The Portuguese Discoverers (XXXVII)

The Portuguese Discoverers (XXXVII)

via Carreira da Índia de Leonel Vicente em 18/12/08

There they separated. Paiva was to make his way directly to Ethiopian and Prester John, while Covilhã would go on to India. Paiva disappeared, but Covilhã finally reached Calicut and Goa on the southwestern shores of India, where he witnessed the prosperous trade in Arabian horses, spices, fine cottons, and precious stones. In February 1489 Covilhã took ship westward to Ormuz at the entrance to the Persian Gulf, then to the east African port of Sofala opposite Madagascar and back north to Cairo. Having completed his mission of assessing the European trade with India, he was eager to return home, but there in Cairo he encountered two Jewish emissaries from King John II who carried a letter instructing Covilhã, if he had not already done so, to proceed at once to the realm of Prester John to collect information and promote an alliance.

Unable to disobey his sovereign, Covilhã took up the mission, meanwhile sending to King John a momentous letter with all he had learned about Arab seafaring ant the commerce of India. In 1493, after a side trip to Mecca, six years after his departure from Portugal, he finally arrived in Ethiopia. In this Realm of Prester John, actually ruled by Alexander "Lion of the Tribe Judah, and King of Kings," he became a Portuguese Marco Polo, so useful at court that the King would not let him leave. Convinced that we would never return home, Covilhã married an Ethiopian wife who bore him several children.

Meanwhile, Covilhã's letter, which has not survived and which is known only secondhand, would have a powerful influence on the future of Portugal and Asia. For it appears to have informed King John II, from reports Covilhã had heard on the African coast, "that his [the king's] caravels, which carried on trade in Guinea, navigating from land to land seeking the coast of this island [Madagascar] and Sofala, could easily penetrate into these Eastern seas and come to make the coast of Calicut, for there was sea everywhere."

"The Portuguese Discoverers", from "The Discoverers", Daniel J. Boorstin, The National Board for the Celebration of Portuguese Discoveries, Lisbon, 1987

Daniel J. Boorstin - antigo director da Biblioteca do Congresso

The Portuguese Discoverers (XXXVI)

The Portuguese Discoverers (XXXVI)

via Carreira da Índia de Leonel Vicente em 16/12/08

By 1487 King John II had organized a two-pronged grand strategy for reaching the long-sought Christian ally. He would send one expedition southeastward overland and another by sea around the African coast. If there really should be a sea passage to India, a Christian ally was more desirable and more necessary than ever, not only for crusading but also to serve as way station and supply base for future trading enterprises.

The overland expedition that left Santarém on May 7, 1487, like others before it, was characteristically small, consisting of only two men. After a considerable search, the King had chosen Pero da Covilhã (1460?-1545?) and Afonso de Paiva for the dangerous assignment. Covilhã, a married man with children, in his late twenties, had already proven himself bold and versatile. He has spent much of his life abroad, had taken part in ambushes in the streets of Seville, had served as the King's secret agent at the court of Ferdinand and Isabella, and had undertaken diplomatic missions to the Barbary States in north Africa. […]

"The Portuguese Discoverers", from "The Discoverers", Daniel J. Boorstin, The National Board for the Celebration of Portuguese Discoveries, Lisbon, 1987

Daniel J. Boorstin - antigo director da Biblioteca do Congresso

The Portuguese Discoverers (XXXV)

The Portuguese Discoverers (XXXV)

via Carreira da Índia de Leonel Vicente em 16/12/08

Meanwhile King John, carrying on Prince Henry's work, kept sending his discovery voyages farther down the west African coast. Diogo Cão reached the mouth of the Congo (1480-84), and began the customs of setting up stone markers (padrões), surmounted by a cross, as proof of first discovery and tokens of Christian faith.

These advances down the coast brought new rumors of the famous but still unseen Prester John. While Prince Henry's first objective was to move into the unknown, another objective, his chronicler Zurara reported, was "to know if there were in those parts any Christian princes, in whom the charity and the love of Christ was so ingrained that they would aid him against those enemies of the faith." This conjectural potential ally must have been Prester John, whose "letter," as we have seen, had been circulating in Europe for two centuries. By this time the locale of the legendary priest-king had been transferred from "furthest Asia" to Ethiopia. Whenever one of Prince Henry's voyages found another great river – the Senegal, the Gambia, the Niger – debouching on the west coast, he found new hope that this at last might be the "Western Nile" that would lead to Prester John's Ethiopian Kingdom. […]

"The Portuguese Discoverers", from "The Discoverers", Daniel J. Boorstin, The National Board for the Celebration of Portuguese Discoveries, Lisbon, 1987

Daniel J. Boorstin - antigo director da Biblioteca do Congresso

The Portuguese Discoverers (XXXIV)

The Portuguese Discoverers (XXXIV)

via Carreira da Índia de Leonel Vicente em 15/12/08

As we have noted, when mariners advanced below the equator they could no longer see the North Star, and so had to find another way to determine their latitude. To solve this problem King John, like Prince Henry, collected experts from everywhere, and set up a commission headed by two learned Jewish astrologer-mathematicians – a Portuguese dividend from the persecutions across the border in Spain. In 1492, when the Spanish inquisitor-general Torquemada gave Jews three months to convert to Christianity or leave the country, the brilliant Abraham Zacuto left the University of Salamanca and was welcomed to Portugal by King John II. Zacuto's disciple at Salamanca, Joseph Vizinho, had already accepted the King's invitation ten years before, and in 1485 had been sent out on a voyage to develop and apply the technique of determining latitude by the height of the sun at midday. He was to accomplish this by recording the declination of the sun along the whole Guinea coast. The most advanced work for finding position at sea by the declination of the sun, as would be necessary in sailing below the equator, was the Almanach Perpetuum which Zacuto had written in Hebrew nearly twenty years before. After Vizinho translated these tables into Latin, they guided Portuguese discoverers for a half-century.

"The Portuguese Discoverers", from "The Discoverers", Daniel J. Boorstin, The National Board for the Celebration of Portuguese Discoveries, Lisbon, 1987

Daniel J. Boorstin - antigo director da Biblioteca do Congresso

The Portuguese Discoverers (XXXIII)

The Portuguese Discoverers (XXXIII)

via Carreira da Índia de Leonel Vicente em 12/12/08

The Gomes contract, we know, produced an impressive annual series of African discoveries – around Cape Palmas at he continent's southwestern tip, into the Bight of Benin, the island of Fernando Po at the eastern tip of the Guinea coast ant then down southward across the equator. It had taken Prince Henry's sailors thirty years to cover a length of coast that Gomes, under his contract, covered in five. When Gomes' contract expired, the King gave the trading rights to his own son, John, who became King John II in 1481, opening the nest great age of Portuguese seafaring.

King John II had some advantages that Prince Henry had lacked. The royal treasury was now enriched by the feedback of imports from the west African coast. Cargoes of pepper, ivory, gold, and slaves had already become so substantial that they gave their names to the parts of continent that faced the Gulf of Guinea. For centuries these would be called the Grain Coast (Guinea pepper was known as "Grains of Paradise"), the Ivory Coast, the Gold Coast, and the Slave Coast. King John protected Portuguese settlements by building Fort Elmina, "the mine," in the heart of the Gold Coast. He supported land expeditions into the interior, to the cack-country of Sierra Lione and even as far as Timbuktoo. And he pushed on down the coast.

"The Portuguese Discoverers", from "The Discoverers", Daniel J. Boorstin, The National Board for the Celebration of Portuguese Discoveries, Lisbon, 1987

Daniel J. Boorstin - antigo director da Biblioteca do Congresso

The Portuguese Discoverers (XXXII)

The Portuguese Discoverers (XXXII)

via Carreira da Índia de Leonel Vicente em 11/12/08

Prince Henry's death caused only a brief hiatus in the exploring enterprise. Then in 1469 King Alfonso V, Prince Henry's nephew, in financial difficulty, found a way to make discovery into a profitable business. In an agreement quite unlike any we have heard of before between sovereign and vassal, Fernão Gomes, a wealthy citizen of Lisbon, committed himself to discover at least one hundred farther leagues, about three hundred miles, of the African coast each year for the next five years. In return, Gomes obtained a monopoly of the Guinea trade, from which the King received a share. The rest of the story has the inevitability of a steadily rising curtain. Discovery of the whole west African coast by the Portuguese now was a question no longer of whether but of when.

The supposed Portuguese policy of secrecy poses tantalizing problems for the historian because the policy itself seems to have been kept secret. When we chronicle Portuguese advances into the hitherto unknown, we must wonder whether any particular Portuguese voyage was unrecorded because of this "policy of secrecy" or simply because it was never made. Portuguese historians have been understandably tempted to treat the absence of a record of pre-Columbian voyages to America as a kind of evidence that such voyages really were made. […]

"The Portuguese Discoverers", from "The Discoverers", Daniel J. Boorstin, The National Board for the Celebration of Portuguese Discoveries, Lisbon, 1987

Daniel J. Boorstin - antigo director da Biblioteca do Congresso

The Portuguese Discoverers (XXXI)

The Portuguese Discoverers (XXXI)

via Carreira da Índia de Leonel Vicente em 10/12/08

When Dinis Dias rounded Cape Verde, the western tip of Africa, in 1445, the most barren coast had been passed, and the prosperous Portuguese trader with west Africa soon engaged twenty-five caravels every year. By 1457 Alvise da Cadamosto – a Venetian precursor of the Italian sea captains like Columbus, Vespucci, and the Cabots who served foreign princes – advancing down the coast for Prince Henry had accidentally discovered the Cape Verde Islands and then went up the Senegal and Gambia rivers sixty miles from the sea. This Cadamosto proved to be one of the most observant as well as one of the boldest of Prince Henry's explorers. By his engaging accounts of curious tribal customs, of tropical vegetation, elephants, and hippopotami, he enticed others to follow.

At the time of Prince Henry's death in Sagres in 1460 the discovery of the west African coast had only begun, but it was well begun. The barrier of groundless fear had been breached in what became the first continuous organized enterprise into the unknown. Prince Henry therefore is properly celebrated as the founder of continuous discovery. For him each new step into the unknown was a further invitation.

"The Portuguese Discoverers", from "The Discoverers", Daniel J. Boorstin, The National Board for the Celebration of Portuguese Discoveries, Lisbon, 1987

Daniel J. Boorstin - antigo director da Biblioteca do Congresso

The Portuguese Discoverers (XXX)

The Portuguese Discoverers (XXX)

via Carreira da Índia de Leonel Vicente em 09/12/08

Having broken the barrier of fear "and the shadow of fear," Prince Henry was on his way. Year after year he dispatched expeditions, each reaching a bit farther into the unknown. In 1435, when he sent out Eannes once again, this time with Afonso Baldaya, the royal cupbearer, they reached another fifty leagues down the coast. There they saw footprints of men and camels, but still did not encounter the people. In 1436, when Prince to interview at Sagres, he reached what seemed to be the mouth of a huge river, which he hoped would be the Senegal of "the silent trade" in gold. They called it the Rio de Ouro, even thought it was only a large inlet and not a river, for the Senegal actually lay another five hundred miles farther south.

The relentless step-by-step exploration of the west African coast proceeded year by year, although commercial rewards were meager. In 1441, from Prince Henry's household went Nuno Tristão and Antão Gonçalves, reaching another two hundred fifty miles farther to Cape Branco (Blanco) where they took two natives captive. In 1444 from that area Eannes brought back the first human cargo – two hundred Africans to be sold as slaves in Lagos. […]

"The Portuguese Discoverers", from "The Discoverers", Daniel J. Boorstin, The National Board for the Celebration of Portuguese Discoveries, Lisbon, 1987

Daniel J. Boorstin - antigo director da Biblioteca do Congresso

The Portuguese Discoverers (XXIX)

The Portuguese Discoverers (XXIX)

via Carreira da Índia de Leonel Vicente em 05/12/08

When Gil Eannes reported back to Prince Henry in 1433 that Cape Bojador was in fact impassable, the Prince was not satisfied. Would his Portuguese pilots be as timid as those Mediterranean or Flemish sailors who plied only the familiar ways? Surely this Gil Eannes, a squire whom he knew well in his own household, was made of bolder stuff. The Prince sent him back in 1434 with renewed promise of reward for yet another try. This time, as Eannes approached the cape he steered westward, risking the unknown perils of the ocean rather than the known perils of the cape. Then he turned south and discovered that the cape was already behind him. Landing on the African shore, he found it desolate, but by no means the gates of hell. "And as he purposed," Zurara reported, "so he performed – for in that voyage he doubled the Cape, despising all danger, and found the lands beyond quite contrary to what he, like others, had expected. And although the matter was a small one in itself, yet on account of its daring it was reckoned great."

"The Portuguese Discoverers", from "The Discoverers", Daniel J. Boorstin, The National Board for the Celebration of Portuguese Discoveries, Lisbon, 1987

Daniel J. Boorstin - antigo director da Biblioteca do Congresso

The Portuguese Discoverers (XXVIII)

The Portuguese Discoverers (XXVIII)

via Carreira da Índia de Leonel Vicente em 04/12/08

At home in Sagres Prince Henry knew that he could not conquer the physical barrier unless he first conquered the barrier of fear.

He would never reach farther into the unknown unless he could persuade his seamen to go beyond Cape Bojador. Between 1424 and 1434 Prince Henry sent out fifteen expeditions to round the inconsequential but threatening cape. Each returned with some excuse for not going where none had gone before. At the legendary cape the sea bounced with cascades of ominous red sands that crumbled from the overhanging cliffs, while shoals of sardines swimming in the shallows roiled the waters between whirlpools. There was no sign of life along the desert coast. Was this not the very image of the world's end?

"The Portuguese Discoverers", from "The Discoverers", Daniel J. Boorstin, The National Board for the Celebration of Portuguese Discoveries, Lisbon, 1987

Daniel J. Boorstin - antigo director da Biblioteca do Congresso

The Portuguese Discoverers (XXVII)

The Portuguese Discoverers (XXVII)

via Carreira da Índia de Leonel Vicente em 03/12/08

When we look at a modern map of Africa, we look long and need a magnifying glass before we can find Cape Bojador (Portuguese for "Bulging Cape"), on the west coast, just south of the Canary Islands. Some thousand miles north of the continent's greatest westward bulge we see a tiny bump on the coastal outline, a "bulge" so slight that it is almost imperceptible on maps of the full continent. The sandy barrier there is so low that it can be seen only when one comes close, where was no worse than a score of other barriers that skillful Portuguese sailors had passed and survived. But this particular Cape Bojador they had made their ne plus ultra. You dare not go beyond!

When we see the enormous risky promontories, the Cape of Good Hope or Cape Horn, that European seafarers would manage to round within the next century, we must recognize Bojador as something quite else. It was a barrier in the mind, the very prototype of primitive obstacles to the explorer. […]

"The Portuguese Discoverers", from "The Discoverers", Daniel J. Boorstin, The National Board for the Celebration of Portuguese Discoveries, Lisbon, 1987

Daniel J. Boorstin - antigo director da Biblioteca do Congresso

The Portuguese Discoverers (XXVI)

The Portuguese Discoverers (XXVI)

via Carreira da Índia de Leonel Vicente em 02/12/08

2

Beyond the Threatening Cape

Unlike Columbus, who would aim straight for the Indies, Prince Henry the Navigator had a larger, a vaguer, and more modern destination – true to his horoscope. […].

We have no evidence that Prince Henry had in mind the specific purpose of opening a sea-way around Africa to India. What beckoned him was the unknown, which lay west and southwest into the Sea of Darkness and southward along the uncharted coast of Africa. The Atlantic islands – The Azores (one-third of the way across the Atlantic Ocean!), the Madeiras, and the Canaries – had probably been discovered by Genoese sailors in the mid-fourteenth century. Prince Henry's efforts in that direction were less an enterprise of discovery than of colonization and development. But when his people landed in Madeira (madeira means wood) in 1420 and set about clearing the thick woods, they set a fire that raged for seven years. Although they never planned in that way, the potash left from the consumed wood would prove a perfect fertilizer for vineyards of the Malmsey grapes imported from Crete to replace those forests. The justly famous "Madeira" wine was the lasting product. Yet, as his stars foretold, Prince Henry was by nature and by preference not a colonizer but a discoverer.

"The Portuguese Discoverers", from "The Discoverers", Daniel J. Boorstin, The National Board for the Celebration of Portuguese Discoveries, Lisbon, 1987

Daniel J. Boorstin - antigo director da Biblioteca do Congresso

The Portuguese Discoverers (XXV)

The Portuguese Discoverers (XXV)

via Carreira da Índia de Leonel Vicente em 28/11/08

Prince Henry's caravel was specially designed for these explorer's needs. He found some clues in the caravos, ships used by Arabs since ancient times off the Egyptian and Tunisian coasts, modeled on the still more ancient fishing vessels that the Greeks had made of rushes and hide. These dhows, rigged with "lateen", slanting ant triangular sails, carried Arab crews of as many as thirty, in addition to seventy horses. A similar smaller, even more maneuverable vessel, called the caravela (-ela = diminutive) was in use on the Douro River in northern Portugal. Prince Henry's shipbuilders produced the famous caravel, which combined some of the cargo-carrying features of the Arab caravos with the maneuverability of the Douro River caravelas.

These remarkable little vessels were large enough to hold an explorer's supplies for a small crew of about twenty, who usually slept on deck but in bad weather went below. The caravel displaced about fifty tons, was about seventy feet in length and about twenty-five feet in the beam, and carried two or three lateen sail. "The best ships that sailed the seas" was what Alvise da Cadamosto (1432?-1511), the experienced Venetian mariner, called the caravels in 1456 after his African voyage in a caravel organized by Prince Henry. The caravel became the discoverer's standard ship. Columbus' three ships – the Santa Maria, The Pinta, and the Niña – were all of caravel design, and the Santa Maria was only one-fifth as big as the large Venetian square-riggers of his day. The caravel proved that bigger was not always better. […]

"The Portuguese Discoverers", from "The Discoverers", Daniel J. Boorstin, The National Board for the Celebration of Portuguese Discoveries, Lisbon, 1987

Daniel J. Boorstin - antigo director da Biblioteca do Congresso

The Portuguese Discoverers (XXIV)

The Portuguese Discoverers (XXIV)

via Carreira da Índia de Leonel Vicente em 27/11/08

At Sagres and at the nearby port of Lagos, experiments in shipbuilding produced a new type of ship without which Prince Henry's exploring expeditions and the great seafaring adventures of the next century would not have been possible. The caravel was a ship specially designed to bring explorers back. The familiar heavy, square-rigged barca or the still larger Venetian carrack was suited for sailing with the wind. These worked well enough within the Mediterranean, where the size of a trading vessel was a measure of its profit, and by 1450 there were Venetian square-riggers of six hundred tons or more. A larger ship meant a bigger profit from more cargo.

A discovery ship had its own special problems. It was not a cargo-vessel, it had to go long distances in unfamiliar waters and had to be able, if necessary, to sail into the wind. An exploring ship was no good unless it could get there and back. Its important cargo was news, which could be carried in a small parcel, even in the mind of one man, but which was definitely a return product, While discovery ships did not need to be big, they had to be maneuverable, and adept at the return. […]

"The Portuguese Discoverers", from "The Discoverers", Daniel J. Boorstin, The National Board for the Celebration of Portuguese Discoveries, Lisbon, 1987

Daniel J. Boorstin - antigo director da Biblioteca do Congresso

The Portuguese Discoverers (XXIII)

The Portuguese Discoverers (XXIII)

via Carreira da Índia de Leonel Vicente em 25/11/08

To Sagres came sailors, travelers, and savants from all over, each adding some new fragment of fact or some new avenue to facts. Besides Jews, there were Muslims and Arabs, Italians from Genoa and Venice, Germans and Scandinavians, and, as exploring advanced, tribesmen from the west coast of Africa. At Sagres, too, were manuscript records of the great travelers that Prince Henry's brother Pedro had collected during his grand tour (1419-1428) of the European courts. In Venice Pedro had received a copy of Marco Polo's travels along with a map "which had all the parts of the earth described, whereby Prince Henry was much furthered."

With these facts came the latest navigating instruments and newest navigating techniques. The mariner's compass was already well known, but its use was still haunted by superstitious fears of its occult power, believed to be akin to necromancy. Only a century before, tricks such as those performed with the lodestone had got Roger Bacon in trouble. At Sagres the compass, like other instruments, was tested only by whether it helped the mariner reach out farther and then find his way home. […]

"The Portuguese Discoverers", from "The Discoverers", Daniel J. Boorstin, The National Board for the Celebration of Portuguese Discoveries, Lisbon, 1987

Daniel J. Boorstin - antigo director da Biblioteca do Congresso

The Portuguese Discoverers (XXII)

The Portuguese Discoverers (XXII)

via Carreira da Índia de Leonel Vicente em 25/11/08

Prince Henry, for all these reasons, made Sagres a center for cartography, for navigation, and for shipbuilding. He knew that the unknown could be discovered only by clearly marking the boundaries of the known. This meant, of course, junking the caricatures drawn by Christian geographers and replacing them with cautious, piecemeal maps. And this required an incremental approach.

In the spirit of the portolanos, the coast pilots, he accumulated the bits of many mariner's experiences to fill out an unknown coast. The Jews, wherever they were, had long since become powerful cultural ambassadors and cosmopolitanizers. The Catalan Jew from Majorca, Jehuda Cresques, son of the cartographer Abraham Cesques, whom we have already met, was brought to Sagres, where he supervised the piecing together of the geographic facts brought back by Prince Henry's seafaring explorers. […]

"The Portuguese Discoverers", from "The Discoverers", Daniel J. Boorstin, The National Board for the Celebration of Portuguese Discoveries, Lisbon, 1987

Daniel J. Boorstin - antigo director da Biblioteca do Congresso

The Portuguese Discoverers (XXI)

The Portuguese Discoverers (XXI)

via Carreira da Índia de Leonel Vicente em 24/11/08

The visitor to Portugal today can see a lighthouse on the ruins of the fortress that Prince Henry made his headquarters for forty years. There Prince Henry initiated, organized, and commanded expeditions, on the frontier of mystery. In the first modern enterprise of exploring, from that spot he sent out an unbroken series of voyages into the unknown. Today's visitor to the harsh inhospitable cliffs of Sagres senses the appeal that place must have had for an ascetic prince who wanted to separate himself from the formalities of an effete court.

At Sagres Prince Henry became the Navigator. There he applied the zeal and energy of the crusader to the modern exploring enterprise. Prince Henry's court was a primitive Research and Development Laboratory. In the crusader's world the known was dogma ant the unknown was unknowable. But in the explorer's world the unknown was simply the not-yet discovered. And all the trivia of everyday experience could become signposts. […]

"The Portuguese Discoverers", from "The Discoverers", Daniel J. Boorstin, The National Board for the Celebration of Portuguese Discoveries, Lisbon, 1987

Daniel J. Boorstin - antigo director da Biblioteca do Congresso

The Portuguese Discoverers (XX)

The Portuguese Discoverers (XX)

via Carreira da Índia de Leonel Vicente em 20/11/08

But still the crusader, he organized a Portuguese fleet and declared his intention to capture Gibraltar from the infidels. When King John forbade that expedition after it was already underway, Prince Henry returned home sulking. Instead of joining the court in Lisbon where he would have shared the burdens of royal government, he went far southward through the Algarve to Portugal's Land's End, Cape Saint Vincent, the southwestern tip of Europe.

Ancient geographers had given a mystic significance to that extremity of land, the borderland of the watery unknown. "Sacred Promontory" (Promentorium Sacrum) was what Marinus and Ptolemy had christened it. The Portuguese, translating this into Sagres, made it the name of the nearby village.

"The Portuguese Discoverers", from "The Discoverers", Daniel J. Boorstin, The National Board for the Celebration of Portuguese Discoveries, Lisbon, 1987

Daniel J. Boorstin - antigo director da Biblioteca do Congresso

The Portuguese Discoverers (XIX)

The Portuguese Discoverers (XIX)

via Carreira da Índia de Leonel Vicente em 20/11/08

Prince Henry gathered information about the interior lands from which the treasures of Ceuta had come. He heard tales of a curious trade, "the silent trade", designed for peoples who did not know each other's language. The Muslim caravans that went southward from Morocco across the Atlas Mountains arrived after twenty days at the shores of the Senegal River. There the Moroccan traders laid out separate piles of salt, of beads from Ceutan coral, and cheap manufactured goods. Then they retreated out of sight. The local tribesmen, who lived in the strip mines where they dug their gold, came to the shore and put a heap of gold beside each pile of Moroccan goods. Then they, in turn, went out of view, leaving the Moroccan traders either to take the gold offered for a particular pile or to reduce the pile of their merchandise to suit the offered price in gold. Once again the Moroccan traders withdrew, and the process went on. By this system of commercial etiquette the Moroccans collected their gold. Tales of the bizarre process fired Prince Henry's hopes.

"The Portuguese Discoverers", from "The Discoverers", Daniel J. Boorstin, The National Board for the Celebration of Portuguese Discoveries, Lisbon, 1987

Daniel J. Boorstin - antigo director da Biblioteca do Congresso

The Portuguese Discoverers (XVIII)

The Portuguese Discoverers (XVIII)

via Carreira da Índia de Leonel Vicente em 19/11/08

The Portuguese armada stormed the fortress at Ceuta on August 24, 1415, in a onde-sided battle. Well armed and armored, and supported by a contingent of English archers, they overwhelmed the Muslims, who were reduced to hurling rocks. Within a day the Portuguese crusaders had taken the Infidel stronghold and provided Prince Henry his moment of glory. Only eight Portuguese had been killed, while the city streets were piled with Muslim bodies. By afternoon the army had begun sacking the city, and the spiritual rewards of killing infidels were supplemented by more worldly treasure. This occasion gave Prince Henry his first dazzling glimpse of the wealth that lay hidden in Africa. For the loot in Ceuta was the freight delivered by the caravans that had been arriving there from Saharan Africa in the south and from the Indies in the east. In addition to the prosaic essentials of life – wheat, rice, and the salt – the Portuguese found exotic stores of pepper, cinnamon, cloves, ginger, and other spices. Ceutan houses were hung with rich tapestries and carpeted with Oriental rugs. All in addition to the usual booty of gold and silver and jewels. […].

"The Portuguese Discoverers", from "The Discoverers", Daniel J. Boorstin, The National Board for the Celebration of Portuguese Discoveries, Lisbon, 1987

Daniel J. Boorstin - antigo director da Biblioteca do Congresso