Inspiration of discovery

Press, 12 November 1977, Page 17

Inspiration of discovery

Prince Henry the Navigator. By John Ure. Constable. 192 pp. Bibliography and index. $12.05. (Reviewed by Naylor Hillary)

In a remote way, New Zealand owes its existence as a partlyEuropean country to a fifteenthcentury Portuguese prince who prodded and cajoled a generation of European seamen to set out on voyages that led, a little later, to the Far East and the South Pacific. John Ure, a British diplomat in Portugal during the recent dissolution of the empire begun by Prince Henry the Navigator in the North African port of Ceuta in 1415 (the year of Agincourt), has puzzled out the curious personality of a man who has been claimed by historians as the last of the medieval knights errant, and as the first of the Renaissance Machiavellians.

As Mr Ure sees him, Prince Henry cannot be understood unless due account is taken of his fire as a medieval crusader for Christendom, intent on fighting infidels and converting heathens. Hence the voyages he promoted in search of people to convert beyond the reach of Islam in West Africa and the Atlantic islands.

But the voyages generated their own new rewards for the crusading Prince. Portuguese trade boomed; slave markets reappeared in southern Europe, justified at the time by the opportunities they gave for the salvation of souls. Although Prince Henry himself was to die in debt in 1460, the enterprises he supported created a new class of wealthy Portuguese captains and merchants who were to press on until, 26 years after the Prince’s death, they rounded the Cape of Good Hope and found a sea road to the wealth of the East Indies.

Perhaps most remarkable of all was the curious private “court” Prince Henry maintained at Sagres, a rocky, windswept promontory jutting into the Atlantic. There he contemplated the ocean and undertook studies in navigation, cartography, and ship design in which he demonstrated the

characteristics of an empirical Renaissance thinker. Although he made no voyage of discovery himself, Prince Henry at Sagres acted as a clearing house for the knowledge and experience of those who did.

To later ages he has sometimes been seen as a symbol of scientific endeavour, as a shrewd Christian strategist, or as a symbol of Portuguese colonial achievement. He was all these things. Twin influences — a courtly upbringing and a zest for discovery — . were adapted into harmony with his profound Christian faith. Something of the Knights Templar lived on in Prince Henry. John Ure sums him up in this fine biography: “The flame of his intense personality, for all its muddled, mystic motivation, was yet to prove fierce enough to kindle the furnace of European exploration which was to burn for four centuries to come.”