India in
1498, if Diaz rounded the Cape of Tempests or of Good Hope in 1486, if
Magellan made the circuit of the globe in 1520-2, their teacher and
master was none the less Henry the Navigator.

CHAPTER VIII.

PRINCE HENRY AND THE CAPTURE OF CEUTA.

1415.

We have seen how the kingdom of Portugal itself was almost an offspring
of the Crusades. They had left behind them a thirst for wealth and for a
wider life on one side, and a broken Moslem power on the other, which
opened the way and stirred the enterprise of every maritime state. We
know that Lisbon had long been an active centre of trade with the Hanse
Towns, Flanders, and England. And now the projected conquest of Ceuta
and the appeal of the conqueror of Aljubarrota for a great national
effort found the people prepared. A royal prince could do what a private
man could not; and Portugal, more fully developed than any other of the
Christian kingdoms, was ready to expand abroad without fear at home.

Even before the conquest of Ceuta, in 1410 or 1412, Henry had begun to
send out his caravels past Cape Non, which had so long been with C.
Bojador the Finisterre of Africa. The first object of these ships was
to reach the Guinea coast by outflanking the great western shoulder of
the continent. Once there, the gold and ivory and slave trade would pass
away from the desert caravans to the European coasters. Then the eastern
bend of Africa, along the bights of Benin and Biafra, might be followed
to the Indies, if this were possible, as some had thought; if not, the
first stage of the work would have to be taken up again till men had
found and had rounded the Southern Cape. The outflanking of Guinea
proved to be only a part of the outflanking of Africa, but it was far
more than half the battle; just as India was the final prize of full
success, so the Gold Coast was the reward of the first chapter in that
success.

But of these earlier expeditions nothing is known in detail; the history
of the African voyages begins with the war of 1415, and the new
knowledge it brought to Henry of the Sahara and the Guinea Coast and of
the tribes of tawny Moors and negroes on the Niger and the Gambia.

In 1414, when Edward was twenty-three, Pedro twenty-two, and Henry
twenty, King John planned an attack on Ceuta, the great Moorish port on
the African side of the Straits of Gibraltar. The three princes had all
asked for knighthood; their father at first proposed to celebrate a