ss.]

By Judge ALBION W. TOURGEE

(1460-1525)

[Illustration: Vasco Da Gama.]

Vasco da Gama was the pet of fortune. Never did a man win immortality
more easily. As a discoverer and a navigator he should rank not only
below Columbus, but also below Bartolemeo Diaz and Cabral among his own
countrymen, as well as Vespucius and Magellan, who carried the Spanish
flag, and the Cabots, who established England's claim to the most
important portions of the New World. As a commander, an administrator,
and ruler of newly discovered regions, however, he ranks easily above
them all. He not only led the way to India, but laid securely the
foundations of Portuguese empire in the East.

Even in the hour of his birth he was fortunate. Prince Henry, surnamed
"the Navigator," to whose indefatigable exertions for more than forty
years was due that impulse to maritime achievement of which the
discoveries of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were the result,
had just died, and his influence hung like an inspiration over the
little kingdom for which he had wrought with such self-denying
patience. This grandson of John of Gaunt has received scant credit for
that wonderful series of discoveries by which the accessible earth was
more than quadrupled in extent. Yet without him, there is no reason to
believe that either the coast of Africa would have been explored, the
Cape of Good Hope passed, or the American continents discovered for a
century, at least, perhaps for two or three centuries afterward. He was
the father of discovery, and it was his hand more than any or all others
that rolled up the curtain of darkness which hid the major part of the
habitable globe. All the navigators and discoverers of that marvellous
age were but the agents of his genius and the creatures of his
indefatigable exertion.

The son of the most noted sovereign of Portugal, and grandson of that
rugged Englishman from whose loins have sprung so many royal lines, he
was fitted by descent and training for the heroic part which he
performed. Distinguished for military achievement before he had come to
man's estate, urged by four of the leading sovereigns of Europe to take
command of their armies, and made Grand Master of the Order of Christ
before he was twenty-five, there is hardly any limit to the military
distinction he might have won or the power he might have secured, had he
sought his own advancement.

But he gave himself to Portugal, and determined