Ch 11 - Western Encroachment

A New Geography

Europe's revival of interest geography during the Middle ages reawakened the spirit of exploration. Prince Henry the Navigator established Sagres, Portugal, as a European center for learning and maritime exploration. Portuguese voyages along Africa's west coast expanded the frontiers of the known world and set new standards for future explorations.

The key that ultimately opened the world to exploration by the West sprang from the mind of Claudius Ptolemaeus (Ptolemy), a Greek astronomer, mathematician and cartographer who lived in Alexandria, Egypt, around the middle of the second century AD, at the height of the Roman Empire. Ptolemy's lifelong effort to collect and summarize the entire scope of contemporary knowledge about geography and cosmology made profound contributions to the field of geography and earned him a reputation as the "father of geography."

Ptolemy rejected the old Greek idea of a known world surrounded by an uninhabitable ocean, suggesting that the world was far more vast than anyone knew at the time. He created the first known projection of a spherical earth onto a flat plane and first popularized the concepts of latitude and longitude, the coordinate system he used to define the "width" and "length" of the known world. His eight-book compilation of maps and technical data, Geographia, which located some 4530 cities and over 200 mountains, established the framework and vocabulary for modern maps.

The Dark Ages blanketed the European continent from about 300 to 1300 AD, erasing the intellectual legacies of ancient Greece and Rome. Christian faith and dogmatic teachings suppressed the eye-opening images of the world that had so carefully been laid down by ancient geographers. Instead of carefully drawn outlines of shores, rivers and mountains handsomely overlaid on a grid of the best known astronomical data, the maps of Christendom displayed little more than pious caricatures of Scriptural dogma. Christian maps of the period were of little or no use in the real world. Lacking facts to fill their glorious landscapes, Christian geographers constructed world maps designed to portray what Christian orthodoxy believed the world should be, not what reality proved it was. The fruits of their labor, based largely on a rich resource of ancient fantasies, erected an artificial barrier against progress toward factual, useful knowledge of the earth.

In their search for the truth, cartographers and geographers of the Middle Ages rediscovered Ptolemy's ancient geography and his classic world maps. In the geographical section of his Opus Maius (ca. 1268), the thirteenth-century Franciscan scholar Roger Bacon maintained that Asia and Africa extended southward below the Equator. The Byzantine monk Maximus Planudes found a copy of Ptolemy's Geographia in 1295, and drew his own maps based on the coordinates found in the text. The translation of Geographia from the original Greek to the more accessible Latin in 1406, helped spark a renewed interest in geography. Translations into other languages quickly followed, resulting in an ever increasing number of manuscript copies. In time, Europe's geographers accepted the entire text and the maps it contained with all the authenticity given a newly found classic. Geographia, regarded as a complete and accurate document on the subject of geography, dominated geographical theory until the European Renaissance.

The magnitude of Ptolemy's contributions to advancing man's geographic knowledge was handicapped by a desperate lack of facts and his general calculations included two fundamental errors. After considering the many available estimates of the earth's circumference, some of which were quite accurate, Ptolemy used that of Posidonius, which was too small by about one sixth. Based upon what he knew at the time, Ptolemy assumed that the "known" world of his day covered exactly 180 degrees of longitude. As a result, many of the locations he assigned to places beyond the familiar Mediterranean were wildly inaccurate. Ptolemy's greatest mistake was stretching the Asian continent eastward across 177° of longitude, far beyond its actual extent of only 131° . By incorrectly placing the eastern tip of Asia much closer to the western tip of Europe than it actually was, Ptolemy made what proved to be perhaps the most influential miscalculation in history.

The revival of interest in Ptolemy reawakened the spirit of exploration, a reawakening that in time challenged long-held beliefs in the assumed superiority of ancient wisdom. Although Ptolemy's Geographia remained Europe's leading academic source of geographical knowledge for over a century, some fifteenth century scholars were willing to consider the possibility that Ptolemy might be wrong. Western Europeans of the early fifteenth century were not completely ignorant of the non-European, non-Christian world. Merchants from Venice and Genoa did business from permanent factory compounds in most of the major trading centers of the Near East and many European pilgrims regularly visited holy shrines in the area. Following the instructions laid down by Ptolemy for the construction of maps and charts, men rediscovered the ability to use their own experience to measure the entire world, to replace the unknown with the known. Wherever they went, Mediterranean mariners began to chart and make notes on the coastal geography and sailing conditions encountered on their voyages. Their harbor guides, portolano in Italian, depicted a considerable portion of the earth's surface based on close, direct and continuous observation. Portolano charts were the first true maps.

Successful travel requires accurate maps  Ptolemy's universal scheme of uniform latitude and longitude meant that any two maps properly drawn according to his description would be precisely alike. By the time Marco Polo returned to Venice from China, chart-makers were busily compiling the results of numerous portolano charts into larger maps and atlases. Abraham Cresques, instrument-maker and map-maker to the King of Aragon, produced the most impressive of these compilations in 1375, the so-called Catalan Atlas. Cresques used data obtained from recent Asian travelers and explorers, including Marco Polo, to produce maps that brought the geography of Ptolemy back to the forefront. The Catalan Atlas , a masterpiece of cartography, gave western man his first recognizable depiction of the Asian continent.

Civil and urban strife ripped at the fabric of European life during the fifteenth century. While the epochal Hundred Years War and the Wars of the Roses ravaged the countryside, religious battles for control of Europe and Africa raged between the Christians and the Moors. The great religious crusades which sought to recapture Christianity's Holy Places and establish Christian principalities in the Near East had long been abandoned as hopeless. The gradual demise of the Byzantine Empire in the face of Ottoman's expanding power made crusading a stark matter of self-defense. Most European monarchs, dealing with far more pressing secular concerns, tended to regard "crusading" as a politically outmoded idea. The idea of conquering the infidels still fired the imagination of adventurous noblemen of Castile and Portugal however, where they generally retained their old-fashioned belligerence and piety. Minor, limited crusades could still be mounted with good odds for glory, profit, and lasting success, particularly against the few targets of opportunity close enough to encourage quick, effective strikes;  Granada, the civilized, decayed remnant of a once-great Muslim empire, and Morocco.

Secure within its borders since the thirteenth century, the united kingdom of Portugal stood in sharp contrast to the rest of Europe. The tiny nation on the westernmost edge of the Iberian Peninsula faced outward away from the classic centers of European civilization, little affected by civil unrest on the continent. On March 4, 1394, in the small Portuguese city of Oporto, King John I and Philippa, Queen of Portugal, welcomed their third son into the world. Infante Dom Enrique (Prince Henry) developed the curious combination of a bold heroic intellect with an outward reaching imagination and the aesthetic of a hermit. Remaining aloof from close personal contacts, he held a great passion for grand ideals. His talent for stubbornness and his powers of organization proved to be the essential ingredients necessary to launch Portugal into the great unknown.

In 1413, King John assigned his nineteen-year-old son the task of building a fleet to support the Portuguese Crusade against the Muslim stronghold and trading center in Ceuta, Morroco, a Spanish Foreign Legion garrison town on the African side of the Strait of Gibraltar. The heavily-armored Portuguese armada carrying some 20,000 well-armed troops attacked Ceuta on August 24, 1415, and quickly captured the lightly defended city from the Moors. During the attack, Prince Henry led a force of 17 armed men against the citadel. While the Crusaders proceeded to loot Ceuta's riches, the young prince got his first dazzling glimpse of the exotic stores that lay hidden in Africa;  pepper, cinnamon, cloves, ginger, rich tapestries and Oriental rugs, as well as the usual booty of gold, silver and precious jewels from the Indies. Local traders told him of gold routes across the Sahara which were thought to originate in Guinea on the African west coast.

King John I rewarded his courageous young son with a knighthood and made him Governor General of Ceuta and Duke of Viseu, a region in north-central Portugal. Africa's wealth so impressed Prince Henry that he never joined the court in Lisbon to share the burdens of royal government. His interests lay across the Mediterranean. In search of the secrets to Ceuta's great wealth, he traveled to Portugal's Cape Saint Vincent on the southwestern tip of Europe. After arriving in Algarve province in 1419, the twenty-five-year-old prince established the settlement of Vila do Infante (Prince's town) on land granted by the crown. He established his court in the small nearby village of Sagres, the place Ptolemy called the "Sacred Promontory."

Sagres evolved into a cosmopolitan community, a center for cartography and navigation, a magnet that attracted the best sea captains, master pilots, mariners, instrument-makers, compass-makers, map-makers, shipbuilders, carpenters and craftsmen in Europe. Brilliant scholars under Prince Henry's patronage began to accumulate and correlate nautical knowledge as it was brought back by the captains of successive voyages to heretofore unknown places. The scholars passed along this new knowledge by instructing less experienced captains about Atlantic currents, wind systems and the latest navigational methods. Blessed with long navigable rivers, deep harbors opening to the Atlantic, and the best European minds in the field of nautical science, Portugal sat naturally poised to launch the first great western enterprise of modern exploration.

Using state-of-the-art navigation instruments and techniques, scholars and craftsmen designed and constructed new mathematical tables and other novel instruments to support new voyages of exploration. At Prince Henry's request, Jehuda Cresques, son of the cartographer Abraham Cresques, moved to Sagres from Majorca to supervise the production of new navigation charts. To ensure the accuracy of Cresques' work, Prince Henry ordered his mariners to keep accurate logbooks, to note every detail of what they saw along the coast and to accurately mark on their charts everything of importance. The cartographers of Sagres compiled all the information that came back to Sagres and regularly updated and extended the maps of the known world. Cartography soon developed into a cumulative science.

Designers judged the effectiveness of every new idea, new chart, or new piece of navigation equipment only on whether or not it helped a ship to reach farther into the unknown then find its way home again. In the closed confines of the Mediterranean Sea, size, not maneuverability, made for a successful ship. A large ship meant large cargos. Large cargos meant correspondingly large profits. When pushing into the unknown however, a ship's size meant nothing unless it could sail to its destination and back again, for its most important cargo was information. A ship of discovery had to sail long distances in unfamiliar waters and, if necessary, sail into the wind, an impossible feat for the contemporary square-rigged sailing ships of the Mediterranean. Neither the heavy, square-rigged barca nor the heavier still Venetian carrack, some of which displaced six hundred tons, were suited for sailing into the wind.

Prince Henry's designers studied the Arab dhow (caravos) and a similar, but smaller and even more maneuverable ship called the caravela, which was already in use on the Duoro River in northern Portugal. The maneuverable dhow, which could carry a crew of thirty men and as many as seventy horses, had been plying the coastal waters off Tunisia and Egypt since around the eighth century. The ship's most distinctive feature was its "lateen" sail, a large triangular cloth fitted to a single mast along a movable boom that allowed the ship to catch the wind even if heading almost directly into it.

Experiments in shipbuilding at Sagres and the coastal village of Lagos a few miles to the east, produced an entirely new ship design well suited for exploration. Prince Henry's designers created the famous caravel, a revolutionary vessel designed specifically to satisfy an explorer's needs. Oak for the keels came from Alentejo. Pine for the hulls and the resin needed to waterproof the rigging and caulk hull seams came from the vast, legally protected forests growing along Portugal's Atlantic seaboard. Sails and rope came from Lagos.

The caravel represented a hybrid design that combined the cargo capacity of the caravos with the maneuverablility of the caravela. At one-fifth the size of a large Venetian barca, the standard fifty-ton caravel was about 70 feet long, had a beam of 25 feet, and carried two or three lateen sails. Proving that bigger is not always better, the caravel carried enough supplies for a small crew of about twenty men and soon became the standard for European discovery ships. Two of the world's most renowned caravels sailed with Christopher Columbus to the Americas;  the lateen-rigged Niña and the square-rigged Pinta.

Because of its square-rigged sails, the barca could not sail any closer than 67° from the wind. The caravel, with its lateen sail, could maneuver to within 55° of the wind. It isn't much, but that small difference allowed a caravel to maneuver "upwind" with forty percent fewer course changes than the barca, a capability that cut the total time of a voyage by one third. With its large sternpost rudder and wide-body hull, the shallow draft caravel proved to be a fast and maneuverable ship. Mariners who took the caravel into unknown waters sailed with high confidence and morale knowing they were aboard a ship specifically designed for a sure and speedy return voyage. The experienced Venetian mariner Alvise da Cadamosto, who sailed a caravel down the West coast of Africa in 1456, called them, "The best ships that sailed the seas."

The waters between Cape Saint Vicente, the Canary Islands and Morocco's northwest coast were already familiar to adventurous Portuguese fishermen. Using fishing and casual trading voyages along a relatively short stretch of northwest Africa, Prince Henry developed a program of progressive, albeit intermittent, exploration much further south. He used all available books, charts, maps and equipment to plan voyages, assess the results and prepare expeditions to sail even farther into the unknown. Gentlemen from his own household commanded the ships and sailed under orders to reach, then sail beyond definite geographical landmarks. Henry's navigators reached the Madeira Islands in 1420. Pushing deeper into the unknown, they practiced their new skills by confirming the existence of the Azores around 1432. Then it was off again to the southwest with the prows of their caravels plowing through undiscovered waters.

When Prince Henry began planning and directing operations at Sagres and Lagos in 1419, the known southern limit of the Atlantic Ocean was the dreaded Cape Bojador, southeast of the Canary Islands on the West African coast just below latitude 27° N. The cape's red sand cliffs, absent any signs of life, sat low on the horizon. The treacherous reef-lined shallows that extended far out to sea were home to vast schools of sardines that roiled the waters between whirlpools caused by the unmanageable currents that swept around the cape. For generations of coastal sailors, superstitions and rumors about Cape Bojador supported the deeply-held belief that no ship that rounded the cape would ever return. The Arabs called it Abu Khatar, "the father of danger." Prince Henry knew he could never get past Cape Bojador until he first conquered the psychological fear of the place. Undeterred by such a challenge, the young prince launched a number of exploratory voyages down Africa's west coast to push back the frontiers of mystery.

Prince Henry's shield-bearer, Captain Gil Eannes of Lagos, was sent to explore the lands past Cape Bojador in 1433, but he never made it past the Canary Islands. On his second attempt in 1434, he sailed his barca just barely around the cape before returning. On a third try the following year he successfully sailed about fifty miles south of Cape Bojador and returned home to an eventual knighthood. Captain Alfonso Baldaya pushed the limit a little further down the African coast in 1436, returning with a cargo of sealskins. By 1441, expeditions came with more frequency, each pushing further south;  Cape Blanc in 1441, Cape Vert (Dakar, Senegal) in 1445, and the mouth of the Gambia River in 1446. As his reputation grew, Prince Henry became known as Prince Henry, "the Navigator."

By 1456, Portuguese caravels reached the broad mouth of Guiana's Geba River at around 12° S Latitude. That was about as far south as Prince Henry's captains sailed during his lifetime. Portugal's motives to explore the West African coast were driven by more than a quest for knowledge. One of their goals was to interdict the considerable trade between Guinea and Morocco and divert from caravans crossing the Sahara to their own ships. With some success, they exported cloth, trinkets, and later horses, to Upper Guinea, and imported slaves, gums and resins, a little ivory, and a little gold dust. The limited profitability of these early ventures helped enrich the coffers of the Order of Christ, the religious military order that provided some of the financial backing for the trade.

Prince Henry became the lay head of the Order of Christ in 1420, a position that gave the Portuguese Crown effective control over its operations. In 1433, King John I gave the Order sovereign status over not only those territories which it already held, but over any future conquests. As the Order's governor, Prince Henry thus secured a monopoly on West African trade from the Portuguese Crown. In 1454 and 1455, he secured edicts from the Holy See that gave the Order of Christ a monopoly on missionary work in the area as well. Under the general terms of his monopoly, Prince Henry licensed other investors to sail under the Portuguese flag. One such license was issued to the Venetian businessman Alvise da Cadamosto, who made two voyages for the Portuguese in 1455 and 1456, becoming the first European to report sighting the Cape Verde Islands.

In his systematic exploration of the West African coast, Prince Henry instituted a number of practices that later became standard procedure for European explorers. Never content with the extent of existing knowledge, he inaugurated the policy of building on the knowledge of previous trips, using the endpoint of one voyage as the beginning for the next. He also established the Portuguese practice of recruiting local natives as interpreters to lay both the intellectual and financial foundation for future voyages. There is no hard evidence that Prince Henry the Navigator had any specific intent to open the way to East Asia for the merchants and traders of Europe. Still, the unknown seas to the west and southwest and Ptolemy's mysterious "Terra Incognita" seemed to beckon him onward.

Ironically, the one man who served as the intellectual stimulus that pushed Portuguese away from the Mediterranean Sea and far into the Atlantic never sailed aboard a single ship under his direction during Portugal's early voyages of discovery. A man of immense curiosity, he sent his captains to sea in search of answers to his many questions. Prince Henry died at the age of 66 in the village of Vila do Infante near Sagres on November 13, 1460. The momentum he built and sustained during Portugal's early years of exploration opened the way for such men as Bartholomew Dias, who rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1488, and Vasco da Gama who finally charted the sea route to India in 1498. Prince Henry the Navigator and his compatriots, the catalyst that led to the Portuguese Empire, opened the door to the world of exploration. The work they began would never end.