ery of Madeira and Porto
Santo serving to whet his appetite for further enterprise, but not winning
the common voice in favour of his projects. The people at home, improving
upon the reports of the sailors, said that "the land which the prince
sought after was merely some sandy place like the deserts of Libya; that
princes had possessed the empire of the world, and yet had not undertaken
such designs as his, nor shown such anxiety to find new kingdoms; that the
men who arrived in those foreign parts (if they did arrive) turned from
white into black men; that the king, Don John, the prince's father, had
endowed foreigners with land in his kingdom, to break it up and cultivate
it, a thing very different from taking the people out of Portugal, which
had need of them, to bring them amongst savages to be eaten and to place
them upon lands of which the mother country had no need; that the Author
of the world had provided these islands solely for the habitation of wild
beasts, of which an additional proof was that those rabbits which the
discoverers themselves had introduced were now dispossessing them of the
island."

There is much here of the usual captiousness [Transcriber's note: Finding
trivial faults.] to be found in the criticism of bystanders upon action,
mixed with a great deal of false assertion and assumed knowledge of
the ways of Providence. Still, it were to be wished that most criticism
upon action was as wise; for that part of the common talk which spoke of
keeping their own population to bring out their own resources, had a
wisdom in it which the men of future centuries were yet to discover
throughout the Peninsula.

MISGIVINGS OF PRINCE HENRY; GIL EANNES.

Prince Henry, as may be seen by his perseverance up to this time, was not
a man to have his purposes diverted by such criticism, much of which must
have been, in his eyes, worthless and inconsequent in the extreme.
Nevertheless, he had his own misgivings. His captains came back one after
another, with no good tidings of discovery, but with petty plunder gained
as they returned from incursions on the Moorish coast. The prince
concealed from them his chagrin at the fruitless nature of their attempts,
but probably did not feel it less on that account. He began to think, was
it for him to hope to discover that land which had been hidden from so
many princes? Still he felt within himself the incitement of "a virtuous
obstinacy," which would not let him rest