by Hugh Thomas
The Carthaginians attempted a similar expedition a hundred years later, but down the west coast. They sent out a large party under Hanno, one of the two magistrates of the state. He may have founded some colonies and, passing the river Sénégal, perhaps reached Sierra Leone, where he discovered an island full of apes, mostly females. He returned to say that he had founded a port and named it Cerne. The story was recorded in the Temple of Moloch in Carthage, but the exploit was soon forgotten.
Later the Persian Sataspes sailed down the coast of West Africa and found, he reported, small black people with clothes made of palm leaves.
No further such adventure seems to have been mounted until the fifteenth century A.D. For these incurious generations, the assumption was that Africa was impossible to circumnavigate, since the Indian Ocean was believed to be landlocked. Some Arab journeys undoubtedly were made, but it is quite unclear where they went.
It was for many generations supposed that Cape Bojador, to the south of Cape Juby, in what is now the Rio de Oro, was the ne plus ultra of wise seamen. Beyond it, white sailors were supposed to turn black, and a Green Sea of Darkness was believed to open up. One might expect to meet sea monsters, and rocks which could turn into serpents. The sun would send down sheets of liquid flame, the mist would be impenetrable, and the currents and reefs unnavigable. But, then, no one quite knew the whereabouts of Cape Bojador; it was often confused with Cape Juby.
A new era of discoveries was begun by Italians, in the late Middle Ages the most enlightened of European peoples. In 1291, Ugolino and Vadino Vivaldi and probably Teodosio Doria, from Genoa, set out with a flotilla of galleys to reach India by way of West Africa. Their declared aim was to outmaneuver the Venetians, who had secured control over trade through Egypt from the east. They thus established the agenda, so to say, of nautical ambition for the next two hundred years. Their ships were lost, but the memory of their attempt remained—though it has been suggested that in truth they set out west for the New World, rather than south for the Old. Then, about 1320, another Genoese, Lanzarotto Malocello, an adventurous captain who had had dealings with Cherbourg, in the remote English Channel, and the Low Countries, as also with the closer Ceuta, in Morocco, went to look for the Vivaldis and planted a Spanish flag in the Canary Isles (known to antiquity as the Fortunate Isles, or the Garden of the Hesperides, and never quite forgotten). Malocello gave his Christian name to one island of that archipelago, which it retains to this day. Other Mediterranean cities were soon interested. The Florentine Boccaccio tells how a journey was made about 1340 to West Africa by a group of adventurers which included Portuguese, Spaniards, Genoese, and Florentines (the commander was Angiolino del Teggia, of Florence), who communicated as they sailed by whistling. They brought back four inhabitants of Tenerife—guanches, who presumably ended their days as slaves—as well as redwood, sheepskins, and tallow.
In those days, Jewish merchants in Majorca had many dealings with their coreligionary trading partners in the ports of North Africa. Those Jews, it will be remembered, had more freedom to move about in the Arab world than their Christian counterparts. They were goldsmiths in Fez, and some Jewish colonies were established still farther south, even in the oases of the Sahara, their members sometimes marrying local Berbers or blacks, such as the Fulani in Senegambia. There were, too, some Catalan merchants in the sultanate of Tlemcen, forty miles inland from the Mediterranean near Oran.
Much information, therefore, became available in Spain, and the famous cartographers of Majorca put it to good use. So Angelino Dulcert, probably of Palma, was in 1339 able to design a sea chart which gave accurate pride of place to an African monarch, Mansa Musa of Mali, known for his wealth and for that extravagant hadj of 1324, of which mention has been made. Dulcert also depicted a “road to the land of the blacks,” as well as a “Saracen King” beyond the Atlas Mountains who owned mines “abounding in gold.”1 The idea was intoxicating! So it was scarcely surprising that Jaume Ferrer, also from Majorca, should set off in 1346 to look for a much-talked-of River of Gold (the territory now known as Rio de Oro); but he, too, vanished, as the Vivaldis and Doria had done.
Across the Mediterranean, in Aragon, an anonymous Franciscan wrote a book which described an imaginary voyage down the West African coast to that River of Gold, which seemed to lead to the presumed land of Prester John, a legendary Christian emperor cut off from Europe by infidel Muslims: that land was Ethiopia, whose monarchs had indeed joined the Christian Church in its early days (Saint Augustine had written, “Aethiopia credit Deo”). The author, like many others, confused Ethiopia, for long a synonym for Africa, with Mali, but much in his book was correct. Not long after, about 1400, Abraham Cresques, also a Majorcan, in a remarkably accurate map (the “Catalan Map,” as it has become known) drew attention to a gap in the Atlas Mountains and wrote, “Through here pass the merchants who come from the lands of the blacks of Guinea.”2
These expeditions were not concerned exclusively with gold. Thus, in the fourteenth century, occasional cargoes of Canary Islanders were carried as slaves to both Portuguese and Andalusian ports. In 1402, Jean de Béthencourt and some French friends, also on their way to the River of Gold, brought back to Seville some indigenous slaves after their conquest of the larger Canary Islands in the name of Castile. They were sold in Cádiz and seem to have been taken to Aragon.
The turning point for European journeys to West Africa came when, in 1415, the Portuguese mounted a military expedition and took Ceuta, then one of the greatest commercial entrepôts on the south coast of the Mediterranean, and the northern terminus of several caravan routes in Africa. The Genoese had recorded commerce with Ceuta for 250 years, and the conquest may have been suggested by them, though there were many motives behind the decision to attack—the political ambitions of the Portuguese princes, and a highly developed sense of destiny inspired by chivalrous literature among them. These half-English infantes, the future King Duarte and his brother Henry the Navigator who, with their father, King João I, had earned their spurs as knights in this enterprise, are said to have heard from some Moorish prisoners of the details of the passage of trains of merchants and camels, carrying beads made in Ceuta, among other things, for exchange with gold and slaves, to Timbuktu on the Niger and to Cantor on the Gambia, news that inspired Henry “to seek the lands by the way of the sea.”3
If he did not know of them before, Henry also learned at Ceuta of the black slaves available from Guinea, for he observed in the battle, as many Portuguese did, the special prowess in the fighting of a tall African, one of the innumerable slave soldiers in whom Muslim monarchs placed so much faith.
Henry the Navigator is an important pioneer in the history of the transatlantic slave trade. He might be said to be a representative European of his day, since he had both English ancestors—through his maternal grandfather, John of Gaunt—and much Spanish and French blood. He is, though, a curiously elusive hero, a gregarious bachelor who liked neither wine nor women, a patriot, yet more a businessman than a typical prince. But he was persistent and energetic, as well as charming and open-minded. He had both curiosity and religious zeal. He was austere, but combined the pride and cold heart of a nobleman with the economic imagination of an entrepreneur. Henry, despite his swarthy complexion, probably never shook off the lowering influence of his dominating English mother who, it was said, found the Court in Lisbon a sewer, and left it a nunnery.
As the Portuguese should have anticipated, the principal center of trade in North Africa was moved by the Muslims from Ceuta, after its fall to the Christians, to other places, so the routes across the Sahara did not pass under Portuguese control. But Prince Henry decided for himself that the source of African gold, the coast of Guinea, might be reached by sea (he may have been influenced, as Columbus was later, by Florentine cosmographers). There might be other commercial benefits which, in the long run, would make an effort at exploration worthwhile: the hope of obtaining slaves may have loomed in his calculations, and the pep
pers—“grains of paradise,” or malaguetta—from the future Grain Coast (approximately the modern Liberia) were already known in European markets, because of the trans-Saharan trade.
The “gold of Guinea” was in truth produced in remote zones: near the upper waters of the Sénégal; at Bambuk, between the rivers Sénégal and Falémé; and two hundred miles away, at Bure, near the junction of the Niger and its tributary the Tinkisso. Other gold fields were in the forests of what later became known as Ashanti, and Lobi, on the higher waters of the Black Volta. But the Portuguese assumed that they could reach those magic sites by sea.
The idea of a land campaign to find the sources of the gold of Guinea did not occur to Prince Henry—fortunately, since no doubt it would have been doomed to failure, just as Arab and Moorish expeditions south from Sijilmasa along the ancient caravan road had been, when mounted in, respectively, the eighth and the eleventh centuries.
Prince Henry eventually established his headquarters on Cape Saint Vincent in the extreme southwest of Portugal, at Sagres, and built a palace, a chapel, an observatory, and a village for workers. The notion that he gathered around him a school of cosmographers and astronomers is a legend, but he did have the services of experts such as Jacome or Jaime Ribas, a Catalan cartographer of distinction. He also ordered the expansion of the port of Lagos, twenty miles away to the east of Sagres, and there were built “the best sailing ships afloat,” as the Venetian Ca’da Mosto would put it later.4
Prince Henry’s doings were partly financed by his own clever investments in, for instance, the monopoly of fishing for tuna along the coast of the Algarve, and in a fishery on the Tagus; and partly from subsidies from the Order of Christ, a knightly association founded in Portugal concerned to carry on the war against Islam in their own territory with money obtained from the Templars, when that undertaking had been dissolved a century before. Prince Henry was grand master of this Order, a post which carried the added benefit that he would gain the profits from its fairs, held at Tomar, as well as from leasing houses and shops round the fairground.
The first ventures of the prince were the seizure of the deserted islands of Madeira and the Azores. Madeira may have been occupied partly to prevent the Spaniards from doing the same: a motive for imperial expansion which would be repeated in the history of Europe. Prince Henry became the governor (in absentia), and managed the place thereafter. Both Madeira and the Azores were lightly colonized by Portuguese from the Algarve, along with some Flemings: the Azores were even known as the Flemish Islands for a time, when Jacome de Bruges was the first governor there. Both yielded dye material: “dragon’s blood,” a resin, and orchil, obtained from lichen. Madeira (so called, from the Portuguese for “wood,” because of its timber-bearing forest) could also offer wax and honey, as well as wood. Like the Azores (“the Hawks”), it had no men to seize, for it had been uninhabited before. The settlers there were conscious of the innovation; the first children to be born on the main island were duly named Adam and Eve.
Prince Henry was always as interested in these Atlantic islands as he was in Africa: they were certain money-makers, and the African adventures were more speculative. All the same, he continued to finance probing voyages along the African coast, as far as Cape Juby, where Béthencourt had anchored for a few days after his conquest of the Canaries (Cape Juby is visible from the Canary island of Fuerteventura). In 1434, Gil Eannes, a native of the Algarve and one of the best sailors in Portugal, was charged to go and look for gold from beyond Cape Bojador: in “seas none had sailed before,” in the phrase of Camoëns, though possibly some Genoese had done so, as of course had Hanno and his sailors. Gil Eannes probably sailed in a simple square-rigged single-masted barca, partly decked if decked at all, only about thirty tons, flat-bottomed, with a shallow draft, and with a crew of about fifteen, who would have expected to row much of the time—the same kind of ship as had been used often before in unsuccessful attempts to round the cape (wherever indeed it was).
Eannes rounded what he took to be the evil cape, to find that his white sailors did not turn black, the Green Sea of Darkness was on that day “as easy to sail in as the waters at home,” the sun did not set down sheets of liquid flame, and even the currents and reefs seemed navigable, provided that one did not sail too close to the shore. Eannes brought back to Portugal a sprig of rosemary gathered on the shore south of the landmark.5
Rosemary promised little in the way of trade. Nevertheless, a year later, Eannes set off again, this time accompanied by Afonso Gonçalves Baldaia, the royal cupbearer, and reached a spot about 150 miles south of the cape. Here they saw with satisfaction the footprints of both men and camels, at a point which they named Angra dos Ruivos (Creek of Red-Haired Men, now Garnet Bay). In 1436, Gonçalves Baldaia sailed again and, after two of his men engaged in a pointless fight with some inhabitants, at last reached the long-sought-after Rio do Ouro, which turned out to be a bay and not a river, nor to be the center of any trade in gold. Gonçalves Baldaia went farther on, halting only at a rock which he called Galha Point, Point of the Galley (now Piedra de Gala), a little short of a promontory soon to be known as Cabo Branco (Blanco).
For several years after 1436, Prince Henry was occupied with matters nearer to home, such as the disastrous siege of Tangier. But in 1441, two new Portuguese captains, Antão Gonçalves and Nuno Tristão, set out, separately, to Cabo Branco, a designation which they gave the place because of the white of the sand before it. (It is on the extreme north of the modern state of Mauritania.) Here some hills began to rise for the first time out of the desert but, at first sight, there was still nothing but sand to be seen. Yet, on the south side of the cape, they found a market run by Muslim traders, and a halt for the camels and caravans of the interior. The people were black but, being Muslim, were dressed in Moorish style, in white robes and turbans. Here the Portuguese received a small quantity of gold dust, as well as some ostrich eggs; and, as Gonçalves had always desired, his men also seized some black Africans, twelve in number, to take back to Portugal (“What a beautiful thing it would be,” this commander told his men, “if we could capture some of the natives to lay before the face of our Prince”).6
These people were nearly all Azanaghi, as had been most of those sold in Lagos in 1444. They seem not to have been carried off to serve as slaves—though one of them, a woman, was a black slave, presumably from somewhere in the region of Guinea. They were taken as exhibits to show Prince Henry, much as Columbus would bring back some Indians, fifty years later, from his first journey to the Caribbean.I
The Portuguese at home showed no special interest. Black slaves were known, as has been shown; already in 1425, a Portuguese vessel had seized a Moroccan slave ship off Larache, with fifty-three black men and three black women, all from Guinea, who had been profitably disposed of in Portugal. But Prince Henry, according to the sycophantic chronicler Zurara, was very pleased: “How great his joy must have been . . . not for the number of those captives, but for the hope, O sainted Prince, you had for others in the future.”7
These new captives included a local chief, Adahu, who spoke Arabic. He negotiated his own release, and that of a boy from his own family, on the understanding that, if he were taken back to where he had been found, he would deliver some black slaves in exchange.
So, the next year, 1442, Antão Gonçalves sailed back to Cabo Branco and from there, or from just below it, to the south, in the Bay of Arguin, brought not only some gold dust from West Africa, some fine salt, and a few ostrich eggs, but about ten black Africans, “from various countries” (that is, presumably, some from a long way away), who were presented to him, apparently, by an Arab mounted on a white camel. It became evident to the Europeans that Cabo Branco and the Bay of Arguin to the south of it, were with their islands, important trading places.
This news fired the interest of Prince Henry, for whom any slave, black or white, obtained from an African was a slave saved from a fate worse than death; and so, the next year, 1443, Nuno T
ristão returned to anchor off an island in the Bay of Arguin. Here he found an “infinite number of herons, of which he and his crew made good cheer,” presumably in a stewpot; and they captured fourteen men, off canoes which they were rowing using their feet as oars. Tristão and his men made these men into slaves without feeling any need to negotiate their purchase. They later gathered another fifteen captives, the crew regretting that “their boat was so small that they were not able to take such a cargo as they desired.”8
Then, a year later, in 1444, Lançarote de Freitas’s company for trade to Africa was formed at Lagos. Trade with Africa remained a royal monopoly; so de Freitas, like hundreds of others after him, had first to seek a license to travel. He was accompanied by Gil Eannes, the first captain to have passed Cape Bojador.
• • •
There are several reasons why the Portuguese should have been the first Europeans to embark on these interesting journeys. Theirs, in a sense, were the seas in which the first discoveries were made, even if they shared them with Castile; and Castile, in the fifteenth century, was a country turned in on itself, always on the brink of civil war. The same was true of England, busy fighting in the early fifteenth century to preserve her possessions in France and, in the second half, divided by a fratricidal conflict between Prince Henry’s cousins. Portugal was generally maritime; her coasts were dotted with little fishing villages; her Jewish and Genoese visitors had endowed Portuguese merchants and captains with a respect for maps, as for magnetic compasses, an Italian invention of the twelfth century.
Meantime, since 1317, the Portuguese fleet had been managed by the Pessagno family from Genoa, whose contract with the king in Lisbon specified that he should always have available twenty experienced Genoese captains (one of them, indeed, was for a time that Lanzarotto Malocello who rediscovered the Canaries).