They were ready to begin their career as explorers.
In the year 1415, Prince Henry, known as Henry the
Navigator, the son of John I of Portugal and Philippa, the
daughter of John of Gaunt (about whom you can read in
Richard II, a play by William Shakespeare) began to make
preparations for the systematic exploration of northwestern
Africa. Before this, that hot and sandy coast had been visited
by the Phoenicians and by the Norsemen, who remembered it
as the home of the hairy ``wild man'' whom we have come to
know as the gorilla. One after another, Prince Henry
and his captains discovered the Canary Islands--re-discovered
the island of Madeira which a century before had been visited
by a Genoese ship, carefully charted the Azores which had
been vaguely known to both the Portuguese and the Spaniards,
and caught a glimpse 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.
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