matter of colonization that a new development began in European history. The Genoese might have been content to record the existence of the Madeira group, but it took the visionary of Sagres to see that an island with good earth could be cultivated and populated.
A third ship, under the captaincy of another minor nobleman, Bartolomew Perestrello, accompanied Zarco and Teixeira. Perestrello was later to be made governor of Porto Santo. His name will be remembered in history because a daughter of his was one day to marry a Genoese, Christopher Columbus, and Columbus for a brief period of his life would live in Porto Santo. There he would learn all that the old seafarer had known of Portuguese navigational methods and cartography. If Columbus has become one of those names with which the whole world is familiar, the fact remains that the seed of his knowledge was planted many years before by a Portuguese prince who refused to accept legends as truth, or superstition as geography.
Driving out into the Atlantic, the three small ships made their landfall successfully at Porto Santo. This time they took with them seeds and plants, and also a pregnant doe rabbit in a cage. (The introduction of rabbits many centuries later to the subcontinent of Australia was to prove a disaster that might have been foreseen if the history of Porto Santo had been better known.) On a small island where there were no predators, no other animals at all, the rabbits multiplied at an astronomical rate. For the remainder of his life Perestrello was to battle against the ever-increasing hordes, which devastated not only the native vegetation of Porto Santo but the newly planted crops as well.
The island was a little over six miles long, by three wide, and the ships did not take long to circumnavigate it. They charted its bays and coves, recorded its high peaks at either end, and sounded the small bay of Porto Santo, where they established their base. It was during this period that first one man and then another noticed the cloud. It looked rather like a fog bank lying across the sea, to the south of the island.
“That is where the vapors begin,” whispered a sailor. “We are at the outermost limits of the world.”
“That is no ordinary mist,” said another. “Beyond it lies the darkness of which we have been told. Beyond that mist begins the great rush of waters that roar at the world’s end.” The three captains in charge of the expedition also noticed the cloud. There was something curious about it, something that had perhaps evaded the sailors.
“This cloud,” they told Prince Henry on their return from the second expedition, “is strangely shaped. And it stays in the same place—always southwest of Porto Santo.”
Clouds mean islands. Clouds mean night mists rising off wooded slopes, or condensation from the ocean hovering above mountain peaks. Prince Henry knew this; so perhaps did his captains. But—whereas it was comparatively easy for him to command, “Go south! Go farther! I must know more!”—his captains had the difficult task of persuading superstitious and reluctant crews to sail into unknown regions. The sailors would have been only too pleased to be assigned to the ships engaged in harrying the Moorish coast and its merchantmen. They were familiar with the normal risks of warfare, and in warfare there was always the chance of plunder. It was the unknown that terrified them, and—as far as they could see—gave little in return except their poor food and small wages.
It was at about this time that Prince Henry may have heard the remarkable story of the Englishman Robert Machin. Among the sailors in the crew of Joao Gongalvez Zarco there was a Spaniard named Juan de Morales, who had at one time been a prisoner of the Moors. During his captivity, so he told Zarco, he had heard from some English fellow prisoners of their accidental discovery of an island in the Atlantic. It was completely uninhabited, they said, fertile,
A third ship, under the captaincy of another minor nobleman, Bartolomew Perestrello, accompanied Zarco and Teixeira. Perestrello was later to be made governor of Porto Santo. His name will be remembered in history because a daughter of his was one day to marry a Genoese, Christopher Columbus, and Columbus for a brief period of his life would live in Porto Santo. There he would learn all that the old seafarer had known of Portuguese navigational methods and cartography. If Columbus has become one of those names with which the whole world is familiar, the fact remains that the seed of his knowledge was planted many years before by a Portuguese prince who refused to accept legends as truth, or superstition as geography.
Driving out into the Atlantic, the three small ships made their landfall successfully at Porto Santo. This time they took with them seeds and plants, and also a pregnant doe rabbit in a cage. (The introduction of rabbits many centuries later to the subcontinent of Australia was to prove a disaster that might have been foreseen if the history of Porto Santo had been better known.) On a small island where there were no predators, no other animals at all, the rabbits multiplied at an astronomical rate. For the remainder of his life Perestrello was to battle against the ever-increasing hordes, which devastated not only the native vegetation of Porto Santo but the newly planted crops as well.
The island was a little over six miles long, by three wide, and the ships did not take long to circumnavigate it. They charted its bays and coves, recorded its high peaks at either end, and sounded the small bay of Porto Santo, where they established their base. It was during this period that first one man and then another noticed the cloud. It looked rather like a fog bank lying across the sea, to the south of the island.
“That is where the vapors begin,” whispered a sailor. “We are at the outermost limits of the world.”
“That is no ordinary mist,” said another. “Beyond it lies the darkness of which we have been told. Beyond that mist begins the great rush of waters that roar at the world’s end.” The three captains in charge of the expedition also noticed the cloud. There was something curious about it, something that had perhaps evaded the sailors.
“This cloud,” they told Prince Henry on their return from the second expedition, “is strangely shaped. And it stays in the same place—always southwest of Porto Santo.”
Clouds mean islands. Clouds mean night mists rising off wooded slopes, or condensation from the ocean hovering above mountain peaks. Prince Henry knew this; so perhaps did his captains. But—whereas it was comparatively easy for him to command, “Go south! Go farther! I must know more!”—his captains had the difficult task of persuading superstitious and reluctant crews to sail into unknown regions. The sailors would have been only too pleased to be assigned to the ships engaged in harrying the Moorish coast and its merchantmen. They were familiar with the normal risks of warfare, and in warfare there was always the chance of plunder. It was the unknown that terrified them, and—as far as they could see—gave little in return except their poor food and small wages.
It was at about this time that Prince Henry may have heard the remarkable story of the Englishman Robert Machin. Among the sailors in the crew of Joao Gongalvez Zarco there was a Spaniard named Juan de Morales, who had at one time been a prisoner of the Moors. During his captivity, so he told Zarco, he had heard from some English fellow prisoners of their accidental discovery of an island in the Atlantic. It was completely uninhabited, they said, fertile,
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