P. Oliveira Martins’s classic The Golden Age of Prince Henry the Navigator for an adverse view of the Prince.

It is five hundred years since Prince Henry died, and a gulf not only of time, but also of psychology, separates him from us. In endeavoring to trace his character and to comprehend his outlook, I have inevitably had to draw on writings concerning the medieval Christian church. In this connection I would like to acknowledge my debt to R. H. Tawney’s Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, and in particular to the section entitled “The Mediaeval Background.”

E. B.

Brixham, Devon. 1960











A WIND 

FROM THE NORTH





1

❖ 

Bright with pennants and devices, the ships lifted over the horizon. They came onward in a half-moon shape, and their music sounded across the water, as gay and confident as the summer sky. Soon the leading vessels were nearing the mouth of the Tagus.

Another fleet waited to meet them. It bore the arms and emblem of the King of Portugal, and was commanded by Prince Peter, the King’s second son. The fleet that proudly advanced its sails toward the shining city of Lisbon was under the command of Peter’s younger brother, Henry, whose twenty-first birthday had been celebrated only a few months before. Thousands of people from Lisbon thronged the banks of the great river to watch the two fleets meet. They did not know on what venture the King and his sons were engaged. They only knew that the preparations for this day had occupied every shipbuilder, sailmaker, victualer, and chandler in Portugal for the past year and more. The lighter craft came first, wafting over the bar at the mouth of the river. They were small boats of fifty tons and less, spreading their new sails to the lazy onshore wind. Behind them sauntered the tubby shapes of the first-class ships, their square sails pufEng and lifting as they met the swell at the river mouth. Behind these again came the lean greyhounds: the oared galleys, whose design had changed little since the Phoenicians and the Romans had made the Tagus their anchoring place.

The names of the ships had a poetry of their own. In the front echelon of light sailing boats were carracas and fustas, balenares, pinazas, and carabelas. Then there were the bareas, their broad-beamed hulls flickering with the arms of soldiers. The oared vessels, moving like insects over a pond, were galleys and galeotas, tardantes, and saetias. In these two types of ship the traditional Mediterranean was united with the new commercial world of the north; the first represented by the galley, and the latter by the high-pooped trading bark. But the gullwinged carabelas, which crossed the bar first, were the forerunners of a new type of ship, one that would dredge an undiscovered world and a thousand new coastlines out of the uncharted rollers of the Atlantic.

As the fleets of the two princes met, the music from their garlanded poops blended with the time-keeping gongs aboard the galleys, and the brassy note of trumpets from the barks. The onlookers cheered, as a hundred and one small rowing boats put off to accompany the fleet to its anchorage. Church bells sounded, dim in the blue distance, and the midsummer heat shook over the hills beyond the city. Catching the slants of wind that dropped down the river mouth, and with the thrust of the tide giving them way against the current of the river, the ships moved slowly upstream. They dropped anchor under the golden walls of Belem on the outskirts of Lisbon. The oars of the galleys were secured, the sails of the barks and pinnaces were furled, and the graceful lateen-rigged carabelas idled over their reflections in the quiet water.

It was July, 1415. The building of so many ships—over twenty oared galleys, twenty-six barks, and many dozen lighter craft—had occupied the whole seaboard of Portugal for over three years.