sails. The anchored caravels were reflected in the water below him, and the strong walls of his fortress were steaming under the sun. The combined fleet totaled 220 ships, and there were twenty-five thousand men embarked—about half the number that had been mustered for the attack on Ceuta, but more than double the force that had sailed for Tangier.

Henry could feel confident that he had an army capable of subduing Alcagar and a fleet manned by seamen who were unlikely to find anything formidable in navigating the Strait of Gibraltar. Forty-three years had passed since King John’s fleet had nearly come to grief in the strait, and since then a new generation of Portuguese sailors had come into being—the first men in Europe to be familiar with the Atlantic Ocean. He had turned a nation of peasants and coastal fishermen into a nation whose destiny lay on the sea.

King Affonso landed on the beach at Sagres, to be greeted by his uncle and entertained in the palace. His brother Fernando had often visited his adoptive father, but there is no record that Affonso had ever before seen the almost legendary home of the Navigator. Affonso, whose later exploits against the Moors earned him the title of “the African,” must have found a stimulus to his ambition on the headland—in the bare rooms where so many enterprises had been planned, looking down on the bay where the first ships had anchored with their news of new-found islands in the Atlantic. Whatever discord may have existed between him and Prince Henry in the past was long since forgotten. Affonso had acknowledged the faults and hastiness of his youth on the day when he had accompanied the body of Prince Peter to its last resting place in Batalha. Even Prince Peter’s eldest son, recalled from exile a few years before, was with him on this expedition.

It was the first time since Ceuta that the whole family was united in an enterprise, but of the older generation only Prince Henry remained. As he joined the King and the court aboard their ship, and looked back at the frowning cliff where he had made his home, he felt the weight of many memories. It had been a bare headland when he had first come here as a young man of twenty-two and gazed south over the sea to Africa. Sagres had harbored his ships and his men, his triumphs and his failures, for over forty years. Now, at the age of sixty-four, he was sailing again for the land where he had written his name forever.

The fleet crossed from Lagos to Tangier in the fair autumn weather. Once again Prince Henry saw those lofty walls that had mocked him so many years ago, and the long beaches down which the survivors had fought their way to safety, and the road back to town, which Prince Fernando had ridden to captivity and death. Inflamed by the memory of that Portuguese defeat, Affonso suggested to his council that they should attack Tangier rather than Alcagar. He was at once dissuaded, and there is little doubt that his uncle was among those who advised against it. One step at a time—Henry had learned that lesson now. In war, as in exploration, it was method and steady persistence that led to success.

Two days later the landing parties streamed ashore on the beach opposite Alcagar. The Moors, forewarned of the fleet’s approach, put up a stiff resistance. But gradually the steady wave upon wave of men drove the defenders back toward the city. Always in the forefront of the invaders was a lean old man, almost as dark as a Moor, followed by a squire bearing a banner with the motto: Talent de bien faire.

Eager to shine under the eyes of Prince Henry, the young noblemen and soldiers beat down all resistance. Soon they were surging round the walls of the city, as the Moorish troops took cover inside and barred the gates against them. Artillery and siege implements had been ferried ashore on the second wave of the assault, and at midnight after the landing, Prince Henry supervised the bombardment of Alcagar.

A heavy cannon was levered into place and bedded down, the Prince directing its positioning and its line of fire. Then, amid the flicker of torches, he gave the order for the bombardment to begin. Standing there in the smoke and roar of the cannon, after a day’s hard fighting, he was alert and indomitable even in those small hours of the morning when the youngest and strongest begin to tire. Time and again the cannon hurled its solid shot against the section of masonry that Prince Henry had indicated. Soon the stones began to crumble and the dust to trickle down. It was not long before the great wall of Alcagar started to spill slowly outward.

The Moors had fought well throughout the day, inflicting many more casualties on the Portuguese than at Ceuta, but now their spirit began to fail. A further shot from the Prince’s battery burst through the wall and breached it. They acknowledged defeat. Soon afterward an embassy came out under a flag of truce and made its way toward the Portuguese lines. The Moorish representatives were brought in front of King Affonso and immediately asked for the terms of surrender. Affonso, acknowledging his uncle as leader of the expedition, left it to Prince Henry to decide on the conditions.

What memories of Tangier must have invaded him at that moment! If he had been of a vindictive nature, he now had it in his power to take revenge and impose harsh conditions. But the ambassadors were treated kindly, and Henry told them that no one wanted their money or possessions. The King of Portugal, he said, had come to take their city in the name of the true faith, but not to force any ransom from them.

“You may depart with your wives, your children, and all your worldly goods. All I ask is that you leave behind any Christians you may have in captivity.”

He had not forgotten the treachery at Tangier, though, and when they asked him for time to consider the terms, he insisted that they accept them now.

“If you force me to take the town by the sword, I will show no mercy.”

The Moors looked at their conquerors, and at the old man. Even if they had not known who he was, they would have recognized that this was a man who did not bluff. Wisely, they accepted. Under their flag of truce they withdrew to the city, and began to make arrangements for the departure of the inhabitants and the handing over of all Christian captives.

On that late November morning, with the dawn coming up over the Mediterranean, Prince Henry knew that Tangier was avenged. Around him stood the sons of his dead brothers and his own adopted son, Fernando. The men were drinking hot spiced wine and warming themselves over the flames of campfires. The cannon had ceased firing, and there was silence over the conquered city. Behind him the long lines of soldiers were preparing for the new day, ferrying supplies ashore, landing water barricoes and ammunition, kindling fires, and boiling sun-dried cod for the morning meal.

The news of the Moorish capitulation began to spread through the assembled ranks, first in a steady buzz of voices, and then to the sound of cheering that swelled up from the pikemen and archers grouped behind the artillery. Gradually it spread to the beach and to the sailors on the ships. The light began to quicken in the east, burnishing the armor of the knights and gleaming dully on Henry’s black chain mail. The dawn wind began to draw on shore, bringing with it the scent of the sea. The long lines of ships were tide-rode. They lay back against their taut anchor ropes, their pennants and ensigns lifting in the new-day breeze.

Constantinople might have fallen, but tomorrow the great mosque of Alcagar would be consecrated to the Christian service. King Affonso had promised that he would not rest until Tangier had been taken. The conquest of Morocco had begun. Henry’s work in North Africa was finished.

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Henry left Africa for the last time in November, 1458. He sailed back to Lagos and stopped in the dockyard to watch his new ships building, and to talk with his captains and agents. He had plans for a number of voyages the following year, and there were ships lying in the port that had recently returned from Guinea, Madeira, and the Azores. All was well with his islands, and trade was flowing from Arguim Bay and from the Gambia. There were many Africans as well as sailors in the streets, and it was now, on his return from Alcagar, that Henry arranged for the Abbot of Soto de Cassa to sail for Gambia to instruct Chief Nomi Mansa in the Christian faith. Success over the infidels, Christianity penetrating Africa, trade and peaceful commerce starting along all the coast south of Bojador—his was a rich harvest.

The winter had come. There was drizzle and gray mist over all the coastline from Cape St. Vincent to Lagos. Sometimes the southwesterlies blew off the Atlantic, driving the nimbus clouds over the headland of Sagres and lashing the spray against the cape. There were no ships at anchor in the bay. Only occasionally would a straggler back from Africa or Madeira, or a merchantman bound out of the Mediterranean for the English Channel, take shelter under the lee of the headland. Here at Sagres, or in his villa at Raposeira, Henry continued his work.

One of his chief interests was the great map of the world that he had prevailed upon King Affonso to have made. The commission had been entrusted to one of the most famous cartographers of the day, a Venetian monk, Fra Mauro, and a draftsman, Andrea Bianco, also from Venice. All the information that Prince Henry had collected from his navigators over years was to be incorporated in the chart—the bays and headlands and the islands that he had dredged out of the ocean. The map was finished in the spring of 1459, and it is evidence of the information that Henry had collected from all over Africa that the Cape of Good Hope, called the “Cavo di Diab,” is shown on this world map. Forty years before Vasco da Gama rounded the cape, either the Prince or his cartographers had heard of an Indian sailing vessel that in 1420 had rounded the cape from the east after a voyage of 2,000 miles. The “Cavo di Diab” was shown separated from the presumed outline of the continent by a narrow strait, as if it were part of an island—which they may well have believed it to be.

The Doge of Venice, Francesco Foscari, saw this world map when it was being made in Murano. Information obtained on Cadamosto’s two African voyages was incorporated in it, and it is possible that the Doge met this great Venetian sailor. He wrote in a letter that he hoped “Prince Henry would find in the work of Fra Mauro further inducement to carry on with his explorations.”

Henry had never needed any inducement, other than his own desire to know what lay beyond the horizon. It was true that Africa and the islands were showing some return for all the money he had spent, but he died heavily in debt. The exact amount that he owed may never be known, but one debt alone to the House of Braganga was for well over $280,000 in terms of modern currency. His estates were mortgaged, his revenues from the islands and from the African trading expeditions spent before they reached him, and his private fortune long since swallowed up. If ever a man bankrupted himself in the service of the future, it was Henry of Portugal. As the Englishman Samuel Purchas wrote of him in the seventeenth century, “He never gave up his endeavours of discoveries, till he discovered the Celestial Jerusalem… . His navigations explored only the coast from Bojador to Sierra Leone, one thousand one hundred and ten miles in nearly fifty years of continual cares and costs. So hard a thing it is to discover.”

In the last two years of his life he was as preoccupied as ever with his many cares and responsibilities. The King of Fez had besieged Alcagar, and it was only with the greatest difficulty that the garrison managed to hold out. After the withdrawal of the Moorish troops it was decided to build a mole running out from the beach in front of the city, to facilitate the loading and unloading of ships. Henry was still governor of Ceuta, so all matters regarding the defense and security of the Portuguese possessions in Morocco were ultimately brought to him. As grand master of the Order of Christ, he had to deal with all the problems that concerned the war against the infidel. As “protector of the studies of Portugal” (a title he had earned by establishing a chair of theology at the University of Lisbon), he was also involved in many details of the university’s curriculum, and with the payment of the lecturers.

With so many calls and demands upon his time, it is extraordinary how much energy he still retained for planning new expeditions. The navigator Pedro de Cintra was being supplied with caravels and merchandise for another voyage—one which would lead him to the coastline of Sierra Leone. Diogo Gomes, Cadamosto’s rival claimant to the discovery of the Cape Verde Islands, was also organizing an expedition to Guinea.

The secret of Henry’s amazing ability to concern himself with so many things at once was that he had largely solved one of the great problems that harass all human beings—the problem of time. The question that has often been raised—Why did Prince Henry never go on any of the voyages of exploration himself?—is easily answered. There is time, and there is space. If you travel in space, you use up time. By cutting himself off from the distractions of the world, and by remaining for over forty years of his life almost entirely at Sagres, he had “found time.” Movement from one place to another involves an expenditure of time—something that his navigators did for him. Undistracted by domestic cares, with all his energies channeled to one end, he was able to concentrate exclusively on his great ambitions.

One of the things that must have pleased him most in these last two years of his life was the news that from Cape Verde onward, the coastline definitely started to trend eastward. Below the Bissagos Islands, as he knew from both Cadamosto and Diogo Gomes, this feature of the continent became marked. It is doubtful whether Prince Henry ever appreciated the vast extent of the continent to which he had devoted his life. Most probably he saw the eastward trend of the coastline as evidence that the end of Africa was almost in sight.