the same way; Guinea was
his half-way house for India.

About the same date (_c._ 1350) as the Catalan voyage is the Book of the
Spanish Friar, "of the voyage south to the River of Gold," which gives a
more than half fabulous story of travel, first by sea beyond Capes Non
and Bojador, then by land across the heart of Africa to the Mountains of
the Moon, the city of Melli, where dwelt Prester John, and "the
Euphrates, which comes from the terrestrial Paradise," where behind some
real notes of Barbary coasting, perhaps gained from the Catalans of
1346, there is little but a confused transcript of Edrisi's geography.
Yet this was one of the books which helped to fix the notion of a double
Nile, Northern and Western, a Nile of Egypt and a Nile of the Blacks,
with a common source in the Mountains of the Moon, upon the Christian
science of the time, as the Arab geographers had fixed it upon Islam.

The next piece of Atlantic exploration was a romantic accident. In the
reign of Edward III., an Englishman named Robert Machin eloped with Anne
d'Arfet from Bristol (_c._ 1370), was driven from the coast of France by
a north-east wind, and after thirteen days sighted an island, Madeira,
where he landed. His ship was swept away by the storm, his mistress died
of terror and exhaustion, and five days after Machin was laid beside her
by his men, who had saved the ship's boat and now ran her upon the
African coast. They were enslaved, like other Christian captives of the
Barbary corsairs, but in 1416 a fellow-prisoner, one Morales of Seville,
an old pilot, was ransomed with others and sent back to Spain. On his
way Morales was captured by a Portuguese captain, Zarco, the servant of
Prince Henry, the rediscoverer of Madeira, and through this the full
story of Machin and his island, came to be known in the court of the
Navigator Prince, who promptly made his gain of the new knowledge a
lasting one, by the voyage of Zarco in 1420.

Last among the immediate predecessors of Prince Henry's seamen come the
French. In the seventeenth century it was claimed, on newly found
evidence, that between 1364 and 1410 the men of Dieppe and Rouen opened
a regular trade in gold, ivory, and malaguette pepper with the coast of
Guinea, and built stations at Petit Paris, Petit Dieppe, and La Mine,
which they named from the precious metal found there. But all this is
more than doubtful, and the genuine Norman voyage of De Bethencourt in
1402 shows us nothing