all, was the end.
Buccaneering on the north-west coast of Africa was not what Henry aimed
at.

So he gave a caravel to one of his household, Gonsalo de Cintra, "who
had been his stirrup-boy," and "bade him go straight to the Land of
Guinea, and that for no cause whatever should he do otherwise." But when
De Cintra got to the White Cape (Blanco) it struck him that "with very
little danger he could make some prisoners there."

So with a cheerful impudence, in the face of the Infant's express
commands, he put his ship about and landed in that bay of Arguin, where
so many captures had been made, but he was cut off from the rest of the
men, and killed with seven others by a host of more than two hundred
Moors, and the chronicle which tells of all such details at the greatest
length, stops to give seven reasons for this, the first serious loss of
life the Europeans had suffered in their new African piracies. And for
the rest, "May God receive the soul that He created and the nature that
came forth from Him, as it is His very own. _Habeat Deus animam quam
creavit et naturam, quod suum est._" (_Azurara_, ch. 27).

Three other caravels, which quickly followed De Cintra, sailed with
special orders to Christianise and civilise the natives wherever and
however they could, and the result of this was seen in the daring
venture of Joan Fernandez. This man, the pattern of all the Crusoes of
after time, offered to stay on shore among the Blacks "to learn what he
could of the manners and speech and customs of the people," and so was
left along with that "bestial and barbarous" nation for seven months, on
the shores of the Bank of Arguin, while in exchange for him an old Moor
went back to Portugal.

Yet a third voyage was made in this spring of 1445 by Nuno Tristam. And
of this, says Azurara, I know nothing very exact or at first hand,
because Nuno Tristam was dead before the time that King Affonso (D.
Henry's nephew) commanded me to write this history. But this much we do
know, that he sailed straight to the Isle of Herons in Arguin, that he
passed the sandy wilderness and landed in the parts beyond, in a land
fertile and full of palm trees; and having landed he took a score of
prisoners. And so Nuno Tristam was the first to see the country of the
real Blacks. In other words, Nuno reached Cape Palmar, far beyond Cape
Blanco, where he saw the palms and got the all-important certainty that
the desert did end somewhere, and that beyond,