we now know there are
physical reasons for its presenting, make a cimetar shape of it, by
running a slightly curved line from Juba on the eastern side to Cape Nam
on the western. Declare all below that line unknown. Hitherto, we have
only been doing the work of destruction; but now scatter emblems of
hippogriffs and anthropophagi on the outskirts of what is left in the
map, obeying a maxim, not confined to the ancient geographers
only--where you know nothing, place terrors. Looking at the map thus
completed, we can hardly help thinking to ourselves, with a smile, what
a small space, comparatively speaking, the known history of the world
has been transacted in, up to the last four hundred years. The idea of
the universality of the Roman dominions shrinks a little; and we begin
to fancy that Ovid might have escaped his tyrant. The ascertained
confines of the world were now, however, to be more than doubled in the
course of one century; and to Prince Henry of Portugal, as to the first
promoter of these vast discoveries, our attention must be directed.

This Prince, having once the well-grounded idea in his mind that Africa
did not end where it was commonly supposed, namely, at Cape Nam (Not),
but that there was a world beyond that forbidding negative, seems never
to have rested until he had made known that quarter of the globe to his
own. He fixed his abode upon the promontory of Sagres, at the southern
part of Portugal, whence, for many a year, he could watch for the rising
specks of white sail bringing back his captains to tell him of new
countries and new men. We may wonder that he never went himself; but he
may have thought that he served the cause better by remaining at home
and forming a centre whence the electric energy of enterprise was
communicated to many discoverers, and then again collected from them.
Moreover, he was much engaged in the public affairs of his country. In
the course of his life he was three times in Africa, carrying on war
against the Moors; and at home, besides the care and trouble which the
state of the Portuguese court and government must have given him, he was
occupied in promoting science and encouraging education.

In 1415, as before noticed, he was at Ceuta. In 1418 he was settled on
the promontory of Sagres. One night in that year he is thought to have
had a dream of promise, for on the ensuing morning he suddenly ordered
two vessels to be got ready forthwith, and to be placed under the