st circle of her
enemies, the belt of settled Moslem ground, and has begun to touch the
wider world outside, on the shore of the ocean as well as along the
Eastern trade routes. And it almost seemed to be of little practical
value that Marco Polo and the friars and traders who followed him had
passed Islam in Asia, and reached even furthest Tartary, for it only
made more clear that Asia was not Christian, and that there would have
to be a deadly struggle before European influence could be restored on
this side to what it had been under Alexander; but on the west, by the
Atlantic coasts, once Morocco had been passed, there were only scattered
savage tribes to be dealt with. Baldaya had now reached the pagans
beyond Islam; the rival civilisation of the Arabs and their converts had
been almost outflanked by Don Henry's ships; and the boys who rode up
the Rio d'Ouro beach in 1435 were the first pickets of a great army.
Their charge upon a body of grown men ten times their number, was a
prophecy of the coming conquests of Christian Europe in the new worlds
it was now in search of, in south and east and west.

Now Baldaya instantly followed up his pioneers. He took a party in his
ship's boat and rode up the stream to the scene of the fight, with the
boys on horseback riding by the bank and shewing him the stone-heap
where the natives had rallied on the day before. But in the night they
had all fled farther up country, leaving most of their miserable goods
behind. All these were carried off, and the Portuguese left the Bay of
the Horses, as they called this farthest reach of the Rio d'Ouro, and
pulled back to the varinel, without any further success than a wholesome
disappointment. They must go farther southward if they were to find the
western Nile and the way round Africa.

Still Baldaya was not content. He wished to carry back a prisoner, as
Henry had charged him, and so he coasted along fifty leagues more, from
the Rio d'Ouro to the Port of Gallee, a rock that looked like a galley,
where there was a more prominent headland than he had passed since
Bojador. Here he landed once again, and found some native nets, made of
the bark of trees, but none of the natives who made them.

In the early months of 1436 he and his varinel were again in Portuguese
waters; but the land had now been touched that lay three hundred miles
beyond the old African Finisterre, and in two years (1434-6) Portugal
and all the Christian nations, throu