Gold was the lure
Jonathan Sumption
PRINCE HENRY 'THE NAVIGATOR': A LIFE by Peter Russell Yale, £20, pp. 448 P. ortugal is one of those countries whose history comprises a brief period of glory, sandwiched between aeons of immobility, foreign domination and decline. There is no obvious reason why it should have been SO. With its long coastline and fine river ports, Portugal might have been the Venice or Genoa of the Atlantic Ocean.
. For a century or so, until the mirage van- ished in the course of the 16th century, that seemed to have become its destiny. In the late Middle Ages, the traditional trade routes of Europe shifted westward, away from the Mediterranean and the great western river valleys to the Atlantic seaboard of Europe. This secular change was the result of a variety of natural and annatural causes, including prolonged internecine war in western Europe and the nomadic invasions of the Middle East. It made the commercial fortunes of Bruges, London, Antwerp and Seville and fed the ambitions which created the first maritime empires of the Atlantic. Of these, the most unexpected and precocious was the colo- nial empire of Portugal. Unexpected? Per- haps the best evidence of that is the degree to which its foundation was due to the efforts of one man, Henry, Duke of Viseu, the Navigator' as 19th-century historians called him. Henry was the third son of John I, King of Portugal and his English queen, Philippa of Lancaster. It was a frustrating business being the cadet of a European royal house. Henry was hemmed in by his father, broth- er and nephew, who successively ruled Por- tugal in his lifetime. He was also obstructed by his own lack of judgment, which meant that he was usually relegated to the mar- gins of Portuguese public life. But he found another outlet for his energies. In 1420, when he was 24 years old, his father had him appointed by the Pope to be the lay administrator of the Order of Christ, a mil- itary order which had succeeded to the property of the Templars in Portugal, and whose great wealth was being used for no obviously useful purpose. This wealth Henry spent on financing a succession of voyages down the Atlantic coast of Africa, punctuated by occasional wars of conquest in the islands lying west of it.
Henry's career as a patron of explorers and colonists began in the middle of the 1420s with a disastrous attempt to capture Grand Canary in 1424, which was beaten off by the native inhabitants. Their meth- ods of fighting, he complained to the Pope, were really most ungentlemanly. Uninhab- ited islands seemed more promising. A year or two later came the colonisation of the principal islands of the Madeira archipelago. This was followed by the occu- pation of the Azores. Then, starting in 1434, Henry's captains began to penetrate south from the Canaries down the west coast of Africa where no Europeans had ever been, and where the rudimentary existing charts showed only formless mass- es and nameless dangers. Thereafter, expe- ditions left Portugal more or less annually for the rest of Henry's life. Each expedition returned with charts, information about the inhabitants of the coast, cargoes of slaves and other exotica, and kidnapped natives who could be interrogated, or taught Por- tuguese and sent back with succeeding expeditions as interpreters.
Henry never did much navigating him- self. He left the work to professional sea- men and soldiers. But he was not simply an investor. He took a personal interest in the planning and execution of their voyages. He saw to the selection and fitting out of their ships. He gave them their instructions and received their reports. He sat on horse- back on the quayside as their cargoes were unloaded. He governed and taxed the infant Portuguese colonies of the islands. The Venetian explorer Cadamosto, who led two of Henry's expeditions to west Africa at the end of the 1350s, described in his travelogues an intelligent man, very much in control of his business, energetic, charming, curious about the world as well, and surprisingly astute in his commercial and technical judgments.
Opinions differed about Henry's motives, even in his own day. The mythology of the 15th century put his efforts down to crusad- ing zeal, the old ambition to turn the west- ern flank of Islam and join forces with the half-mythical Christian kingdom of Prester John. Henry himself encouraged this view. It helped to secure grants from Pope and King and to justify his appropriation of the revenues of a crusading order. The mythol- ogy of the 19th century looked at things very differently. It wrote off crusading zeal as bigotry and hypocrisy, and preferred to see Henry as a man of science, driven by the thirst for knowledge. There is some truth in both notions, but neither of them explains very much.
The reality was that Henry was a late mediaeval nobleman whose outlook on the world was no different from the rest of his kind. He was interested in money, war and God, three things which were perfectly complementary to a man of his disposition. Portugal had only recently emerged from a Tangier in the 16th century, as depicted in the Civitates orbis terrarutn, 1572 long war against Castile. War had not only occupied the nobility of the previous gener- ation. It had supplied its more successful practitioners with loot and ransoms: a stream of profits well in excess of anything that the revenues of their estates could produce. It had become a large-scale busi- ness enterprise, whose practitioners per- fectly understood how to maximise their profits and minimise their risks. They need- ed new outlets for their enterprise. Until more profitable ways of making a return were suggested by the seamen and mer- chants who crewed his ships and split the profits, Henry regarded west Africa as sim- ply another field for mounted raids on ships instead of horses.
Even the curiosity of the man must be kept in perspective. Henry took men out to west Africa not so much to discover about unknown lands, but because he thought that he knew about them already. The libraries of late mediaeval Europe were filled with fictional travellers' tales, whose authors described the known world in con- vincing detail, derived partly from earlier works of the same kind and partly from their own imaginations and a shrewd instinct for what their readers wanted to hear. The main influence on Henry seems to have been a well-known Castilian world geography called the Libro del conoscimien- to del mundo (Book of Knowledge of the World). What interested him most about this farrago of fictions were the reports that south of the Sahara lay great gold- fields from which the bullion trade of north Africa was supplied. For the time being, Henry might have to be content with slaves, timber and sugar. But his real object was gold.
In recent years, Portuguese scholarship has collected 15 hefty volumes of contem- porary source material about the life and work of Henry the Navigator. But for all that, very little is known about him. It is the common fate of mediaeval heroes. Person- al letters rarely survive. Intimates never wrote their memoirs. Spouses and friends spoke their thoughts low and in private. Administrative archives survive only in patchy, fragmentary form. Sycophantic chroniclers covered great men with conven- tional praise, from which only cardboard figures emerge. Yet out of this unpromis- ing material Sir Peter Russell has written a remarkable biography. Russell is a great scholar of Iberian history with a profound knowledge of the Portuguese sources. He approaches with becoming reserve the fables of official chroniclers which his pre- decessors swallowed whole. He gets more out of the stony administrative records than most students of the period would have thought possible. He writes in an approachable style a tale worth telling. He has also been well served by his publishers, Yale University Press, who have produced a beautiful book, well-bound on good paper with a generous clutch of illustra- tions, for a very reasonable price.
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