te would be connected by an
overland traffic with the Mediterranean.

(2.) Again, Henry was founding upon his work of exploration an empire
for his country. At first perhaps only thinking of the straight
sea-passage as the possible key of the Indian trade, it became clearer
with every fresh discovery that the European kingdom might and must be
connected by a chain of forts and factories with the rich countries for
whose sake all these barren coasts were passed. In any case, and in the
eyes of ordinary men, the riches of the East were the plain and primary
reason of the explorations. Science had its own aims, but to gain an
income for its work it must promise some definite gain. And the chief
hope of Henry's captains was that the wealth now flowing by the overland
routes to the Levant would in time, as the prize of Portuguese daring,
go by the water way, without delay or fear of plunder or Arab middlemen,
to Lisbon and Oporto. This would repay all the trouble and all the cost,
and silence all who murmured. For this Indian trade was the prize of the
world, and for the sake of this Rome had destroyed Palmyra, and
attacked Arabia and held Egypt, and struggled for the mastery of the
Tigris. For the same thing half the wars of the Levant had been waged,
and by this the Italian republics, Venice, Genoa, and Pisa, had grown to
greatness.

(3.) Lastly, Henry was a Crusader with Islam and a missionary with the
heathen. Of him fully as much as of Columbus, it may be said, that if he
aimed at an empire, it was a Christian one, and from the time of the
first voyages his captains had orders not merely to discover and to
trade, but to convert. Till his death he hoped to find the land of
Prester John, the half-true, half-fabulous Christian Priest-King of the
outer world, so long cut off from Christendom by the Mohammedan states.

At this time many things were drawing western Europe towards the East
and towards discovery. The progress of science and historic knowledge,
the records and suggestions of travellers, the development of the
Christian nations, the position of Portugal and the spirit of her
people,--all these lines met, as it were, in Henry's time and nation and
person, and from that meeting came the results of Columbus and Da Gama
and Magellan.

In the earlier chapters we have tried to trace the preparation along
these slowly converging paths, for the discoveries of the fifteenth
century. We started with that body of knowle