Lost to Time

by Martin W. Sandler

  Eanes’s story has its beginnings in Portugal’s desire to attain spices and other treasures of the East, riches that had been so eloquently described by such early travelers as Marco Polo and the Italian friar Odoric of Pordenone. In the late fourteenth century, with Muslims blocking the overland trade routes to these coveted goods, the Portuguese began seeking a water route to India and beyond by exploring the uncharted and foreboding waters off the west coast of Africa. The Portuguese had another agenda as well. Since the early Middle Ages, gold dust from the rivers and streams of the Sahara had been shipped to Spain and other European regions for trade. Now Portugal wished to satisfy its own gold lust. In seeking to lead the way not only to the riches of the East but also to what might lay far beyond, Portugal had several advantages over its European rivals. In the late fourteenth century and throughout most of the fifteenth century, it was a nation devoid of civil wars. Geographically, Portugal’s deep harbors and its several long rivers that flowed into the Atlantic provided a natural backdrop for exploration beyond its shores. Most important of all, there was, within the nation, a man with the vision and ultimately the power to make the dream of far-off discovery a reality.

  IN THIS 1922 PANEL OF GLAZED TITLES, Portuguese artist Jorge Colaço paid tribute to Prince Henry the Navigator by showing the regent standing at Sagres before the mysterious and threatening ocean, while envisioning the lands and opportunities that lay beyond once the seas could be conquered.

  BORN IN 1394, INFANTE DOM HENRIQUE was the son of Portugal’s King John I and Phillipa of Lancaster, daughter of King Henry IV of England. He became known to history as Prince Henry the Navigator.

  The most detailed description of him comes from the fifteenth-century chronicler Gomes Eanes de Zurara, whose 1453 Crónica dos Feitos da Guiné (The Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea) remains the authority for the early Portuguese voyages of discovery. Zurara described Prince Henry as

  big and strong of limb, his hair . . . of a color natural fair, but by which constant toll and exposure had become dark. His expression at first sight inspired fear in those who did not know him and when wroth, though such times were rare, his countenance was harsh. Strength of heart and keenness of mind were in him to an excellent degree and beyond comparison, he was ambitious of achieving great and lofty deeds.

  Prince Henry never took part in a single voyage of exploration, but he earned the title of “father of modern exploration” through both his organizational skills and his ability to motivate the many mariners he assembled to carry out the risky and often precedent-setting voyages he launched. He was also a deeply religious man who, at the same time, placed great faith in astrologers. Zurara reported that the prince’s court astrologers had foreseen that Henry was “bound to engage in great and noble conquests, and above all was he bound to attempt the discovery of things which were hidden from other men and secret.” The prediction could not have been more accurate. In Prince Henry’s lifetime, his navigators, including the unlikely Gil Eanes, would explore the “great seas of darkness” along the foreboding African coast and lead the world into a bold new age.

  Before exploring the world, the prince embarked on a crusade as his first “great and noble conquest.” In 1413, when he was only nineteen years old, he convinced his father that a military assault on the Moroccan trading center of Cuerta would give them an opportunity to win the souls of “unbelievers” while driving the infidel Muslims from their strongholds. The king agreed, and he put his son in charge of helping to both plan the attack and build a fleet. When, on August 14, 1415, the Portuguese forces scored a complete, one-day victory, Prince Henry returned home covered in glory—so much so that he immediately began embarking on an even more ambitious military venture: an attack on the Muslim stronghold of Gibraltar. But this time the king refused to back the plan. Bitterly disappointed—particularly because his adventure in Cuerta had permitted him to see firsthand the extraordinary treasures that lay there—Henry was determined to unlock a water route to the East. He decided to leave his father’s court and to take up residency on Portugal’s Cape Saint Vincent in a village called Sagres.

  Contrary to what was long believed, Prince Henry did not establish a school for navigators at Sagres. What he did do, however, was assemble and train a host of mariners and develop a succession of different types of ships that would prove essential in the discovery of whole new worlds.

  These were vital achievements, but the greatest of all the challenges that Prince Henry faced was overcoming his sailors’ fears of the perceived horrors lurking in the waters in which he was asking them to sail. This was particularly true of Cape Bojador, approximately 850 miles south of Sagres, for it was at Bojador that geographical knowledge stopped and mythical terrors took over.

  Located about 140 miles southeast of the Canary Islands and jutting out into the Atlantic Ocean, human civilization’s first exposure to Cape Bojador is believed to have taken place about 600 BCE, when, according to the ancient Greek historian Herodotus (ca. 484–425 BCE), Egypt’s pharaoh Necho II sent a group of Phoenician mariners to circumnavigate the African continent. Some maritime historians also believe that further contact may have occurred about 530 BCE during a voyage made by the Carthaginian explorer Hanno the Navigator.

  Cape Bojador’s name in Arabic is Abu Khatar, meaning “father of danger.” It is an appropriate appellation. As Peter D. Jeans wrote,

  Beneath the huge red sandstone cliffs of Cape Bojador . . . the Atlantic Ocean erupts in an almost constant fury, the sea crashing into the clefts and gullies of the cliffs and exploding into huge columns of compressed water; it is a place where the water looks like molten metal because of the schools of sardines turning and flashing in the turbulent sea. Fearsome water spouts savage the sand-laden sea and dust storms howl off the cliff tops in the constant northeasterlies.

  No one could deny that these were very real challenges to any mariner, but as far as Prince Henry’s navigators were concerned, they were nothing compared to the terrors believed to exist in all distant uncharted waters, nightmarish creatures and evil supernatural forces about which medieval scholars had written with such relish.

  Their books and treatises had been filled with accounts of giant sea monsters waiting to devour any mariner who set so far out into the sea. As for Cape Bojador, it was the locus, according to common belief, of all fear. The cliffs along Cape Bojador’s coast were said to contain a lodestone so powerful that it pulled out a ship’s metal rivets, sending the vessel and all aboard to the bottom of the sea. Just as frightening were the stories of how these same cliffs also rained down sheets of fire upon any vessel that dared sail by them. Still other writings proclaimed that once the water off the cape was entered, the white sailors aboard would immediately turn black.

  Just as petrifying were the stories about what would happen to a vessel if, by some miracle, it made its way around the cape. During Prince Henry’s time, for example, it was widely believed that the sun was boiling hot at the equator. Thus even if a vessel got past the cape, the equatorial sun would burn it to powder. Those who ascribed to this theory also had a special belief concerning the specific type of monsters that a ship and its crew would encounter in the unlikely event the equator was crossed, a belief historians have attributed to “impeccable medieval logic.” It went this way: since all men were descended from Adam and Eve, and since it was impossible to cross the equator, all creatures in the subequatorial region known as the antipodes must be something other than human, something particularly monstrous.

  The most commonly held belief was far more simple. In labeling the waters beyond Cape Bojador as the “Green Sea of Darkness,” geographers and other sages stated with certainty that not only were these seas inhabited by terrible monsters and the spirits of dead sailors, but they also represented a point of no return, a place where, once entered, ships and their crews fell off the edge of the world and into the pits of hell.

  Prince Henry would have none of it. Those w
ere superstitions and myths, not truths, he told his mariners. Their fears had to be put aside. Cape Bojador had to be rounded. Between 1421 and 1433 the determined prince sent out no less than fourteen expeditions, each of whose main purpose was to round the cape and set the stage for further, more ambitious exploration. Describing these attempts and the frightened mariners who undertook them, Zurara wrote:

  So the Infant [prince] . . . began to make ready his ships and his people, as the needs of the case required; but this much you may learn, that although he sent out many times, not only ordinary men, but such as by their experience in great deeds of war were of foremost name in the profession of arms, yet there was not one who dared to pass that Cape Bojador and learn about the land beyond it, as the Infant wished. And to say the truth, this was not from cowardice or want of good will, but from the novelty of the thing and the widespread and ancient rumour about this Cape, that had been cherished by the mariners of Spain from generation to generation. And although this proved to be deceitful, yet since the hazarding of this attempt seemed to threaten the last evil of all, there was great doubt as to who would be the first to risk his life in such a venture. How are we, men said, to pass the bounds that our fathers set up, or what profit can result to the Infant from the perdition of our souls as well as of our bodies. . . . But being satisfied of the peril, and seeing no hope of honour or profit, they left off the attempt. For, said the mariners, this much is clear, that beyond this Cape there is no race of men nor place of inhabitants; nor is the land less sandy than the deserts of Libya, where there is no water, no tree, no green herb—and the sea so shallow that a whole league from land it is only a fathom deep, while the currents are so terrible that no ship having once passed the Cape, will ever be able to return.

  THIS MAP, DRAWN IN 1570 by famed Belgian cartographer Abraham Ortelius, shows Cape Bojador jutting out above the Tropic of Cancer into the Atlantic from the northwestern coast of Africa. A fierce leviathan is depicted to the southwest of the cape.

  . . . during twelve years the Infant continued steadily at this labour of his, ordering out his ships every year to those parts, not without great loss of revenue, and never finding any who dared to make that passage. Yet they did not return wholly without honour, for as an atonement for their failure to carry out more fully their Lord’s wishes, some made descents upon the coast of Granada and other voyaged along the Levant Seas, where they took great booty of the Infidels, with which they returned to the Kingdom very honourably.

  Booty—but not the great prize that Prince Henry sought. Yet, disappointed as he was with each failed expedition, he never lost sight of his goal. “Now,” wrote Zurara, “the Infant always received home again with great patience those whom he had sent out . . . never upbraiding them with their failure, but with gracious countenance listening to the story of the events of their voyage, giving them such rewards as he was wont to give those who served him well, and then either sending them back to search again or despatching other picked men of his Household.”

  Still, gracious and patient as he was, Henry was growing increasingly frustrated. Surely there was someone among all his navigators who would not lose nerve and would bring home the prize. And then he made a startling decision. To lead his fifteenth attempt he chose someone who had no navigational experience. Instead, he selected a man who had served him loyally from boyhood as a squire and shield bearer. His name was Gil Eanes, and almost nothing is known about him prior to his attempt to round Cape Bojador. The little we do know is that he was born around 1415 in Lagos in the southern Algarve region of Portugal—and that he was totally devoted to his prince.

  EANES SET OUT FOR CAPE BOJADOR IN 1433. As historian Hugh Thomas wrote, he “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 been expected to row much of the time—the same kind of ship that had been used often before in unsuccessful attempts to round the cape.”

  As inexperienced a seaman as he was, Eanes proved to be a natural leader and in good time landed successfully at Madeira Island. From there he sailed on to the Canary Islands, again without incident, where he captured some island natives. Then he headed for Cape Bojador. The closer he came to the feared spot, the more stories he began to hear about the horrors that might await them from his increasingly apprehensive crew. Then the cape came into sight.

  Immediately there came a terrified cry from the lookout perched atop the masthead, warning of boiling waters dead ahead. Then the crew informed Eanes that they refused to go any farther. Eanes was a squire, not a pilot; a leader it seemed, but not a seaman. Having no explanation of the sea’s strange behavior, he turned and headed back to Sagres.

  Once again Prince Henry was called upon to exhibit graciousness in the face of disappointment, deeper disappointment perhaps than after hearing of most previous failed attempts. For despite Eanes’s lack of seamanship, the prince had been convinced that his squire’s loyalty and dedication to task gave him perhaps a greater chance of succeeding than the experienced mariners who had failed before him. Patiently he listened as Eanes swore that the seas off Cape Bojador had been boiling. Even more patiently the prince explained that the sea had not been boiling but had been racing at ebb tide over the shoals that surrounded the cape, something that took place commonly on Portugal’s own coast. Then he asked Eanes if he would be willing to make a second attempt. The chagrined squire, more determined than ever to please his prince, agreed.

  Less than a year later, in 1434, according to Zurara,

  The Infant made ready the same vessel, and calling Gil Eanes apart, charged him earnestly to strain every nerve to pass the Cape and even if he could do nothing else on that voyage, yet he should consider that to be enough. “You cannot find,” said the Infant, “peril so great that the hope of reward will not be greater . . . Go forth then . . . make your voyage straightaway, in as much as with the grace of God you cannot but gain from this journey honour and profit.

  So once again, Gil Eanes set out for one of the most feared places in the known world. Truth be told, he was prepared to sacrifice his life to fulfill his obligation to his prince. He was more than half-convinced that he was about to do so. His sailors, however, had no motivation to make such a sacrifice and, as Eanes’s small vessel approached the cape for the second time in two years, stories of the horrors that awaited them spread throughout the ship. Soon, they were in open rebellion, demanding that the captain turn the ship around and head back to Sagres. Although Eanes was far from convinced that the sailors’ fears were not justified, he summoned every ounce of his energy and persuasive powers and somehow convinced the men that they should sail on.

  And then the miracle happened. As they entered the waters off Cape Bojador and gazed anxiously at the towering cliffs above, no liquid sheets of flame rained down on them. As they sailed on, the ship’s metal fastenings did not fall out. And as they nervously looked upon one another, none of them turned black.

  Now they were actually rounding the cape, about to become the first to enter the most feared waters of all. Again, a miracle! There were no monsters anywhere, only a calm sea. There was no edge of the world to fall off of. They did not descend into the pits of hell. After joining his men both in prayer and rejoicing, Eanes landed on a barren desert coast. He found no inhabitants; in fact, he discovered no living thing except for a plant that eventually became known as St. Mary’s rose or the rose of Jericho (Anastatica, similar to tumbleweed) that he brought back to Sagres to prove to his prince that he had landed on the other side of the cape.

  It had taken Prince Henry nineteen years and fifteen expeditions, but, thanks to Gil Eanes, Cape Bojador and all it symbolized had been conquered. Writing of Eanes’s accomplishment, Zurara exclaimed, “and as he proposed, 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. An
d . . . on account of its daring it was reckoned great.”

  Great indeed—regarded by mid-nineteenth-century historian and English Privy Council member Sir Arthur Helps as “a great event in African history and one that in that day was considered equal to a labor of Hercules.” It was actually an understatement. For by breaking the psychological barrier of fear that rounding Cape Bojador had represented, Gil Eanes had not only profoundly affected the future course of African history, he had opened the way to the world beyond Cape Bojador.

  EANES HAD RETURNED HOME A HERO, showered with gifts and acclaim. And now the prince had another assignment for him. By rounding Cape Bojador, Eanes had paved the way for the discovery of new peoples, new avenues, and, most important, new opportunities for trade. As usual, Prince Henry acted quickly.

  In 1435, Henry sent Eanes out again, this time on a larger vessel called a barinel (balinger) or oared galley, commanded by the prince’s royal cupbearer Afonso Gonçalves Baldaya (also Baldaia). Sailing past Madeira and the Canaries, they reached a spot on the African coast about 150 miles south of Cape Bojador where they and their crew came upon footprints of both men and camels. They encountered no humans, but it was an important discovery nonetheless, dispelling the long-held notion that people couldn’t live in what the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle had dubbed the “Torrid Zone.” For Eanes, it was yet another historic achievement. The man who had been the first to round Cape Bojador had now been present when the most southerly sign of life yet known to Europeans had been discovered.

  Almost as soon as Eanes and Baldaya returned to Sagres, Prince Henry sent Baldaya out again, ordering him to sail beyond the point that he and Eanes had reached until he found opportunity for trade. Baldaya reached a body of water that he called Rio de Ouro (River of Gold) in West Africa, but soon found that it was not a river but a bay and that there was no gold trading post. He then proceeded even farther south, where he collected thousands of seal skins, the first commercial cargo brought back from West Africa to Europe.