f the Azores. All
the West African islands, plainly enough described in the map of 1428,
were half within, half without the knowledge of Christendom, ever and
anon being brought back or rediscovered by some accident or enterprise,
and then being lost to sight and memory through the want of systematic
exploration. This was exactly what the Portuguese supplied. The Azores,
marked on the Laurentian Portulano of 1351, were practically unknown to
seamen when, after eighty years had passed, Gonzalo Cabral was sent out
from Sagres to find them (1431). He reached the Formiga group--the Ant
islands,--and next year (1432) returned to make further discoveries,
chiefly of the island Santa Maria. But the more important advances on
this side were made between 1444-50, after the first colony had been
planted twelve or fourteen years, and were the result of the Prince's
theoretical correction of his captains' practical oversight. From a
comparison of old maps and descriptions with their accounts, he was able
to correct their line of sail and so to direct them to the very islands
they had searched for in vain.

But as yet these results were far distant, and the slow and sure
progress of African coasting towards Cape Bojador was the chief outcome
of Pedro's help. In 1430, 1431, and 1432, the Infant urged upon his
captains the paramount importance of rounding the Cape, which had
baffled all his caravels by its strong ocean currents and dangerous
rocks. At last this became the Prince's one command: Pass the Cape if
you do nothing beyond; yet the years went by, King John of good memory
died in 1433, and Gil Eannes, sent out in the same year with strong
hopes of success, turned aside at the Canaries and only brought a few
slaves back to Portugal. A large party at Court, in the Army, and among
the nobles and merchant classes, complained bitterly of the utter want
of profit from Henry's schemes, and there was at this time a danger of
the collapse of his movement. For though as yet he paid his own
expenses, his treasury could not long have stood the drain without any
incoming.

Bojador, the "paunch" or "bulging Cape," 180 miles beyond Cape Non, had
been, since the days of the Laurentian Portulano (1351), and the Catalan
and Portuguese voyages of 1341 and 1346, the southmost point of
Christian knowledge. A long circuit was needed here, as at the Cape of
Good Hope, to round a promontory that stretched, men said, fully one
hundred miles into the