Heurter, Lord of Moerkerke--and there is a special interest in his name.
For it is through him that we get in 1492 the long and interesting
notice of the first settlement of the Azores on the globe of Martin
Behaim, now at Nuremberg, the globe which was made to play such a
curious part, as undesigned as it was ungenerous, in the Columbus
controversy.

"These islands," says the tablet attached to them on the map, "these
Hawk islands, were colonised in 1466, when they were given by the King
of Portugal to his sister Isabel, Duchess of Burgundy, who sent out
many people of all classes, with priests and everything necessary for
the maintenance of religion. So that in 1490 there were there some
thousands of souls, who had come out with the noble knight, Job de
Heurter, my dear father-in-law, to whom the islands were given in
perpetuity by the Duchess.

"Now in 1431, Prince Henry provisioned two ships for two years and sent
them to the lands beyond Cape Finisterre, and they, sailing due west for
some five hundred leagues, found these islands, ten in number, all
desert without quadrupeds or men, only tenanted by birds, and these so
tame that they could be caught by the hand. So they called these 'the
Islands of the Hawks' (Azores).

"And next year (1432), by the King's orders, sixteen vessels were sent
out from Portugal with all kinds of tame animals, that they might breed
there."

Of the first settlement of Flores and Corvo, the two remaining islands
of the group, still less is known, but in any case it seems not to have
been fully carried out till the last years of the Prince's life,
possibly it was the work of his successor in the Grand Mastership of the
Order of Christ, which now took up a sort of charge to colonise outlying
and new discovered lands. For among the Prince's last acts was his
bequest of the islands, which had been granted to himself by his
brother, King Edward, in 1433, to Prince Ferdinand, his nephew, whom he
had adopted with a view of making him his successor in aims as well as
in office, in leading the progress of discovery as well as in the
headship of the Order of Christ.

CHAPTER XVI.

THE TROUBLES OF THE REGENCY AND THE FALL OF DON PEDRO.

1440-9.

Don Pedro had been nominated sole Regent of Portugal on November 1,
1439, and by the end of the next year all the unsettlement consequent on
the change at court seemed to be at an end. But a deep hatred continued
between the various part