Henry the Navigator – Universal History

Enrique “The Navigator” He was a 15th-century Portuguese explorer, son of King John I the Great, during whose reign Portugal began a process of colonial expansion in African territory that allowed it to reach regions never before reached by European man. The main protagonist of this adventure was Enrique the Navigator, who came to the African continent fighting alongside his father. There he started a famous navigation school, the cradle of numerous discoveries.

Portuguese colonial expansion

The Portuguese colonial expansion began in the fifteenth century with the purpose of exploring the African coast in search of a new route to the Indies, which would avoid passing through the Mediterranean, subject to the increasing control of the Turkish fleet, and also for a metal precious, gold, which was lacking in Europe. Likewise, the news of the existence of a Christian kingdom located to the south of Morocco stimulated the desire for adventure of the Lusitanian explorers.
The initial advance along the African coasts was facilitated by the remarkable Portuguese navigational technique and by the school of Henry the Navigator.
The son of Don Juan I and Doña Felipa de Lancaster, Enrique, who was born in Porto in 1394, received a careful education and was knighted by his father when he reached the age of majority.. When Juan I organized the campaign to Ceuta in 1417, his son accompanied him, fighting with great courage in numerous battles and receiving the titles of Duke of Coimbra and Lord of Covirán as a prize. Once this campaign was successfully concluded, Enrique returned to Portugal, where he stayed for a short time before embarking on a new trip to African territory.

Foundation of a sailing school

In the year 1416, he founded a town called Tercena Naval, which is today the city of Sagres, near Cape San Vicente, and established a naval school, several shipyards and arsenals there.. It was at this school that the navigators who would later carry out the exploration voyages that consolidated Portuguese imperialism in numerous colonies were trained. Enrique established his residence in the town founded by him and voluntarily withdrew from the courtly life of the metropolis, dedicating himself to perfecting plans to dominate an ocean that popular imagination had populated with monsters and catastrophes. The risky maritime expeditions ordered by Enrique reached the ears of the Church and of monarchs and emperors. Pope Martin V, Don Juan II of Castile and Henry V of England tempted him to contribute to his cause the knowledge, both military and navigation, which had made him famous at the time. Enrique, who was the creator of the chair of medicine at the University of Lisbon, was the greatest mathematician of his time, applied the astrolabe to navigation and invented flat charts. However, he rejected these proposals and continued with his dreams of expanding the Portuguese Empire.

Discoveries

This was how its navigators began a series of discoveries that took the Lusitanian banner to places that until then were only part of legend. In 1418 Bartolomé Perestrello discovered the island of Porto Santo and, the following year, Juan Gonzalves Zarco and Tristán Vaz Tejeira discovered the island of Madera. In 1432 Gonzalo Velho Cabral discovered Santa María, the first insular land of the Azores archipelago, in the middle of the Atlantic. However, the obsession of Henry the Navigator was not the islands, but that terrible sea that the sailors of the Middle Ages believed impossible to cross. After twelve years of hard work, he ordered to equip a ship with everything necessary for a long journey and put his squire Gil Eannes in command. Eannes’ first voyage, however, only took him as far as the Canary Islands, from where he returned without daring to continue his journey beyond Cape Bojador, on the African mainland. In 1434 Henry managed to convince Eannes to go to sea and explore the African coast, marking the beginning of a major series of discoveries and conquests..
In 1441 he sent two of his captains to tour the Sahara coast, one of them discovering Cape Blanco, while the other brought black slaves to Portugal for the first time. In 1443 Nuño Tristán discovered the island of Arguim, where Enrique established a factory, and in 1445 Juan Fernández entered Sudan and reached the country of the Tuaregs, being the first European to explore the interior of the dark continent. The following year, Alvaro Fernández discovered Sierra Leone, while in 1457 Luis de Cadamosto and the Genoese Antonio Molle discovered Gambia. Henry the Navigator died in Sagres in 1460, the same year that Diego Gómez discovered the Cape Verde archipelago.