tendom in the fourteenth century, and still more in
the fifteenth (Prince Henry's own), is the story of the ventures and the
successes, not so much of landsmen, as of mariners.

CHAPTER IV.

MARITIME EXPLORATION.

CIRCA 1250-1410.

Italian, Catalan, French, and English sailors were the forerunners of
the Portuguese in the fourteenth century, and the latter years of the
thirteenth. And as in land travel, so in maritime, the republics of
Italy, Amalphi, Pisa, Venice, and Genoa, were the leaders and examples
of Europe. Just as the Italian Dante is the first great name in the new
literatures of the West, so the Italian Dorias and Vivaldi and Malocelli
are the first to take up again the old Greek and Phoenician enterprise
in the ocean. Since Hanno of Carthage and Pharaoh Necho's Tyrians, there
had been nothing in the nature of a serious trial to find a way round
Africa, and even the knowledge of the Western or Fortunate Islands, so
clear to Ptolemy and Strabo, had become dim. The Vikings and their
crusader-followers had done nothing south of Gibraltar Straits.

[Illustration: THE S.W., OR AFRICAN SECTION OF THE HEREFORD MAP. C.
1275-1300. (SEE LIST OF MAPS)]

But while the Crusades were still dragging along a weary and hopeless
warfare under St. Louis of France and Prince Edward of England,
discovery began again in the Atlantic. In 1270 Lancelot Malocello found
the Canaries; in 1281 or 1291 the Genoese galleys of Tedisio Doria and
the Vivaldi, trying to "go by sea to the ports of India to trade there,"
reached Gozora or Cape Non in Barbary, the southern Ultima Thule, and
according to a later story "sailed the Sea of Ghinoia (Guinea) to a city
of AEthiopia," where even legend lost sight of them, for in 1312 nothing
more had been heard. From the frequent and emphatic references to this
attempt in the literature of the later Middle Ages, it is clear that the
daring Genoese drew upon themselves the attention of the learned and
mercantile worlds, as much as one would naturally expect. For these men
are the pioneers of Christian explorations in the southern world--the
precursors of all the ocean voyages that led to the discoveries of
Prince Henry, Da Gama, Columbus, and Magellan,--the first who directly
challenged the disheartening theories of geographers, such as Ptolemy,
the inaction and traditionalism of the Arabs, and the elaborate
falsities of story tellers, who, in the absence of real knowledge, had a
grand op