prisoner, "very well vested in the
robes that the Infant had ordered to be given him," under promise that
he would soon come back and bring his tribe with him.

"But as soon as he got safely off, he very soon forgot his promises,
which Antam Gonsalvez had trusted, thinking that his nobility would
hold him fast and not let him break his word, but by this deceit all our
men got warning that they could not trust any of the natives save under
the most certain security."

The ships now went twelve miles up the Rio d'Ouro, cast anchor, and
waited seven days without a sign of anybody, but on the eighth there
came a Moor, on top of a white camel, with fully one hundred others who
had all joined to ransom the two boys. Ten of the tribe were given in
exchange for the young chiefs, "and the man who managed this barter was
one Martin Fernandez, the Infant's own Ransomer of Captives, who shewed
well that he had knowledge of the Moorish tongue, for he was understood
by those people whom Nuno Tristam's Arab, Moor though he was by nation,
could not possibly get speech with, except only the one chief, who had
now escaped."

With the "Blackamoors," Antam Gonsalvez got as ransom what was even more
precious, a little gold dust, the first ever brought by Europeans direct
from the Guinea Coast, which more thoroughly won the Prince's cause at
home and brought over more enemies and scoffers and indifferentists to
his side than all the discoveries in the world.

"Many ostrich eggs, too," were included in the native ransom, "such that
one day men saw at the Infant's table three dishes of the same, as fresh
and as good as those of any other domestic fowls." Did the Court of
Sagres suppose the ostrich to be some large kind of hen?

What was still more to the Prince's mind, "those same Moors related,
that in those parts there were merchants who trafficked in that gold
that was found there among them"--the same merchants, in fact, whose
caravels Henry had already known on the Mediterranean coast, and whose
starting-point he had now begun to touch. Ever since the days of the
first Caliphs, this Sahara commerce had gone on under the control of
Islam; for centuries these caravans had crossed the valleys and plains
to the south of Morocco and sold their goods--pepper, slaves, and gold
dust--in Moslem Ceuta and Moslem Andalusia; now, after seven hundred
years of monopoly, this Moslem trade was broken in upon by the
Europeans, who, in fifty years' ti