gh Henry's work, had entered on a
new chapter of history. The narrower world of the Roman Empire and the
Mediaeval Church was already growing into the modern globe in the break
up of that old terror of the sea which had so long fixed for men the
bounds that they must not pass. The land routes had been cleared to
Western knowledge, though not mastered, by the Crusades; now the far
more dreaded and unknown water-way was fairly entered. For up to this
time there is no fair evidence that either Christian or Moorish
enterprise had ever rounded Bojador, and the theoretical marking of it
upon maps was a very different thing from the experience that it was
just like any other cape, and no more an end of the world than Cape St.
Vincent itself. Neither Genoese, nor Catalans, nor Normans of Dieppe,
nor the Arab wanderers of Edrisi and Ibn Said were before Don Henry now.
His discoveries of the Atlantic islands were findings, rediscoveries;
his coast voyages from the year 1433 are all ventures in the true
unknown.

But from 1436 to 1441, from Baldaya's second return to the start of Nuno
Tristam and Antam Gonsalvez for Cape Blanco, exploration was not
successful or energetic. The simple cause of this was the Infant's other
business. In these years took place the fatal attempt on Tangier, the
death of King Edward, and the troubles of the minority of his child,
Affonso V.--Affonso the African conqueror of later years.

True it is, we read in our _Chronicle of the Discovery of Guinea_, that
in these years there went to those parts two ships, one at a time, but
the first turned back in the face of bad weather, and the other only
went to the Rio d'Ouro for the skins and oil of sea wolves, and after
taking in a cargo of these, went back to Portugal. And true it is, too,
that in the year 1440 there were armed and sent out two caravels to go
to that same land, but in that they met with contrary fortune, we do not
tell any more of their voyage.

CHAPTER XI.

HENRY'S POLITICAL LIFE. 1433-1441.

The Prince's exile from politics in his hermitage at Sagres could not be
absolutely unbroken. He was ready to come back to Court and to the
battle field when he was needed. So he appeared at the deathbed of his
father in 1433 and of his brother in 1438, at the siege of Tangier in
1437, and during the first years of the Regency (1438-40) he helped to
govern for his nephew, Edward's son Affonso. From 1436 till 1441 he did
not seriously turn