The World Expands

I am standing inside the largest fortress I have ever seen. It is located outside the city of Sagres near a promontory called the Cape of St. Vincent. The fortress is over one mile in diameter.

Although Prince Henry the Navigator was neither a sailor nor a navigator, he sponsored a great deal of exploration along the west coast of Africa. Under his patronage, Portuguese crews founded the country's first colonies and visited regions previously unknown to Europeans. Henry is regarded as an originator of the Age of Discovery, and of the trade in African chattel slaves.

As a young man in 1415 he and his brothers participated in the attack on Ceuta, Morocco, making it a Portuguese colony. Henry became fascinated with Africa and financed exploratory voyages past the known limits of the world. Learning from fishermen here, already wise about West Africa, he moved to Sagres, and set up his operation in the harbor here. He ordered his ship masters to go beyond what Europeans considered to be the margins of the Earth, and thus disproved many of the myths sailors had believed about sailing over the edge of the world. His ships discoved the Canary Islands and the Madeiras.

Capitalizing on inter-tribal warfare in western Africa, tribal leaders assisted him in enslaving their enemies, initiating the African slave trade in Europe. Henry died in 1460 here in Sagres. By that time Portuguese explorers and traders had advanced as far as modern-day Sierra Leone. It would be another 28 years before Vasco da Gama, under the Portuguese flag, would sail clear around Africa and complete an expedition to India.

The knowledge of the African coast and the techniques to sail there were considered a Portuguese state secret. The value of this knowledge impelled construction of this huge fortress near Cape St. Vincent, and the smaller fort in the city of Sagres a few miles from here. The spice trade to India and the Far East became the major source for the creation of wealth in Europe for half a millennium. Before the invention of refrigeration, pepper was the primary means of preserving meat. Most of the European wars over the next three centuries would be fought to acquire colonies producing these luxuries—spices, pepper, tea, coffee, sugar, chocolate and rubber.

In that age of exploration the possession of one clove of nutmeg would buy an estate in England, and finance its upkeep and that of the owner for a lifetime. The British started making sailors’ uniforms without pockets, lest a sailor hide a purloined piece of nutmeg or saffron. British sailors’ uniforms are made without pockets to this day.

With such value placed on these commodities one can understand why the Portuguese guarded their early monopoly with a fortress one mile in diameter. Despite his lack of knowledge, his mistakes, and the moral judgment of later centuries, Prince Henry the Navigator more than doubled the size of the known world and turned the small kingdom of Portugal into a superpower of the sixteenth century.Read more