me, broke into the greater monopoly of
the Indian Seas, when Da Gama sailed from Lisbon to Malabar (1497-9).

Next year (1443) came Nuno Tristam's turn once more. People were now
eager to sail in the Infant's service, after the slaves, and still more
the gold dust, had been really seen and handled in Portugal, and "that
noble cavalier," for each and all of the three reasons of his
fellows--"to serve his lord," "to gain honour," "to increase his
profit,"--was eager to follow up his first successes.

Commanding a caravel manned in great part from the Prince's household,
he went out straight to Cape Blanco, the white headland, which he had
been the first to reach in 1441. Passing twenty-five leagues,
seventy-five miles beyond, into the bank or bight of Arguin, he saw a
little island, from which twenty-five canoes came off to meet him, all
hollowed out of logs of wood, with a host of native savages, "naked not
for swimming in the water, but for their ancient custom." The natives
hung their legs over the sides of their boats, and paddled with them
like oars, so that "our men, looking at them from a distance and quite
unused to the sight, thought they were birds that were skimming so over
the water." As for their size, the sailors expected much greater marvels
in those parts of the world, where every map and traveller's tale made
the sea swarm with monsters as big as a continent.

"But as soon as they saw they were men, then were their hearts full of a
new pleasure, for that they saw the chance of a capture." They launched
the ship's boat at once, chased them to the shore, and captured
fourteen; if the boat had been stronger, the tale would have been
longer, for with a crew of seven they could not hold any more prisoners,
and so the rest escaped.

With this booty they sailed on to another island, "where they found an
infinite number of herons, of which they made good cheer, and so
returned Nuno Tristam very joyfully to the Prince."

This last piece of discovery was of much more value than Nuno thought.
He saw in it a first-rate slave hunting-ground, but it became the
starting-point for trade and intercourse with the Negro States of the
Senegal and the Gambia, to the south and east. It was here, in the bay
of Arguin, where the long desert coast of the Sahara makes its last bend
towards the rich country of the south,--that Henry built in 1448 that
fort which Cadamosto found, in the next ten years, had become the centre
of