pposed discovery of Australia about 1530, or somewhat earlier, and
the travels of Ferdinand Mendez Pinto in Japan and the furthest East,
the opening of the trade with China in 1517, and the complete
exploration of Abyssinia, the Prester's kingdom, in 1520, by Alvarez and
the other Catholic missionaries, the millions converted by Francis
Xavier and the Jesuit preachers in Malabar, and the union of the old
native Christian Church of India with the Roman (1599), were other steps
in the same road. All of them, if traced back far enough, bring us to
the Court of Sagres, and the same is true of Spanish and French and
Dutch and English empires in the southern and eastern world. Henry built
for his own nation, but when that nation failed from the exhaustion of
its best blood, other peoples entered upon the inheritance of his work.

But though he was not able himself to see the fulfilment of his plans,
both the method of a South-east passage, and the men who followed it out
to complete success, were his,--his workmanship and his building.

Da Gama, Diego Cam, the Diaz family, and most of the great seamen who
followed the path they had traced, were either "brought up from boyhood
in the Household of the Infant," as the _Chronicle of the Discovery_
tells us of each new figure that comes upon the scene, or looked to him
as their master, owed to the School of Sagres their training, and began
their practical seamanship under his leave and protection. Even the
lines upon which the national expansion and exploration went on were so
strictly and exclusively the same as he had followed, that when a
different route to the Indies was suggested after his death by
Christopher Columbus, the Court of John II. refused to treat it
seriously. And this brings us to the other, the indirect side of Henry's
influence.

"It was in Portugal," (says Ferdinand Columbus, in his _Life of the
Admiral_, his father,) "that the Admiral began to think, that if men
could sail so far south, one might also sail west and find lands in that
quarter." The second great stream of modern discovery can thus be traced
to the "generous Henry" of Camoens' _Lusiads_ no less plainly, though
more indirectly, than the first; the Western path was suggested by his
success in the Eastern.

But that success had turned the heads of his own people. When Columbus,
the son of the Genoese wool-comber, who had been a resident in Lisbon
since 1470, submitted to the Court of John II. so