Henry the Navigator

3 Key excerpts on "Henry the Navigator"

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  Literature of Travel and Exploration

  An Encyclopedia

  • Jennifer Speake(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Prince Henry the Navigator, the fifth child of King John I of Portugal and his English wife Philippa of Lancaster, was ominously born on an Ash Wednesday in Oporto in the north of Portugal. This was his birthplace because the court was then located there, the royal family following the tradition of staying at different towns for short periods. He became Duke of Viseu and Lord of Covilhã, titles he received when he was knighted after he distinguished himself in the campaign in which the Portuguese captured Ceuta, the Moroccan citadel on the African coast across the straits from Gibraltar. Portuguese writers refer to him as Infante (Prince) D. Henrique, hardly ever as “The Navigator,” the cognomen that the English applied to him in honor of the discoveries he inspired.

  He was of English, French, and Spanish ancestry, and, like all his brothers, became famous in Europe, being mentioned by the poet Camões in the Portuguese epic Os Lusíadas (1572) as belonging to “the eminent generation.” He is renowned for his patronage of voyages of discovery, his sponsoring of a new type of sailing vessel, and his promotion of the advancement of techniques of cartography and the improvement of navigational instruments, which contributed greatly to the expansion of European maritime commerce. He was Master of the Order of Christ from 1420 until his death and invested part of the Order’s revenue as well as his own fortune in voyages of discovery.

  With Christian Europe cut off from Asia by the Muslims, his main objective for launching exploratory voyages along the western coast of Africa was the outflanking of Islamic power. But he also wanted to increase the geographical knowledge of his time by finding a sea route to the Orient, hoping also to find gold that would contribute to the expenses of the costly voyages. He was searching as well for Prester John, the legendary Christian priest-king of Africa. Regarding this search, the chronicler Zurara wrote that Prince Henry’s objective was “to extend the Holy Faith of Jesus Christ and bring it to all souls who wish to find salvation.” To accomplish this he sought out a Christian kingdom that “for love of Our Lord Jesus Christ would help in that war.”

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  Geography, Cartography and Nautical Science in the Renaissance

  The Impact of the Great Discoveries

  • W.G.L. Randles(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  III The alleged nautical school founded in the fifteenth-century at Sagres by Prince Henry of Portugal, called the ‘Navigator’1

  1 We put ‘Navigator’ in inverted commas since the term ‘Henry the Navigator’ was first used successively by two German historians Heinrich Schaefer and Gustav de Veer and then later taken up as the title of their books by the English historians Henry Major in 1868 and Raymond Beazley in 1895. Only secondary Portuguese historians, following the above writers, have called him the ‘Navigator’.

  DOI: 10.4324/9781003110323-3

  The statement that in order to implement his program of maritime discovery, Prince Henry of Portugal (1394–1460) had founded at Sagres in the early fifteenth century a nautical school to which he attracted experts in astronomy, navigation and cartography, has appeared in recent works published in connection with the quincentenary of Columbus’ first voyage. The assertion has already for long been the subject of heated controversy among Portuguese historians of which the best and most authoritative have amassed respectable evidence to show that no such institution ever existed.2 In his Atlas of Columbus and the Great Discoveries (1990), destined for a wide audience, Kenneth Nebenzahl writes:

  2 The most recent critic of the ‘Sagres School’ was the late Luis de Albuquerque, Dúvidas e Certezas na História dos Descobrimentos Portugueses, Lisbon, 1990, Part I, Chap. II .

  ‘By 1420, Henry had founded his renowned school for mathematicians, astronomers, navigators, cartographers, and instrument makers at Sagres.’3

  3 Kenneth Nebenzahl, Atlas of Columbus and the Great Discoveries

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  The Portuguese Pioneers

  • Edgar Prestage(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Johnston Press

    (Publisher)

  terra incognita to Christian Europe. Overland travellers, mostly Moslems, had penetrated to the coast as far south as the Senegal, but if a line were drawn from the mouth of that river to the lower waters of the Niger and then across to the east coast a little below Abyssinia, the whole of the continent to the south was entirely unknown, save a narrow strip of the eastern coast down to Sofala, frequented by Arab traders. In less than a century from their start the Portuguese mapped the coastline, dotting it with names, many of which are still in use, and explored part of the interior. This great contribution to geographical science was one of the achievements of Henry the Navigator and his successors.

  Before entering upon a relation of the maritime expeditions made under his auspices it is natural to ask ourselves how far their results may have been anticipated, and the reply is that the undoubted pre-Henrician voyages down the west coast of Africa were very few. The Phoenicians, who were sent out by Pharaoh Necho, may have rounded the Cape of Good Hope, but Hanno probably got no farther than Sierra Leone; in medieval times Ibn Fatima seems to have reached Cape Branco, but the Genoese Malocello did not pass beyond the Canaries, while Doria and Vivaldi disappeared, so that it is impossible to fix their furthest south. The voyages of the men of Dieppe in the fourteenth century are not proven, owing perhaps to the destruction of records, the existing evidence being of too late a date.1

  1 The documents are in J. P. Oliveira Martins, Os filhos de D. João I ; they are not included in the English version by J. J. Abraham and W. E. Reynolds called The Golden Age of Prince Henry the Navigator (London, 1914).

  1 The following account of the expedition to Ceuta is based on Zurara’s Cronica de Ceuta (ed. Esteves Pereira, Lisbon, 1915).

  2 Cronica de Ceuta , cap. 62. In 1410 John I seems to have sent his confessor to inform Pope John XXIII of the project, and in 1413 he obtained from the Pope the appointment of the Queen’s confessor as Bishop of Morocco, as though in anticipation of the conquest he had planned. Vide Snr. L. Teixeira de Sampayo, Arquivo de Historia , vol. i (Coimbra, 1923). Barros (Asia , dec. I, bk. i, cap. 2) says that John had nourished the idea for a long time.

  1 Ordenaçoens do Rey Affonso V , bk. v, tit. 83 and 84. The first volume of the Documentos das Chancellarias Reais anteriores a 1531 relativos a Marrocos

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