Henry The Navigator Essay, Research Paper

Henry the Navigator

Henry was the third son of King John I and Philippa of Lancaster, the daughter of John of Gaunt of England. Henry and his older brothers, the princes of Duarte and Pedro, were educated under the supervision of their parents; they were taught soldiering, statecraft, and the appreciation of literature.

The starting point of Henry’s career was the capture of the Moroccan city of Ceuta in 1415. According to Henry’s enthusiastic biographer, Gomes Eanes de Zurara, the three princes persuaded their still-vigorous father to undertake a campaign that would enable them to win their knightly spurs in genuine combat instead of in the mock warfare of a tournament. King John consented and, with Ceuta in mind, began military preparations, meanwhile spreading rumours of another destination, in order to lull the Moroccan city into a feeling of false security.

Although a plague swept Portugal and claimed the Queen as a victim, the army sailed in July 1415. King John found Ceuta unprepared, as he had hoped, and its capture unexpectedly easy. Though Zurara later claimed the principal role in the victory for Henry, it would seem that the experienced soldier-king actually directed the operation. That Henry distinguished himself, however, is indicated by his immediate appointment as governor of Ceuta, which did not require his permanent residence there but obligated him to see that it was adequately defended.

An emergency arose in 1418, when the Muslim rulers of Fez (Fes) in Morocco and the kingdom of Granada in Spain joined in an attempt to retake the city. Henry hastened to the rescue with reinforcements but on arrival found that the Portuguese garrison had beaten off the assailants. He then proposed to attack Granada, despite reminders that this would antagonize the kingdom of Castile, on whose threshold it lay. But his father, who had spent years fighting the attempts of the Castilians to annex Portugal, wanted peace with them and sent peremptory orders to return home.

As governor of Ceuta, Henry always had ships at his command and by 1418 had begun to sponsor voyages in a small way. In that year, two squires of his, Joao Goncalves Zarco and Tristao Vaz Teixeira, rediscovered the islands of Porto Santo near Madeira and a little later Madeira itself, both of which had been visited by Genoese in the previous century.

Upon his return to Portugal, Henry had been made duke of Viseu and lord of Covilha. In 1419 he retired from the court and became governor of the Algarve, the southernmost province of Portugal. There, on the rocky promontory of Sagres, at the southwestern tip of Portugal, he founded a small court of his own, to which he attracted seamen, cartographers, astronomers, shipbuilders, and instrument makers.

In 1420, at the age of 26, he was made grand master of the Order of Christ, the supreme order sponsored by the pope, which had replaced the crusading order of the Templars in Portugal. While this did not oblige him to take religious vows, it did oblige him to dedicate himself to a chaste and ascetic life. (He had, however, not always refrained from worldly pleasures; as a young man he had fathered an illegitimate daughter.) The funds made available through the order largely financed his great enterprise of discovery, which also had as its object the conversion of the pagans to Christianity. It was for this reason that all of Henry’s ships bore a red cross on their sails. s

When Duarte succeeded King John in 1433, he did not hesitate to lecture and reprove Henry for such shortcomings as extravagance, unmethodical habits, failure to keep promises, and lack of scruples in the raising of money. This rebuke is not supported by the traditional account of the Navigator as a lofty, ascetic person, indifferent to all but religion and the furtherance of his mission of discovery.

Henry unquestionably was also–although in a different way–influenced by his older and perhaps more brilliant brother, Prince Pedro. In 1425 Pedro set out on a long tour of Europe on which he visited England, Flanders, Germany, Hungary, and the principalities of Moldavia and Walachia (now Romania) before returning home through Italy, Aragon, and Castile. In eastern Europe he was close enough to Ottoman Turkey to appreciate the Muslim danger. The travels stimulated his interest in geography, which was further whetted in Italy, the home of most European travellers to distant parts. From Italy Pedro brought home to Portugal, in 1428, a copy of Marco Polo’s travels that he had translated for Prince Henry’s benefit.

During the five years of his brother Duarte’s reign, Henry was able to persuade his captains to venture farther down the African coast. The most important achievement was the rounding of Cape Bojador by Gil Eanes in 1434, overcoming a superstition that had previously deterred seamen. During the next years, Henry’s captains pushed southward somewhat beyond the Rio de Oro. They also began the colonization of the recently discovered Azores, through the orders of both Henry and Pedro.

In 1437 Henry and his younger brother, Fernando, gained Duarte’s reluctant consent for an expedition against Tangier. Ceuta had proved an economic liability, and they believed that possession of the neighbouring city would both insure Ceuta’s safety and provide a source of revenue. Pedro opposed the undertaking as he felt it meant deviation from Portugal’s true mission, which to him was prosecution of further discovery. Henry and Fernando nevertheless attacked Tangier and met with disaster; Henry had shown poor generalship and mismanaged the enterprise. The Portuguese army would have been unable to reembark had not Fernando been left as hostage. Henry offered himself as hostage, but as the army refused to lose its commander, Fernando remained in captivity to later die of ill treatment at Fez in 1443.

King Duarte died in 1438, shortly before Henry’s return. His heir, Afonso V, was only six at the time, and Pedro assumed the regency over the bitter opposition of the boy’s mother, Leonor of Aragon, who hated her brother-in-law and would willingly have accepted Henry. But Henry had no wish to govern Portugal and attempted unsuccessfully to bring about peace in the family. He felt satisfied with Pedro as regent and for himself wished only to return to Sagres and resume his maritime work. The Queen Mother somewhat eased matters by leaving the country, and for most of the next decade Pedro and Henry worked in harmony, though their illegitimate half brother, Afonso, count of Barcelos, dissatisfied with his inferior position in the family, attempted to sow discord and eventually succeeded.

During these years, Henry’s mission of discovery, encouraged and aided by the regent, progressed rapidly. One of his immediate aims was to find an African gold supply–the existence of which he is thought to have learned from the Moors of Ceuta–to strengthen the Portuguese economy and to make the voyages pay for themselves. In 1441 a caravel returned from the West African coast with some gold dust and slaves, thus silencing the growing criticism that Henry was wasting money on a profitless enterprise. One of Henry’s voyagers, Dinis Dias, in 1445 reached the mouth of the Senegal (then taken for a branch of the Nile); and a year later Nuno Tristao, another of Henry’s captains, sighted the Gambia River. By 1448 the trade in slaves to Portugal had become sufficiently extensive for Henry to order the building of a fort and warehouse on Arguin Island; this installation was, in fact, the first European trading post established overseas. (see also Index: slave trade)

Afonso V attained his legal majority at the age of 14 in 1446. His embittered mother had meanwhile died in Castile, and although the young king presently married Pedro’s daughter, Isabel, his relations with the regent were nonetheless bad. Afonso of Barcelos now came to work on the boy’s susceptible mind. His task was rendered easier by the obvious reluctance with which Pedro turned full power over to the youth, whose weaknesses were already apparent.

Henry, who wished only to be a peacemaker, left Sagres and tried, unsuccessfully, to establish harmony between his brother Pedro and his nephew King Afonso. Armed conflict between the two became inevitable, and Henry in the end felt obliged to side with the King, though he remained as much as possible in the background. He took no part in a skirmish at Alfarrobeira in May 1449, in which Pedro was killed by a chance shot from a crossbowman. There is reason to believe that after this sad termination of the family feud, Henry wished to go into exile at Ceuta and spend his remaining days fighting Moors but that the King refused him permission. A historian writing 50 years later gave the impression that Henry had deserted his brother when he might have saved him. Henry’s biographer, Zurara, on the other hand, declared that his hero did everything possible to prevent Pedro’s death and promised to explain the circumstances further in later writings; but if he did so, the account is lost.

The farthest point south along the African coast reached during Henry’s lifetime is generally considered to have been Sierra Leone, though one piece of evidence suggests that his seamen progressed to Cape Palmas (off the Ivory Coast), some 400 miles beyond. So great was his investment in exploration that, despite his great revenues, Henry died heavily in debt.

Afonso V had small interest in discovery but great zeal for crusading and knight-errantry. Resuming the old attempt at Moroccan conquest, he led an expedition in 1458 against Alcacer Ceguer (now Ksar es-Shrhir), in which Henry accompanied him. The Prince, now 64, did well in the fighting, and, when the town capitulated, Afonso left the surrender terms to his uncle, who showed remarkable leniency. Henry lived for two years after his return from Alcacer Ceguer.