Henry the Navigator dies at Sagres, 13 November 1460

On 28 October 1460 an old prince signed his will on a bare headland at the south-western tip of Portugal. It ended with the words, here translated from Portuguese, “signed by me and sealed with the seal of my arms, made in my town of the Infante”. The town was his own creation: a walled settlement on the Sagres promontory, a few kilometres from Cape St Vincent, where ships rounding the corner of Europe could shelter.3 sources3 sources

Infante Henrique was 66. He had been ill, and sixteen days later he was dead. Diogo Gomes, a sea captain who had sailed to West Africa in his service and seems to have attended him in his last illness, left a short account of what happened next.3 sources3 sources

The English-speaking world knows him as Henry the Navigator, the prince who sat at Sagres with his charts and sent caravels into the unknown. Most of that picture was added after his death. The real man was a crusading nobleman, a businessman with monopolies and debts, and the patron of the first Portuguese slave raids in Africa.2 sources2 sources

Henrique was born in Porto on 4 March 1394, the fourth son of King João I and his English queen, Philippa of Lancaster. His father was the hero of Aljubarrota, the battle of 1385 that secured his crown against Castile after the succession crisis that followed King Fernando's death in 1383.3 sources3 sources

Gomes Eanes de Zurara, the royal chronicler who wrote his life while he was still alive, described a man of good height and strong build whose fair skin had darkened in the sun, who never married, gave up wine and spent nearly half the year fasting. Zurara admired him without reserve. He was writing for Henrique's nephew, King Afonso V, and finished his Chronicle of Guinea in the royal library on 18 February 1453.1 source1 source

Henrique's career began in war. On 21 August 1415 a Portuguese fleet took Ceuta, a Muslim port on the African side of the Strait of Gibraltar. Zurara says Henrique commanded a large part of the fleet, fought for five hours and saw his banner go first through the gates; his father knighted him there on the day the city's new cathedral was consecrated. Three years later he sailed back to relieve Ceuta from a siege, and he went on governing it for the crown for 35 years.1 source1 source

Ceuta brought prestige rather than profit. Running it was costly, and the caravan trade simply went elsewhere. In 1437 Henrique pressed for a second conquest, Tangier, and led the army that besieged it for 22 days. The attack failed. His younger brother Fernando was left as a hostage, and because Henrique refused to hand back Ceuta in exchange, Fernando died a prisoner in Morocco in 1443.3 sources3 sources

Zurara listed five reasons why Henrique sent ships south along Africa: to know what lay beyond Cape Bojador, to find Christians to trade with, to measure the strength of the Moors, to look for a Christian ally against them, and to save souls. He then added a sixth, which he called the root of the others: Henrique's horoscope. His ascendant was Aries, the chronicler wrote, which inclined him to “seeking out things that were hidden from other men”.2 sources2 sources

His own sea journeys, as far as the record goes, were all to Morocco: Ceuta in 1415 and 1418, Tangier in 1437, and at 64 the capture of Alcácer Ceguer with Afonso V in 1458. None of them was a voyage of discovery.3 sources3 sources

Ships cost money, and Henrique found much of it in the Church. In 1420 Pope Martin V made him administrator of the Order of Christ, the military order that had inherited the Portuguese property of the Templars, in bulls dated 25 May and 24 November 1420. Its revenues were meant for the fight against the infidel. Henrique gave the Order the church revenues of the new islands and built two cloisters at its mother convent.3 sources3 sources

The islands came first. Between about 1418 and 1420 two of his captains, João Gonçalves Zarco and Tristão Vaz Teixeira, reached Porto Santo and Madeira. The dates are disputed: Zurara wavers between 1418 and 1419, while a letter of Henrique's from 1460 implies that settlement began 35 years earlier, in 1425. The documents of 1419 to 1425 speak of settling, never of discovering, and an island called Legname, “wood”, already appears on fourteenth-century charts.2 sources2 sources

By the time Zurara wrote, Madeira was sending Portugal wheat, sugar, wax, honey and timber. Henrique granted it out in captaincies: Machico to Tristão Vaz Teixeira in 1440, Porto Santo to Bartolomeu Perestrelo in 1446 and Funchal to Zarco in 1450. A royal pilot seems to have been sent to the Azores in 1427, and Gonçalo Velho Cabral explored there in 1431 and 1432. On 2 July 1439 Afonso V licensed Henrique to people the seven islands then known.3 sources3 sources

Henrique also held monopolies, from soap-making to the right to license every voyage south of Bojador. Even so, his spending outran his income. In 1448 he owed his half-brother, the Duke of Braganza, 19,394½ gold crowns, secured on his lands, and the debt later grew by 16,084 crowns. His heirs were still paying it off after his death.2 sources2 sources

Cape Bojador, on the coast of what is now Western Sahara, was the limit of known sailing. For twelve years Henrique's captains turned back before it, frightened by stories of currents and shoals. In 1433 he sent Gil Eanes, a squire from Lagos, who got only as far as the Canaries. The next year Henrique sent him again with orders to pass the cape, whatever else he did.2 sources2 sources

In 1434 Gil Eanes doubled the cape. He landed, found no people, and brought back a handful of plants that the Portuguese called roses of Saint Mary. Then Eanes and Afonso Gonçalves Baldaia sailed 50 leagues beyond the cape and saw tracks of men and camels, and on a further voyage Baldaia went 120 leagues past it, to the inlet the Portuguese called the Rio do Ouro. Beazley dates these voyages to 1435 and 1436. Later surveys found no unusual reefs or currents at Bojador. What had held sailors back was fear and the lack of any reason to go.2 sources2 sources

Past Bojador there was little gold, but there were people. In 1441 one of Henrique's captains, Antão Gonçalves, brought the first captives and gold dust home from beyond the cape. In 1444 Lançarote, a squire raised in Henrique's household who was now the king's tax collector at Lagos, was the first to ask the prince for a licence, since no one could sail there without one. He led six armed caravels from the town. They came back with 235 captives. Lançarote reminded the prince that he was owed a fifth of everything, and proposed that the captives be taken ashore at dawn to a field outside the town gate and divided there.2 sources2 sources

On 8 August, early because of the heat, the sailors brought them out. Crowds came from the town and the villages around to watch. Zurara broke off his narrative with a prayer: it was the captives' humanity, not their religion, he wrote, that made him weep.1 source1 source

Mothers clutched their children and threw themselves on the ground, taking blows rather than be parted. Henrique watched on horseback with his retinue and took his fifth, 46 people, which he quickly gave away. Zurara praised him for caring more about the captives' souls than about profit. He also wrote that the families were split up afterwards, a father staying in Lagos, a mother sold to Lisbon and the children somewhere else.2 sources2 sources

Zurara ended his chronicle in 1448 with a total of 927 captives, most of whom, he claimed, became Christians. After that year, he wrote, the business of these parts was carried on “more by trafficking and bargaining of merchants than by bravery and toil in arms”. A trading fort went up on the island of Arguin in 1448. In 1455 the papal bull Romanus Pontifex confirmed the exclusive right of Portugal, and of Henrique, to sail south of Cape Bojador.2 sources2 sources

The medieval Mediterranean had long known slave markets, run above all by Genoese merchants. What changed at Lagos was the source and the scale: a sea route to West Africa, licensed and taxed by a prince. For that reason historians such as Peter Russell, Henrique's most thorough modern biographer, count him a founder of the Atlantic slave trade.1 source1 source

Henrique did build at Sagres, but late. The fortress's own history dates the grant from his brother Pedro, then regent, to 1443. When Zurara wrote ten years later the place had strong walls and a few houses, and work was still going on. He described it as a port for merchants, where ships passing between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic could take bearings, provisions and pilots. The Genoese, he heard, had offered a good price for it.2 sources2 sources

Over the following centuries the town grew in the telling. What C. R. Beazley, who edited Zurara for the Hakluyt Society in 1899, called the older view rested mainly on the sixteenth-century historian João de Barros and was taken up by nineteenth-century writers such as Richard Henry Major and Oliveira Martins. It placed Henrique at Sagres from 1418, with a palace, a chapel, a study, the first observatory in Portugal, an arsenal and a dockyard, where cartography and astronomy were taught to pilots. Beazley himself called pictures of a geographical university on the headland “quite beyond any known means of verification”.1 source1 source

The tradition rests on thin evidence. Barros wrote that Henrique brought a Master Jacome from Majorca, skilled in navigation and the making of maps and instruments, to teach Portuguese pilots. That would be a hired specialist, not a school, and the passage does not mention Sagres; Russell doubts the Jacome story too. Many of the voyages sailed from Lagos, where the captains landed their cargoes and whose townsmen were the first to ask Henrique for licences.3 sources3 sources

Today the Sagres fortress itself says only a few traces go back to the Infante's town: stretches of a zigzag wall, a cistern tower, the foundations of a windbreak and the stone wind rose. The bastioned walls were remodelled in the late eighteenth century, and the suggestion that a reconstructed building marks the site of Henrique's house is, in the guide's words, “sem fundamento”, without foundation.1 source1 source

Henrique died at the Vila do Infante on 13 November 1460. That is what the Sagres fortress and Diogo Gomes say; a Portuguese Navy commemoration gives Lagos instead. His body was taken that same night to the church of Santa Maria in Lagos and buried there.3 sources3 sources

He had no children. Before the Tangier campaign he had adopted his nephew Fernando, a younger son of King Duarte, who inherited most of his lands and offices and succeeded him at the head of the Order of Christ. Fernando, and later Fernando's son Manuel, were left to settle the debts.2 sources2 sources

His remains were later moved to the Monastery of Santa Maria da Vitória at Batalha, which his father had begun in 1387, two years after Aljubarrota. There he lies in the Founder's Chapel, the square hall João I began around 1415 as a pantheon for himself, his queen and their sons. Master Huguet finished it in 1435.2 sources2 sources

His parents share the tomb in the centre of the chapel. Along the south wall, under carved arches, are four of their sons: Fernando, the hostage of Tangier; João; Henrique; and Pedro, the regent who had granted him Sagres and who was killed in 1449 at Alfarrobeira fighting the army of Afonso V, the side Henrique took.4 sources4 sources

The chapel has not come down untouched. Its tall spire collapsed in the earthquake of 1755, and when religious orders were abolished in 1834 and the Dominican friars left, it was stripped of everything used for worship. In the late nineteenth century three neo-Gothic tombs were added on the west wall for Afonso V, João II and Prince Afonso.1 source1 source

Portuguese nationalism later turned Henrique into a visionary man of science, and the Estado Novo dictatorship made the most of him. For the 500th anniversary of his death the Padrão dos Descobrimentos, first put up in plaster for the regime's 1940 Exposição do Mundo Português, was rebuilt in concrete and stone. Its designers were the architect Cottinelli Telmo and the sculptor Leopoldo de Almeida; Cottinelli had died in 1948, and the rebuilding followed his design under António Pardal Monteiro. The new monument was inaugurated on 9 August 1960.2 sources2 sources

The Padrão is 56 metres tall. A nine-metre Henrique stands at the prow of a stylised caravel, followed by 32 other figures, each about seven metres tall. The Portuguese Navy took his motto, talant de bien faire, “the will to do well”, as its own, and in 1936 made him the first patron of the Naval School's courses.2 sources2 sources

Lagos tells a different part of the story. In 2009, digging for an underground car park outside the old walls at Vale da Gafaria, archaeologists found more than 150 human skeletons in an early modern rubbish dump. Studies showed they were Africans brought to Lagos as merchandise, sick or dying, and thrown away with the town's refuse. The town museum now has a section on the slave route in the building on the Praça do Infante known as the slave market.1 source1 source

The two places hold the two halves of the same record. The Padrão celebrates the voyages Henrique paid for. The Lagos museum remembers the people his captains brought back, starting with the 235 divided in the field outside the town gate in 1444.3 sources3 sources