ening for terrible fairy tales.

The first age, if so it may be called, of South Atlantic and African
voyages was purely Italian; the second was chiefly marked by the efforts
of the Spanish States to equip fleets and send out explorers under
Genoese captains. In 1317 the Genoese Emmanuel Pessanha became Admiral
of Portugal; in 1341 three ships manned by Portuguese and "other
Spaniards" with some Italians put out from Lisbon in search of
Malocello's "Rediscovered" islands, granted by the Pope to Don Luis of
Spain in a Bull of November 15, 1334, and now described, from the
original letters of Florentine merchants and partners in the venture of
1341, by Boccaccio. "Land was found on the fifth day after leaving the
Tagus" (July 1); the fleet stayed till November, and then brought back
four natives and products of the islands. The chief pilot thought these
were near nine hundred miles from Seville, and we may fully suppose that
the archipelago of thirteen, now first explored and described,
represents the Fortunate Islands of Greek geography, the Canaries of
modern maps, and that the five chief islands with their naked but not
quite savage people, with excellent wood houses, and flocks of goats,
palms, and figs, gardens and corn patches, rocky mountains and pine
forests, were our Ferro, Palma, Gomera, Grand Canary, and Teneriffe. The
last they took to be thirty thousand feet high, with its white scarped
sides looking like a fortress, but terrified at signs of enchantment
they did not dare to land, and returned to Spain, leaving the Islands of
the Rediscovered to be visited as a convenient slave depot by merchants
and pirates from the Peninsula till the Norman Conquest of Bethencourt
in 1402.

The voyage of 1341 gained much by attempting little; the Catalan voyage
of 1346, which followed close upon it, was something of a return to the
wilder and larger schemes of the first Genoese. On August 10, 1346,
Jayme Ferrer left Majorca "to go to the River of Gold," but of the said
galley, says the Catalan map of 1375, no news has since been heard. On
the same map, however, the explorers' boat is sketched off the "Cape
Finisterre of west Africa," and there is, after all, some ground for
supposing this to be nothing more than a mercantile venture to the Gold
Coast of Guinea, which was becoming known to the traders of Nismes,
Marseilles, and the Christian Mediterranean by the caravan traffic
across the Sahara. Even Prince Henry began in