impse of the mouth of the Senegal River on the west coast of Africa,
which they supposed to be the western mouth of the Nile. At last, by the
middle of the Fifteenth Century, they saw Cape Verde, or the Green Cape,
and the Cape Verde Islands, which lie almost halfway between the coast
of Africa and Brazil.

But Henry did not restrict himself in his investigations to the waters
of the Ocean. He was Grand Master of the Order of Christ. This was a
Portuguese continuation of the crusading order of the Templars which had
been abolished by Pope Clement V in the year 1312 at the request of King
Philip the Fair of France, who had improved the occasion by burning his
own Templars at the stake and stealing all their possessions. Prince
Henry used the revenues of the domains of his religious order to equip
several expeditions which explored the hinterland of the Sahara and of
the coast of Guinea.

But he was still very much a son of the Middle Ages and spent a great
deal of time and wasted a lot of money upon a search for the mysterious
"Presser John," the mythical Christian Priest who was said to be the
Emperor of a vast empire "situated somewhere in the east." The story of
this strange potentate had first been told in Europe in the middle of
the twelfth century. For three hundred years people had tried to find
"Presser John" and his descendants Henry took part in the search. Thirty
years after his death, the riddle was solved.

In the year 1486 Bartholomew Diaz, trying to find the land of Prester
John by sea, had reached the southernmost point of Africa. At first
he called it the Storm Cape, on account of the strong winds which had
prevented him from continuing his voyage toward the east, but the Lisbon
pilots who understood the importance of this discovery in their quest
for the India water route, changed the name into that of the Cape of
Good Hope.

One year later, Pedro de Covilham, provided with letters of credit on
the house of Medici, started upon a similar mission by land. He crossed
the Mediterranean and after leaving Egypt, he travelled southward.
He reached Aden, and from there, travelling through the waters of the
Persian Gulf which few white men had seen since the days of Alexander
the Great, eighteen centuries before, he visited Goa and Calicut on the
coast of India where he got a great deal of news about the island of the
Moon (Madagascar) which was supposed to lie halfway between Africa and
India. Then he retu