of the savages' poisoned arrows; then, when
at last they had "thrown their honour to the winds and those bodies to
the fishes," shamefaced and utterly broken in spirit, the five
wretchedly ignorant seamen, who were now left alone, drifted, with the
boundless and terrible ocean on one side, and the still more dangerous
and unknown coast of Africa on the other, for sixty days. A common
sailor, "little enough skilled in the art of sailing"; a groom of the
Prince's chamber, the young hero who saved the ship; a negro boy, who
was taken with the first captives from Guinea; and two other "little
lads small enough,"--this was the crew. As for the rest, Beati mortui
qui in Domino moriuntur, Blessed are the dead that die in the Lord,
cries the chronicler in that outburst of bewildered grief with which he
ends his story. There were widows and orphans left for the Prince to
care for, and "of these he took especial charge."

But all people were not so unlucky as Nuno Tristam. The caravel of Zarco
of Madeira, which under Zarco's nephew, Alvaro Fernandez, had already
passed beyond every other in the year of the great armada, 1445, was
sent back again on its errand "of doing service in the unknown lands of
Guinea to the Lord Don Henry," in the black year, 1446. Its noble and
valiant owner now "charged the aforesaid" Alvaro Fernandez, with the
ship well armed, to go as far as he could, and to try and make some
booty, that should be so new and so splendid that it would be a sign of
his good-will to serve the Lord who had made him. So they sailed on
straight to Cape Verde, and beyond that to the Cape of Masts (or Spindle
Palms), their farthest of the year before, but they did not turn back
here, in spite of unfriendly natives and unknown shores. Still coasting
along, they found tracks of men, and a little farther on a village,
"where the people came out as men who shewed that they meant to defend
their homes; in front of them was a champion, with a good target on his
arm and an assegai in his hand. This fellow our captain rushed upon, and
with a blow of his lance struck him dead upon the ground. Then, running
up, he seized his sword and spear, and kept them as trophies to be
offered to the Lord Infant." The negroes fled, and the conquerors turned
back to their ship and sailed on. Next day they came to a land where
they saw certain of the women of those negroes, and seized one who was
of age about thirty, with her child a baby of two, and