as, therefore, as a bar drawn across that advance in
maritime discovery which had for so long a time been the first object of
Prince Henry's life.

The Prince had now been working at his discoveries for twelve years,
with little approbation from the generality of persons; the discovery of
these islands, Porto Santo and Madeira, serving to whet his appetite for
further enterprise, but not winning the common voice in favor of
prosecuting discoveries on the coast of Africa. 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 empires 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 among
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 the discoverers themselves had introduced
were now dispossessing them of the island."

There is much here of the usual captiousness to be found in the
criticism of bystanders upon action, mixed with a great deal of false
assertion and premature 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. 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 fe