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1473.

Maritime enterprise in Portugal.

Columbus, disappearing from Italy in 1473, is next found in Portugal, and it is a natural inquiry why an active, adventurous spirit, having tested the exhilaration of the sea, should have made his way to that outpost of maritime ambition, bordering on the great waters, that had for many ages attracted and puzzled the discoverer and cosmographer. It is hardly to be doubted that the fame of the Portuguese voyaging out upon the vasty deep, or following the western coast of Africa, had for some time been a not unusual topic of talk among the seamen of the Mediterranean. It may be only less probable that an intercourse of seafaring Mediterranean people with the Arabs of the Levant had brought rumors of voyages in the ocean that washed the eastern shores of Africa. These stories from the Orient might well have induced some to speculate that such voyages were but the complements of those of the Portuguese in their efforts to solve the problem of the circumnavigation of the great African continent. It is not, then, surprising that a doughty mariner like Columbus, in life's prime, should have desired to be in the thick of such discussions, and to no other European region could he have turned as a wanderer with the same satisfaction as to Portugal.

Let us see how the great maritime questions stood in Portugal in 1473, and from what antecedents they had arisen.

Portuguese seamanship.

Explorations on the Sea of Darkness.

Marino Sanuto, 1306.

The Portuguese, at this time, had the reputation of being the most expert seamen in Europe, or at least they divided it with the Catalans and Majorcans. Their fame lasted, and at a later day was repeated by Acosta. These hardy mariners had pushed boldly out, as early as we have any records, into the enticing and yet forbidding Sea of Darkness, not often perhaps willingly out of sight of land; but storms not infrequently gave them the experience of sea and sky, and nothing else. The great ocean was an untried waste for cartography. A few straggling beliefs in islands lying westward had come down from the ancients, and the fantastic notions of floating islands and steady lands, upon which the imagination of the Middle Ages thrived, were still rife, when we find in the map of Marino Sanuto, in 1306, what may well be considered the beginning of Atlantic cartography.

The Canaries.

There is no occasion to make it evident that the Islands of the West found by the Phœnicians, the Fortunate Islands of Sertorius, and the Hesperides of Pliny were the Canaries of later times, brought to light after thirteen centuries of oblivion; but these islands stand in the planisphere of Sanuto at the beginning of the fourteenth century, to be casually visited by the Spaniards and others for a hundred years and more before the Norman, Jean de Béthencourt, in the beginning of the fifteenth century (1402), settled himself on one of them. Here his kinspeople ruled, till finally the rival claims of sovereignty by Spain and Portugal ended in the rights of Spain being established, with compensating exclusive rights to Portugal on the African coast.

The Genoese in Portugal.

But it was by Genoese in the service of Portugal, the fame of whose exploits may not have been unknown to Columbus, that the most important discoveries of ocean islands had been made.

Madeira.

It was in the early part of the fourteenth century that the Madeira group had been discovered. In the Laurentian portolano of 1351, preserved at Florence, it is unmistakably laid down and properly named, and that atlas has been considered, for several reasons, the work of Genoese, and as probably recording the voyage by the Genoese Pezagno for the Portuguese king—at least Major holds that to be demonstrable. The real right of the Portuguese to these islands, rests, however, on their rediscovery by Prince Henry's captains at a still later period, in 1418–20, when Madeira, seen as a cloud in the horizon from Porto Santo, was approached in a boat from the smaller island.

Azores.

Maps.

It is also from the Laurentian portolano of 1351 that we know how, at some anterior time, the greater group of the Azores had been found by Portuguese vessels under Genoese commanders. We find these islands also in the Catalan map of 1373, and in that of Pizigani of the same period (1367, 1373).

PART OF THE LAURENTIAN PORTOLANO. [From Major's Prince Henry.]

Robert Machin.

It was in the reign of Edward III. of England that one Robert Machin, flying from England to avoid pursuit for stealing a wife, accidentally reached the island of Madeira. Here disaster overtook Machin's company, but some of his crew reached Africa in a boat and were made captives by the Moors. In 1416, the Spaniards sent an expedition to redeem Christian captives held by these same Moors, and, while bringing them away, the Spanish ship was overcome by a Portuguese navigator, Zarco, and among his prisoners was one Morales, who had heard, as was reported, of the experiences of Machin.

Porto Santo and Madeira rediscovered.

Zarco, a little later, being sent by Prince Henry of Portugal to the coast of Guinea, was driven out to sea, and discovered the island of Porto Santo; and subsequently, under the prompting of Morales, he rediscovered Madeira, then uninhabited. This was in 1418 or 1419, and though there are some divergences in the different forms of the story, and though romance and anachronism somewhat obscure its truth, the main circumstances are fairly discernible.

The Perestrello family.

This discovery was the beginning of the revelations which the navigators of Prince Henry were to make. A few years later (1425) he dispatched colonists to occupy the two islands, and among them was a gentleman of the household, Bartolomeo Perestrello, whose name, in a descendant, we shall again encounter when, near the close of the century, we follow Columbus himself to this same island of Porto Santo.

Maps.

It is conjectured that the position of the Azores was laid down on a map which, brought to Portugal from Venice in 1428, instigated Prince Henry to order his seamen to rediscover those islands. That they are laid down on Valsequa's Catalan map of 1439 is held to indicate the accomplishment of the prince's purpose, probably in 1432, though it took twenty years to bring the entire group within the knowledge of the Portuguese.

Bianco's map, 1436.

Other maps.

The well-known map of Andrea Bianco in 1436, preserved in the Biblioteca Marciana at Venice, records also the extent of supposition at that date respecting the island-studded waste of the Atlantic. Between this date and the period of the arrival of Columbus in Portugal, the best known names of the map makers of the Atlantic are those of Valsequa (1439), Leardo (1448, 1452, 1458), Pareto (1455), and Fra Mauro (1459). This last there will be occasion to mention later.

Flores.

In 1452, Pedro de Valasco, in sailing about Fayal westerly, seeing and following a flight of birds, had discovered the island of Flores. From what Columbus says in the journal of his first voyage, forty years later, this tracking of the flight of birds was not an unusual way, in these early exploring days, of finding new islands.

MAP OF ANDREA BIANCO. [From Allgem. Geog. Ephemeriden, Weimar, 1807.]

Thus it was that down to a period a very little later than the middle of the fifteenth century the Portuguese had been accustoming themselves to these hazards of the open ocean. Without knowing it they had, in the discovery of Flores, actually reached the farthest land westerly, which could in the better knowledge of later years be looked upon as the remotest outpost of the Old World.