ages." And so
when the great leader was dead, and the people were left to carry out
his will, his spiritual foresight of great scientific discoveries, his
ideas of conversion and civilisation, were not the things for the sake
of which ordinary men were reconciled to his scheme and ready to finish
his work. If they thought or spoke or toiled for the finding of the way
to India, it was to find the gold and spices and jewels of an earthly
paradise.

This is not fancy. It is simply impossible to draw any other conclusion
from the original accounts of these voyages in Azurara's chronicle, for
Azurara himself, though one of Henry's first converts, a man who
realised something of the grandeur of his master's schemes and their
reach beyond a merely commercial ideal through discovery to empire, yet
preserves in the speeches and actions of captains and seamen alike,
proof enough of the thoroughly commonplace aims of most of the first
discoverers.

On the other hand, the strength of the movement lay of course in the few
exceptions. As long as all or nearly all the instruments employed were
simply buccaneers, with a single eye to trade profits, discovery could
not advance very fast or very far. Till the real meaning of the Prince's
life had impressed his nearest followers with something of his own
spirit, there could be no exploration, except by accident, though
without this background of material gain no national interest could have
been enlisted in exploration at all.

Real progress in this case was by the slow increase of that inner circle
which really shared Henry's own ambition, of that group of men who went
out, not to make bargains or do a little killing, but to carry the flag
of Portugal and of Christ farther than it had ever been planted before,
"according to the will of the Lord Infant." And as these men were called
to the front, and only as they were there at all, was there any rapid
advance. If two sailors, Diego Cam and Bartholomew Diaz, could within
four years, in two voyages, explore the whole south-west coast of Africa
from the Equator to the Cape of Tempests or of Good Hope, was it not
absurd that the earlier caravels, after Bojador was once passed should
hang so many years round the north-west shores of the Sahara?

Even some of the more genuine discoverers, the most trusted of the
Prince's household, men like Gil Eannes, the first who saw the coasts
beyond the terrible Bojador, or Diniz Diaz, or Antam Gonsalv