like a volcano,
till 1428. This was at least the common story as told in Portugal, and
it was often joined with another--of the rabbit plague, which ate up all
the green stuff of the island in the first struggling years of Zarco's
settlement, and so prevented the export of anything but timber. So much
of this was brought into Portugal that Henry's lifetime is a landmark in
the domestic architecture of Spain, and from the trade of the "Wood
Island" is derived the lofty style of building that now began to replace
the more modest fashion of the Arabs.

A charter of Henry's, dated 1430, ten years after the rediscovery of
Madeira, and reciting the names of some of the first settlers, and his
bequest of the island, or rather of its "spiritualties," to the Order of
Christ on September 18, 1460, just before his death, are the chief links
between this colony and the home country in the next generation--but in
the history of institutions there are few more curious facts than the
insistence of the Prince on a census for his little "Nation." From the
first, the family registers of the colonists were carefully kept, and
from these we see something of the wonder of men who were beginning
human life, as it were, in a new land. The first children born in
Madeira--a son and daughter of Ayres Ferreira, one of Zarco's
comrades--were christened Adam and Eve.[36]

[Footnote 36: In 1418 and 1424-5 Henry purchased and tried to secure
certain rights of possession in the Canaries, conceded by De
Bethencourt; and these attempts were repeated in 1445 and 1446.]

CHAPTER X.

CAPE BOJADOR AND THE AZORES.

1428-1441.

But in spite of Zarco's success, Cape Bojador had not yet been passed,
though every year, from 1418, caravels had left Sagres, "to find the
coasts of Guinea."

In 1428, Don Pedro, Henry's elder brother, had come home from his
travels, with all the books and charts he had collected to help the
explorers--and it is practically certain that the Mappa Mundi given him
in Venice acted as a direct suggestion to the next attempts on west and
south--westward to the Azores, southward towards Guinea.

Kept in the royal monastery of Alcobaca till late in the sixteenth
century, though now irrecoverably lost, this treasure of Don Pedro's,
like his "manuscripts of travel," would seem to have been used at the
Sagres school till Prince Henry's death, and at least as early as 1431
its effect was seen in the first Portuguese recovery o