rince's explorations, and who came forward with the
stock request, "Give me a caravel to go to the land of the negroes."

A little beyond Cape Verde, Vallarte went on shore with a boat's crew
and fell into the trap which had caught the exploring party of the year
before. He and his men were surrounded by negroes and were shot down or
captured to a man. But one escaped, swimming to the ship, and told how
as he looked back over his shoulder to the shore, again and again, he
saw Vallarte sitting a prisoner in the stern of the boat.

"And when the chronicle of these voyages was in writing at the end of
the self-same year, there were brought certain prisoners from Guinea to
Prince Henry, who told him that in a city of the upland, in the heart of
Africa, there were four Christian prisoners." One had died, three were
living, and in these four, men in Europe believed they had news of
Vallarte and his men.

But between the last voyage of Zarco's caravel in 1446 and the first
voyage of Cadamosto in 1455, there is no real advance in exploration.

The "third armada," as it was called, that is the fleet of the nine
caravels of 1446-7, the voyage of Gomes Pires to the Rio d'Ouro at the
same time, the trading ventures of the Marocco coast which were the
means of bringing the first lion to Portugal in 1447, the expeditions
to the Rio d'Ouro and to Arguin in the course of the same year, are not
part of the story of discovery, but of trade. There is hardly a
suspicion of exploring interest about most of them. Even Vallarte's
venture in 1448 has nothing of the novelty which so many went out to
find "for the satisfaction of the Lord Henry." Guinea voyages are
frequent, almost constant, during these years, and this frequency has at
any rate the point of making Europeans thoroughly familiar with the
coast already explored, if it did little or nothing to bring in new
knowledge.

But the value and meaning of Henry's life and work was not after all in
commerce, except in a secondary sense; and these voyages of purely
trading interest, with no design or at any rate no result of discovery,
do not belong to our subject. Each one of them has its own picturesque
beauty in the pages of the old chronicle of the Conquest of Guinea, but
measured by its importance to the general story of the expansion of
Europe, there is no lasting value in any one of the last chapters of
Azurara's voyages,--his description of the Canaries, and of the
"Inferno" of T