The life of Prince Henry

Portugal was called Lusitania in ancient Greece and Rome. /kloc-At the beginning of the 4th century, during the reign of King Denis, Portugal began to expand overseas. By the middle of15th century, with the maturity of navigation technology, the navigator Henry appeared in Portugal.

Prince Henry is the third prince of King Joao I of Portugal. It is said that his birthdates indicates that he will "undertake a great and noble expedition, and more importantly, he will discover mysterious things that others can't see". Henry studied strategy and tactics, diplomatic art, state management, ancient and modern knowledge and read widely since childhood. As a prince, Henry longed for a life of adventure and fighting. At the same time, he is a devout Christian. In his view, it is the duty of Christians to attack the Moors, explore the unknown and bring Christianity there. Prince Henry was never married. He is rigorous and firm, and leads a simple life.

14 15, Henry personally raided Ceuta, and the Moors didn't know it beforehand. As a result, Ceuta was captured in just one day, and only eight Portuguese were killed. Later generations regarded this as the beginning of the outward expansion of the Portuguese and Europeans.

14 17, the Moorish army surrounded Ceuta, and Henry led reinforcements to Ceuta, where he stayed for three months, which changed the history of the world. During these three months, Henry learned from prisoners of war and commercial population that there was an old and busy commercial road that could cross the Sahara desert. After 20 days, he can reach the "green countries" with dense forests and fertile land, namely today's Guinea, Gambia, Senegal, southern Mali and southern Niger, from which he can get African pepper, gold and ivory. The Portuguese have no experience of crossing the desert by land. Prince Henry has a bold idea to reach a "green country" from the sea. This idea was endorsed by King Joao I.

Henry is not interested in politics. He went to the southernmost province of Portugal, served as governor of Tequila, far away from Lisbon, and settled in Sagrish, a small village near Cape San Vicente, which became the starting point for his exploration in strange places in the next few decades. Prince Henry's contribution to navigation is not to explore personally, but to promote exploration. He founded a navigation college there to train domestic sailors and improve navigation technology; Establish an observatory to attract geologists, cartographers, mathematicians and astronomers from all over the world to study and make plans and schemes; Collect extensively the documents on geography, meteorology, trade winds, ocean currents, shipbuilding, navigation, etc., and analyze them for your own use; Travel libraries have been established, including The Travels of Marco Polo, and many maps have been collected and new maps have been drawn. He funded mathematicians and craftsmen to improve and manufacture new navigation instruments, such as compass, quadrant (instrument for measuring altitude, especially altitude) and horizontal marker (simple astrolabe for measuring latitude) imported from China. In sailing, the ship is the most important. Because of the different navigation conditions between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, ships sailing in the Mediterranean are not suitable for sailing in the Atlantic. Therefore, Henry devoted his greatest energy to shipbuilding, so he took many preferential measures to encourage shipbuilding: all ships with a tonnage of 100 tons or more can get wood from the royal forest free of charge, and any other necessary materials can be imported duty-free. In the case of insufficient currency at that time, duty-free imports had to pay a considerable price. After hard work, we reached 1440 and finally built a ship suitable for sailing in the Atlantic Ocean. This is a dhow. The purpose of using jib is to make the ship sail against the wind. We just need to adjust the angle of the sail, instead of relying on the wind direction as before. This kind of ship is shallow, light, flexible and fast, and can sail close to the coast without having to stay away from the coast in order to avoid reefs and sandbars, which is particularly important in the navigation for the purpose of exploring strange coasts.

14 19 or 1420, Henry sent his first expedition, with only one sailboat, to the south to find Guinea. The ship was blown to the west by the wind, and the Madeira Islands were discovered in this way. Prince Henry later declared that the islands belonged to Portugal and sent a colonial fleet in 1420. Later, it became the foothold and material supply station of the Portuguese expedition. His next target was the Canary Islands, but Portuguese soldiers were defeated by the locals. Prince Henry made several efforts later and failed. Later, Portugal gave up the ownership of the Canary Islands and gave it to the Spanish. In the following years, Prince Henry sent several expeditions from two directions. One direction is to go south along the coast of Africa, and the other direction is to leave the coast and sail deep southwest to find more islands. 1427, the fleet exploring the southwest discovered the Azores. 1432, Prince Henry sent 16 ships, hundreds of people and a priest to colonize the Azores with dozens of livestock. The discovery and colonization of Azores have an important influence on Portugal's future exploration and colonization, because its distance from Portugal is almost equal to 1/3 of Portugal's distance across the Atlantic to America.

1433, King Joao I died and Henry's eldest brother Duarte I succeeded him. At this time, Henry focused on exploring south along the African coast. The first obstacle of this route is Cape Bohal, which is located on the African continent just south of the Canary Islands. As early as 134 1 year to 1346, navigators from Catalonia and Portugal sailed 900 kilometers south along the west coast of Africa to Bohado. The sailors are afraid to sail south again. They secretly returned to Europe on the pretext of meeting all kinds of terrible aborigines. The salt in the sea is too thick to cultivate. They also threatened that all Christians passing through Bohado would become black. At that time, the south of Cape Bohal was a completely unknown world to Europeans. There are many reefs, huge waves and mysterious rapids. Arabs call this sea area "dark green ocean" in fear. On the map of medieval Arabia, on the coast slightly south of Cape Bohal, there was a Satan's hand sticking out of the water. 1434, after more than a dozen attempts, Prince Henry's expedition finally survived under the leadership of Captain Jill Evans. (Later, the captain boasted that sailing in the dark green ocean was as easy as sailing in domestic waters. Surara, a contemporary Portuguese historian, called it a feat. ) In the following year, Ines went out to sea again and arrived at 100 nautical mile south of Cape Bohal. They found footprints of people and camels on the beach there, which proved that there was life in this area. 1436, they arrived at a place called Rio de Oro, where they found placer gold, thinking that this is the golden river that Europeans have been looking for. In fact, it is not even a river, but a small bay with little value.

During the reign of Du Jiaerte, the king used the tax of Madeira Islands15 as the navigation fund. 1438 When Alfonso V ascended the throne, Regent Peizhuo gave Henry a monopoly on navigation and trade south of Cape Bohal, and exempted all taxes on navigation income. In order to support Henry's missionary work in West Africa, the Pope appointed Henry as the head of the Order, and Henry could control the funds of the Order at will. The above support ensures Henry's abundant funds in sailing and is the driving force for the rapid development of sailing exploration. But exploration is not for the sake of exploration, and prolonged exploration has not brought much benefit, so Henry has been criticized more and more, thinking that it is meaningless and unprofitable to pursue the unknown. 144 1 year, after dealing with the fiasco of attacking Tangier and the political struggle caused by it, Henry returned to Sagrish and resumed his exploration on the African coast. This year, the expedition set a new record for sailing south: Cape Brown (now Cape Nouadhibou, Mauritania). In the same year, another expedition returned ten Muslim prisoners. This marks the beginning of the slave trade in Europe. Seeing that this was an opportunity to quell the criticism, Henry organized a voyage to plunder slaves in 1444, bringing back 235 slaves at a time and selling them outside Lagos. This was the beginning of the 400-year slave trade in evil Europe. Since then, the voyage organized by Henry has paid equal attention to exploration, colonization and slave trade. At this time, the Portuguese royal family issued a charter to private explorers, allowing them to get everything they found, which means that for private people, as long as they pay a small amount of money and take risks, they can make a fortune; For the royal family, you can get benefits without paying the price. This set off a wave of private exploration in China. Soon, 25 ships will sail to the African coast every year. Of course, private exploration is not a real exploration because of its profit-seeking and unorganized nature, but only to obtain wealth in the discovered area. 1448, Prince Henry sent someone to build a permanent fortress on Algin Island in Cape Brown as a trade transit point for Portuguese exploration. With the continuous expansion of African trade, Altun Island has become an important center for providing gold. The exploration finally paid off, and those criticisms went away, and even involuntarily turned past complaints into word of mouth.

1444, Tristan arrived near the Senegalese estuary in Cape Brown, where the coast became full of green. After more than ten years of sailing, Portugal finally reached a green country. After 1449, the sailors organized by Prince Henry did not take geographical discovery as their task, but tried their best to explore some discovered rivers, especially gambia river, in order to find Christian King John and gold. However, instead of finding John and gold, the sailors found some prosperous black kingdoms and heard that there was a bigger kingdom in the distance.

1460 The death of Prince Henry marked the end of a great era of Portuguese maritime exploration. Although Prince Henry has only four experiences of sailing on the sea in his life, and all of them are short voyages in familiar waters, he is still worthy of the title of "navigator". It was he who organized and funded the initial long-lasting and systematic exploration, and it was he who combined exploration with colonization to make exploration a profitable undertaking. In 40 years of organized navigation, Portugal has become the navigation center of Europe. They built a world-class fleet, possessed first-class shipbuilding technology and trained a large number of world-class explorers or navigators. None of this would have happened without Henry. He pushed Portugal out of Europe and took risks in the unknown world.

In fact, Prince Henry did not go to sea, but went to Ceuta, Morocco with the Royal Fleet in 14 15. He is the third son of King Joao I, and his two brothers are Duarte and Pedro. His mother is English. I have been quiet and practical since I was a child. I like learning and devote myself to the set goals. After he arrived in Ceuta with the fleet, he studied a lot of historical documents and accumulated valuable navigation materials. He is convinced that there are still many unknown continents on the earth waiting for people to discover. Therefore, a grand vision was formed in his mind. He believes that a new era in Portuguese history is about to begin.

After returning from Ceuta, Enrique devoted himself to sailing. Far from the luxurious and comfortable court, he gave up his marriage and family life and chose Sagres near the desolate Cape San Vicente in the southwest corner of Portugal to settle down, where he founded a navigation school and observatory. He recruited famous cosmologists and mathematicians from abroad and studied a large amount of information collected. After that, a dock was opened in Sagres to build ships.

After years of research, training and preparation, Enrique sent a fleet to sail for the first time in 14 18, and discovered Santos Island in Madeira Islands that year and Madeira Island the following year. Later, his fleet discovered the Azores.

Since 1930s, Enrique has been challenging the limits of human navigation at that time. He carefully selected Portugal's first-class explorers and brave sailors. Under his careful planning and deployment, these loyal captains and crew members successively discovered Guinea, Senegal, Cape Verde and Sierra Leone.