al
suggestion and encouragement to take up a life-profession of discovery,
it was at any rate put into practice on his second and last return
(1418). From that time to the end of his life he became a recluse from
the Court life of Lisbon, though he soon gathered round himself a rival
Court, of science and seamanship.

The old "Sacred Cape" of the Romans, then called Sagres, now the "Cape
St. Vincent" of Nelson and modern maps, was his chosen home for the next
forty years, though he seems to have passed a good deal of his time in
his port of Lagos, close by.

In 1419 King John made him Governor for life of the Algarves (the
southern province of Portugal) and the new governor at once began to
rebuild and enlarge the old naval arsenal, in the neck of the Cape, into
a settlement that soon became the "Prince's Town." In Lagos, his ships
were built and manned; and there, and in Sagres itself, all the schemes
of discovery were thought out, the maps and instruments corrected, and
the accounts of past and present travellers compared by the Prince
himself. His results then passed into the instructions of his captains
and the equipment of his caravels. The Sacred Cape, which he now
colonised, was at any rate a good centre for his work of ocean voyaging.
Here, with the Atlantic washing the land on three sides, he was well on
the scene of action. There were buildings on Sagres headland as old as
the eleventh century; Greek geography had made this the starting-point
of its shorter and continental measurements for the length of the
habitable world, and the Genoese, whose policy was to buy up points of
vantage on every coast, were eager to plant a colony there, but Portugal
was not ready to become like the Byzantine Empire, a depot for Italian
commerce, and Henry had his own reasons for securing a desolate
promontory.

On this he now built himself a palace, a chapel, a study, an
observatory--the earliest in Portugal--and a village for his helpers and
attendants. "In his wish to gain a prosperous result for his efforts,
the Prince devoted great industry and thought to the matter, and at
great expense procured the aid of one Master Jacome from Majorca, a man
skilled in the art of navigation and in the making of maps and
instruments, and who was sent for, with certain of the Arab and Jewish
mathematicians, to instruct the Portuguese in that science." So at
least, says De Barros, the "Livy of Portugal." At Sagres was thus
founded anew