o long had hung round Christendom,
chilling every enterprise.

Thus the whole question of the world and its shape, its countries and
climates, its seas and continents, on every side of practical
exploration, was bound to be before Prince Henry as a theorist; the
practical question which he helped to solve was only a part of this
wider whole. Did this Africa stretching opposite to him in his retreat
at Sagres never end till it reached the Southern pole, or was it
possible to get round into the Eastern ocean? Since Ptolemy's map had
held the field, it had been heresy to suppose this; but in the age of
Greek and Phoenician voyages it had been guessed by some, and perhaps
even proved by others.

The Tyrians whom Pharaoh Necho sent down the Red Sea more than six
hundred years before Christ, brought back after three years a story of
their finding Africa an island, and so returning by the west and north
through the Straits of Gibraltar.

The same tradition, after a long time of discredit, was now reviving
upon the maps of the fourteenth century, and, in spite of the terrible
stories of the Arabs, Henry was able in the first years of the fifteenth
to find men who would try the forlorn hope of a direct sea-route from
Europe to the Indies. We have seen how far the charts and guide-books of
the time just before this had advanced Christian knowledge of the world;
how the southern coastline of Asia is traced by Marco Polo, and how even
Madagascar is named, though not visited, by the same traveller; the
Florentine map of 1351 proves that a fairly true guess of the shape of
Africa could be made even before persistent exploration began with Henry
of Portugal; the Arab settlements on the east coast of Africa and their
trade with the Malabar coast, though still kept as a close monopoly for
Islam, had thoroughly opened up a line of navigation, that was ready, as
it were, for the first Europeans who could strike into it and press the
Moorish pilots into a new service. Discovery was thus anticipated when
the coasts of West and South had once been rounded.

Beyond this, the vague knowledge of the Guinea coast already gained
through the Sahara Caravan Trade was improved by the Prince himself,
during his stay at Ceuta, into the certainty that if the great western
hump of Africa beyond Bojador could be passed, his caravels would come
into an eastern current, passing the gold and ivory coast, which might
lead straight to India, and at any ra