A Wind From the North (6 page)

The preacher royal, Father John of Xira, proclaimed the object of the expedition. He read the men the crusading bull granted by the Pope, which gave absolution to all those who might die in the battle against the infidel. He urged them to forget any ideas they might have that this great purpose should have been postponed because of the death of the Queen. This, he reminded them, was a sacred mission.

Leaving Lagos on July 30, the fleet coasted down to Faro, where the off-lying banks and shoals run out to the hundred-fathom line and then drop steeply away into the Atlantic. The wind died, the current drove against them, and for a whole week they lay becalmed. A breeze would drift off the land, and the sailing ships would trim their sails to it, only to find that it had died almost as soon as the creaking yards had been eased round. The oarsmen strained at the oars, then rested as the sailing vessels checked their way and hung motionless again.

Now the King, the three princes, and their half-brother the Count of Barcellos learned the indifference of the sea. King John was familiar with war on land, but he was a poor sailor and out of his element in a ship. Like the Constable, Nuno Pereira, like his knights and his soldiers, he was a landsman. Portugal was still primarily a peasant country. Although her coastal fishermen were fine sailors, it would be many years before Portugal would recognize that her destiny lay on the ocean.

We know little of Prince Henry’s early life, so we cannot tell how much experience he had of ships and the sea at the age of twenty-one. Most probably he had been sailing on the Tagus, and he would have been familiar since boyhood with the boats of the coastal fishermen and the merchantmen of Lisbon. It is doubtful whether he had ever been on a longer sea voyage than his recent excursion from Porto to Lisbon. In any case, this first experience of the contradictory ways of wind and weather was to serve him in good stead all his life. In later years, whenever his captains reported back to him with unsatisfactory news, he was always prepared to accept their excuse that the elements had been against them. Patience is a virtue learned at sea, and the quiet Prince absorbed this lesson early and thoroughly.

The plague was in the ships, and men were sickening and dying. The new pitch blistered and bubbled in the seams. The unfamiliar diet of salted food increased thirsts that could hardly be slaked with rationed water.

One morning the news was brought to Prince Henry that Fernando Alvares Cabral, the comptroller of his household, was delirious with a fever. The physician aboard the galley informed the Prince that Cabral was probably suffering from the plague. The sick man had the delusion that they were attacked by the Moors, and cried out that Prince Henry’s life was in danger.

Henry’s compassion was immediately aroused.

“Is there anything I can do for him?”

“As Cabral’s medical adviser, I would suggest that you see him, and calm him by the evidence of your presence and safety. As your medical adviser, my Prince, I say—do not go near him!”

But Henry immediately went to the sick man, spoke to him, and comforted him. His devotion to those who served him was a quality that later became legendary.

During these long fretful days of calm, another incident occurred which bore witness to Prince Henry’s bravery and presence of mind. His brother Edward, who was sleeping on deck, suddenly heard that most terrifying of all cries at sea— “Fire!” A lantern had burst into flames, and the burning oil was threatening to spread over the galley’s wooden decks. Prince Edward’s immediate reaction was to run below and wake his brother, who was sleeping in a stern cabin. Henry came straight out of a deep sleep, and ran up on deck. While the sailors were making ineffectual attempts to put out the fire, he seized the flaming lantern and threw it over the side. While the men sluiced water over the scorched deck, Prince Edward and other knights gathered round. Henry looked at his burned hands. Would he ever be able to fight and wield a sword? But the physician, who had twice been witness to the Prince’s courage, advised him to plunge them into honey. The simple remedy proved effective.

After a week of calm the Atlantic wind came back again, and the fleet began to gather way. To the slop of water against their wooden planking, the sigh of rigging, and the monotonous creak and splash of the oars, they came down to the Strait of Gibraltar. At nightfall, they loomed out of the ocean and began to pass the city of Tarifa. Tarifa was in the kingdom of Castile, but the governor happened to be Portuguese. Perhaps he had advance word of the King’s intentions. At any rate, he reassured the advisers who came running to him with the news that an unknown fleet was anchored in Algeciras Bay.

“They are Portuguese,” he said.

“If all the trees of Portugal had been turned into planks, and all the Portuguese had become carpenters,” said a skeptic, “they could never in the course of their lives have built such a multitude of ships.”

“They are Portuguese,” he said.

In the morning there was a thick summer haze over the sea. Nothing was visible, but through the white mist came the sounds of a great fleet. In Algeciras the people strained their eyes seaward. Across the bay in Gibraltar the Moorish garrison looked to its defenses. The cloud was heavy over the Rock, and the walls streamed with the sweat of summer dewfall. As the sun rose, the mist began to lift, and now the Castilians in Algeciras and the Moors in Gibraltar saw anchored in their bay the largest fleet ever known.

In the afternoon of August 10 the King summoned his council, and the decision was reached to attack Ceuta on the following Monday. If they sailed that same night, they would be able to get into formation during daylight on the eleventh, and they would be ready to make their assault on the morning of Monday, the twelfth. The reasoning was logical, the planning exact, but once again those unknown factors of wind and weather upset their calculations.

The currents in the Strait of Gibraltar are strong, setting mainly easterly from the Atlantic into the Mediterranean. The reason for this steady surface current is that the Mediterranean receives from its rivers and rainfall only about a third of the amount that it loses through evaporation. This almost tideless sea is largely replenished, therefore, by the constant inflow from the Atlantic. In late summer and early autumn the current is usually at its strongest, and it was this fact, coupled with a dense fog, that upset the Portuguese plans

That night, as the ships moved out into the strait, the fog came down thick and heavy. It was a summer fog of the kind that often adds to the difficulty of navigating these narrow waters. The Portuguese pilots must almost certainly have known about the prevailing current in the strait, but perhaps they were ignorant that fog in summer often precedes a strong east wind (known locally as the Levanter). They could hardly have picked a worse moment to try to take a slow-moving fleet, dependent largely on the wind, across the strait. Perhaps the pilots advised against choosing this moment for the assault, but the advice of mariners was little heeded those days in the councils of the great. In any case, the fact that their presence in Algeciras Bay was known to the Moors in Gibraltar meant that by now, no doubt, a fast skiff or galley was on its way to Ceuta, to warn of the advance of a Christian fleet. The alarm would soon be out on both sides of the strait. Speed was essential.

So the fleet wallowed out into the thick clammy night, and their sails drooped. Soon the east-going current, as it whirled past Europa Point at the tip of Gibraltar, began to take the ships with it. The slow, heavy merchantmen, carrying the soldiers, drifted down the coast at half a knot or so. The lighter vessels drew away from them, some of them fetching up, finally, as far east as Malaga, 60 miles away. Only a few of the oared galleys, unaffected by the calm, managed to cross the strait. These were ready in position by Monday morning, but by now the main body of the fleet was dispersed over many miles of sea. Some were drifting off Malaga, others were striving to beat the current and cross to Ceuta, others again were being carried by a west-going ebb, away from Ceuta toward the Atlantic. It was on the Tuesday, while the King and the bulk of the fleet were once more making up for Ceuta Bay, that the Levanter began to blow. Wind against tide made a confused sea. The awkward square-sailed barks could make no further easting, the galleys were blown off course, and soon the main body of the fleet was driven back. They sought shelter in the deep arm of Algeciras Bay, which they had left just four days previously. It was this moment of confusion—this apparent disaster when the Portuguese attack seemed destined to fail—that contributed to their ultimate success.

Sala-ben-Sala, the governor of Ceuta, had been on the alert from the moment when the first galleys and small craft had appeared off his walls. He had seen the approach of the larger sailing vessels, some from the direction of Malaga, and some from Gibraltar. It seemed clear to him that his city was to be the target. But the confusion that had followed, the second dispersal of the fleet, and finally the disappearance of the bulk of it back to Algeciras, reassured him. It now looked as if the attack was to be made on his fellow governor in the citadel of Gibraltar.

It was true that some of the ships and galleys were still anchored off his walls, but there were few of them. He contented himself with ordering sporadic fire to be made on them from the cannon and arbalests. A few skirmishes took place, parties trying to land from rowing boats, and minor clashes on the shore. But there seemed to be no real threat to Ceuta. The Berber tribesmen who had been summoned to the garrison’s defense were dismissed. The ruler of Fez, and other neighboring chieftains who had sent help, were told that reinforcements were no longer needed. The fact was that the prosperous merchants of Ceuta disliked the presence of these wild tribesmen in their rich and orderly city almost as much as they feared the threat of sea-borne invasion. They had watched the ragged approach of the first invasion force, and had seen it dispersed up and down the coast by the currents. They had watched the second attempt broken up by the onset of the Levanter. They felt quite confident that the Portuguese would not try again.

There was near mutiny in some of the Portuguese ships, and Prince Henry found himself called upon to deal with an instance of it. Two of his squires rashly suggested to him that the King did not mean to take Ceuta at all. Taking his silence for assent and blind to his rising anger, they went so far as to say that King John was only looking for some way of saving his face, and that he cared little if he lost a few men in the process. Henry was not a man to suffer lightly the halfhearted, or the doubting Thomas, let alone men who dared suggest that his father was a coward.

“You force me to tell you,” he said, “something I would have preferred to keep secret. Tomorrow you will see me walking down the gangplank—the first man to land in Ceuta! As for you, I will have two men transferred from another ship to take your places.”

As Prince Edward later wrote, “… The most victorious King, my father, may God rest his soul, finding himself between Gibraltar and Algeciras, with me, my beloved brothers Prince Peter and Prince Henry, the Count of Barcellos, and the Constable, was told by some, who were not in favour of our intentions, that for many reasons we should not return to Ceuta, because of the danger of crossing the Straits in a storm. Furthermore, many signs and omens from Heaven made them believe this: the death of the most virtuous Queen, my beloved mother, the storm which had not allowed us to stay in harbour, and the plague which we now had amongst us in the ships.  

But if there were some among the nobility who were still reluctant or doubtful, the sailors and men-at-arms in Henry’s galley had been convinced of success by another omen. While they were crossing the strait, a fish “rose out of the sea, and lifting itself in the air came and fell on the deck of the galley; and they ate of it that day… Flying fish are common in the Strait of Gibraltar—angeletti, “little angels,” the sailors call them. In a low freeboard vessel, it is quite common for flying fish to skin aboard, particularly at night when they are attracted by the ship’s light. But a flying fish would make no more than a mouthful for one man. However, when the sea has been disturbed, as in this case after a strong wind, it is not unusual to find the great tunny leaping out of the waves. It was probably a tunny that jumped the low guardrail of Prince Henry’s galley and provided both a meal and a good omen.

Nine days later than originally planned, the Portuguese fleet regrouped for the attack on Ceuta. Sala-ben-Sala saw the fleet lift its sails over the horizon on the night of the twentieth. There could no longer be any doubt that his own city was the objective. It would take some time to recall the Berber tribesmen who had dispersed on his orders. He was also troubled by the reports of prophets and astrologers. A holy man had dreamed of a cloud of bees swarming in the city, and of a lion, bearing a gold crown on his head, which entered the strait in company with a swarm of sparrows and destroyed the bees. This had been interpreted as meaning that the lion was the King of Portugal, the sparrows his Christian troops, and the bees the Moors of Ceuta. An old prophecy had also been recalled, which said that a lion, with three cubs, would come out of the Spanish peninsula and would overthrow the city, and that this would be the beginning of the end of Moorish power in Africa.

The plan of the attack remained unchanged. Prince Henry, in command of forty or fifty ships, was to anchor off Almina on the eastern side of the headland, King John with the main body of the fleet coming in to Ceuta Bay on the west. At daybreak, on a signal from the King, Prince Henry was to lead his men ashore. It was hoped that the Moorish defenders would flock to the western walls of the city when they saw the bulk of the fleet anchored there. In this way Prince Henry’s forces would be left practically unopposed to establish their beachhead and take the city in the rear.

Throughout the long summer night, as ship after ship came to anchor, Sala-ben-Sala ordered every window and embrasure to glow with lights to impress the enemy with his preparedness. Groups of men-at-arms appeared on the walls, shouting defiance at the assembled ships. The lights of the city lay mirrored in the calm water of the bay. The fleet winked back with the answering gleam of oil lamps and the flicker of torches. The groan of homs, the sonorous boom of time-keeping gongs aboard the oared galleys, and the shrill scream of whetstones as soldiers sharpened their swords, echoed across the water.