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National Geographic : 1960 Nov
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National Geographic, November, 1960 to the West Indies with the backing of Spain. The way to the real Indies was not by that direction. One spectacular, brilliant voyage would not discover it. No, the way was by constant, searching sailings to the south, and Prince Henry sent his ships that way-ship after ship. It was slow, costly, difficult. Scholars might say the torrid zone was endurable, but it was sailors who had to go there, and they feared it. Seamen were superstitious men; to them the sea was immense and its dangers real. Time after time, year after year, small caravels sailed from Lagos or from Lisbon to venture a few hundred miles or so and return with fearsome stories. It took 19 years for Henry to get his first ship past Cape Bojador, just south of the Canary Islands, not a thousand miles from Sagres (see Atlas Map The World, a supplement to this issue). "Beyond this there is no race of men or 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 commonly accepted view is recorded by the 15th-century historian Azurara. That was the trouble: The seamen feared that if they did pass the Cape they would never come home again. Wind and current there came from the north; no ports existed, and they could get no help ashore. Exploding the Myth of a Boiling Sea "Go back, go back while we may!" was al ways their cry, until one braver than the rest sailed on. Such a one was Gil Eannes, conqueror of the myth of Bojador, whose name is honored now by the beautiful Por tuguese hospital ship which sails annually to the Grand Banks and Greenland. Gil Eannes had to make two attempts. On his first he came in sight of the Cape, but his sailors refused to round it. They could see the water boiling on the other side, they declared, and indeed it was obvious from the mastheads that some disturbance was causing a great upset and swirling in the sea. Boiling waters, adverse currents, no place to go! Go back, go back! Gil Eannes was a courtier, not a pilot; a leader, not a seaman. Not knowing the answer to the sea's strange appearance, he returned. The disappointment that his failure brought to Prince Henry can well be imagined. One can almost hear the courtier offering his excuses. "But the sea was boiling," he might well have said. "I saw it myself from the masthead!" "That was not the sea boiling, but racing at ebb tide over coastal shoals," explains the Prince. "Have you not seen it doing this along our own coasts?" Indeed Gil Eannes had. And so in 1434 he sailed back to the much-feared Cape once more, this time with a different crew, and when he saw the water boil, sailed bravely on, skirting it. And indeed there were shoals there, just as the Prince had said! Seamen Who Dared Other Unknowns Having defeated one myth and found it baseless, why not sail on to conquer others? But there was the problem of finance, too. Portugal was a little country. Its total pop ulation did not exceed a million and a half souls. Its revenues were limited and could not be extended. Prince Henry's caravels were becoming costly, small though they were, and seamen had to be fed and paid. Still the little ships pressed on, though for years the Prince's voyages were ridiculed as expensive absurdities. His personal courage never failed, and it is a tribute to his genius that he never lacked good seamen to take out his ships. Portugal's fishing industry was a fine recruiting ground for courageous and able mariners. I can well understand that. So could any one who ever watched the great barcos do mar going out through the wild Atlantic surf at Costa Nova, Furadouro, Caparica, or a dozen other Portuguese beaches, to wrest a living from the reluctant and frequently tumultuous sea (pages 631 and 632). No breakwaters shelter these long, exposed beaches. Every Atlantic gale blows merciless ly home on them. Even on the quietest days the sullen surf roars and the rollers break threateningly. Over these beaches and through that surf the Portuguese fishermen must launch their 30- and 40-foot boats, by hand, aided by nothing but their own strength and skill and great lion hearts. The sea roars, the huge boats leap to life, the spray drives; but the fishermen keep on, riding through the surf with their huge sweeps-three or four strong men to a sweep! So it was in Prince Henry's time, and so it 646
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