all
green, peopled with men and cattle, but when they tried to near the
shore and land a storm drove them back. For three days they struggled
against it, but at last they found themselves near Cape Blanco, more
than three hundred miles to the north, where they gave up all thought of
trying to push into the unknown south, and turned cheerfully to their
easier work of slave-hunting. In one of these raids, a party of seven,
in a boat away from all the rest, was overpowered and killed like De
Cintra's men by a large body of natives, "whose souls may God in His
mercy receive in the Habitation of the Saints." The Moors carried off
the boat and broke it up for the sake of its nails, and Azurara was told
by some that the bodies of the dead were eaten by their brutal
conquerors. 'T is certain at least, he adds, that their custom is to eat
the livers of their victims and to drink their blood, when they are
avenging the death of parents or brothers or children, as they do it to
have full vengeance on such as have so greatly injured them.

CHAPTER XIII.

THE ARMADA OF 1445.

While Gonsalo Pacheco had been wasting time and men and the good name of
Europe and Christendom in his plunderings between C. Bojador and C.
Blanco, the memory of the death of Gonsalo de Cintra was kept alive in
Lagos, and the men of the town came in solemn deputation to the Prince,
before the summer of this same year (1445) was out, to beg him for
permission to take full, perfect, and sufficient vengeance. In other
words, they offered to equip the largest fleet that had ever sailed on
an ocean voyage--as it now began to be called, a Guinea voyage--since
the Prince began his work. As far as we know, this was also one of the
greatest armadas that had been sent out into the new-discovered or
re-discovered or undiscovered seas and lands since the European nations
had begun to look at all beyond their own narrow limits.

Neither the fleet of 1341, which found the Canaries, and of which
Boccaccio tells us, nor the Genoese expedition of 1291, nor the Catalan
venture of 1346, nor De Bethencourt's armament of 1402, for the
conquest of the Fortunate Isles, was anything like this armada of 1445.
For this last was a real sign of national interest in a work which was
not only discovery, but profit and a means to more; it proved that in
Portugal, in however base and narrowly selfish a way, there was now a
spirit of general enterprising activity, and till this ha