Henry the Navigator

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Henry the Navigator
1394–1460

Prince Henry (1394–1460), properly Infante Dom Henrique, was the third surviving son of Portugal's King João I and Philippa of Lancaster. Though labeled "the Navigator" by nineteenth-century Europeans looking approvingly on the roots of Western expansion, he was in fact neither seaman nor shipbuilder, but rather an avid religious crusader and patron of early Atlantic exploration.

Fate and upbringing helped point Henry toward his achievements. At his birth, astrologers saw in his zodiac a destiny to make "great and noble conquests" and uncover "secrets previously hidden from men," and Henry's parents selected as his patron saint the French crusader-king St. Louis. Personal ambition joined these portents to make crusading and exploration—along with acquiring fame and wealth—his life interests.

Henry's efforts need to be viewed in the context of his time and place. Since the expulsion of the Moors from Portugal in 1249, Portuguese seamen had been expanding their commercial range. Once it was apparent that Venice controlled the eastern Mediterranean and Muslims blocked access to products from sub-Saharan Africa, sailors, merchants, and bankers from Genoa and Florence brought their skills to Spain and Portugal, hoping to find support for their plan to outflank Venetians and Muslims and thus gain access to Asian spices and African gold. Henry, who had gone crusading in 1415 and had helped capture Ceuta, the Muslim stronghold in Morocco, gained control of funds for "worthy ventures" in 1420 when the pope appointed him administrator of the military Order of Christ. From then on, he would use his own and the order's wealth primarily to organize and sponsor exploration and colonization.

An expedition Henry sent in 1424 to colonize Grand Canary failed, but mariners he sponsored discovered the uninhabited Madeiras, and colonization of these islands paid off in production of wheat, grapes, and sugar. Henry also oversaw colonization of the Azores, due west of Portugal, in the 1440s, but the Atlantic, leading south down Africa's western edge, was the main focus of his attention. He sponsored Gil Eannes to pass Cape Bojador, eight hundred miles south of Portugal and previously a psychological barrier to travel, in 1434, and subsequent mariners he sent reached Cape Verde, Africa's westernmost point, in 1445. At Henry's death in 1460, Portuguese-financed sailors were approaching Sierra Leone, 2,000 miles from Europe. The move down the Atlantic coast did not end with Henry, of course: in 1497 Vasco da Gama would sail around Africa's southern tip and reach India, opening East Africa and the Indian Ocean to Portuguese imperial designs.

Henry, thus, was not an explorer himself, but the major patron of the early fifteenth-century Atlantic explorers and colonizers who showed how newfound lands could be exploited, and who brought back information to help subsequent European mariners. Henry's greatest importance may be in sponsoring those who answered the age-old question of how to return to Europe after sailing down West Africa's Atlantic coast: by making a long westward tack to pick up prevailing winds. This permitted European sailing into the south Atlantic and, soon, all the seas of the world.

see also Empire, Portuguese.