Prince Henry the Navigator

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This article is about the Portuguese prince. For the Dutch prince, see Prince William Frederick Henry of the Netherlands.
Prince Henry the Navigator
Duke of Viseu
Henry the Navigator1.jpg
Infante Henrique; St. Vincent Panels[a]
Born (1394-03-04)4 March 1394
Porto, Portugal
Died 13 November 1460(1460-11-13) (aged 66)
Sagres, Portugal
Burial Batalha Monastery
House Aviz
Father John I of Portugal
Mother Philippa of Lancaster
Religion Roman Catholicism

Infante Henrique of Portugal, Duke of Viseu (4 March 1394 – 13 November 1460), better known as Prince Henry the Navigator (Portuguese: Infante Dom Henrique, o Navegador), was an important figure in 15th-century Portuguese politics and in the early days of the Portuguese Empire. Through his administrative direction, he is regarded as the main initiator of what would be known as the Age of Discoveries. Henry was the third[1] child of the Portuguese king John I and responsible for the early development of Portuguese exploration and maritime trade with other continents through the systematic exploration of Western Africa, the islands of the Atlantic Ocean, and the search for new routes.

King John I was the founder of the House of Aviz. Henry encouraged his father to conquer Ceuta (1415), the Muslim port on the North African coast across the Straits of Gibraltar from the Iberian Peninsula. He learned of the opportunities from the Saharan trade routes that terminated there, and became fascinated with Africa in general; he was most intrigued by the Christian legend of Prester John and the expansion of Portuguese trade. Henry is regarded as the patron of Portuguese exploration.


Frontispiece of Zurara's Crónicas dos Feitos de Guiné (Paris codex), with the phrase talent de bien faire ("the talent of doing well" or "Hunger for good deeds") and the pyramids, of Prince Henry's motto. It has been argued that the image inserted portrays his brother, King Duarte, rather than Henry. The empresa or divisa placed below is Henry's motto. According to Friar Luis de Sousa, based on papers of Henry`s contemporary chronicler Gomes Eanes de Zurara, and other 15th-century documents, Henry's pyramids represented the pyramids of Egypt, at Giza, and at the top of his pyramids was a golden Sun.

Henry was the third surviving son of King John I and his wife Philippa,[2] sister of King Henry IV of England. He was baptized in Porto, and may have been born there, probably when the royal couple was living in the city's old mint, now called Casa do Infante (Prince's House), or in the region nearby. Another possibility is that he was born at the Monastery of Leça do Bailio, in Leça da Palmeira, during the same residential passage of the royal couple in the city of Porto.

Henry was 21 when he and his father and brothers captured the Moorish port of Ceuta in northern Morocco. Ceuta had long been a base for Barbary pirates who raided the Portuguese coast, depopulating villages by capturing their inhabitants to be sold in the African slave market. Following this success, Henry started to explore the coast of Africa, most of which was unknown to Europeans. His objectives included finding the source of the West African gold trade and the legendary Christian kingdom of Prester John, and stopping the pirate attacks on the Portuguese coast. At that time the ships of the Mediterranean were too slow and too heavy to make these voyages. Under his direction, a new and much lighter ship was developed, the caravel, which could sail further and faster,[3] and, above all, was highly maneuverable and could sail much nearer the wind, or "into the wind". This made the caravel largely independent of the prevailing winds. With the caravel, Portuguese mariner explored the shallow waters and rivers as well as the open ocean with wide autonomy. In 1419, Henry's father appointed him governor of the province of the Algarve.

Resources and income[edit]

On 25 May 1420, Henry gained appointment as the Grand Master of the Military Order of Christ, the Portuguese successor to the Knights Templar, which had its headquarters at Tomar, in central Portugal.[4] Henry held this position for the remainder of his life, and the Order was an important source of funds for Henry's ambitious plans, especially his persistent attempts to conquer the Canary Islands, which the Portuguese had claimed to have discovered before the year 1346.

In 1425, his second brother the Infante Peter, Duke of Coimbra, made a tour of Europe. While largely a diplomatic mission, among his goals was to seek out geographic material for his brother Henry. Peter returned from Venice with a current world map drafted by a Venetian cartographer.[5]

In 1431 he donated houses for the Estudo Geral to reunite all the sciences — grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, music, and astronomy — into what would later become the University of Lisbon. For other subjects like medicine or philosophy, he ordered that each room should be decorated according to each subject that was being taught.

Henry also had other resources. When John I died in 1433, Henry's eldest brother Edward became king. He granted Henry all profits from trading within the areas he discovered as well as the sole right to authorize expeditions beyond Cape Bojador. Henry also held a monopoly on tuna fishing in the Algarve. When Edward died eight years later, Henry supported his brother Peter for the regency during the minority of Edward's son Afonso V, and in return received a confirmation of this levy.

Henry functioned as a primary organizer of the disastrous expedition to Tangier in 1437. Henry's younger brother Ferdinand was given as a hostage to guarantee that the Portuguese would fulfill the terms of the peace agreement that had been made with Çala Ben Çala. The Portuguese Cortes refused to approve the return of Ceuta in exchange for the Infante Ferdinand who remained in captivity until his death six years later.

Prince Regent Peter had an important role and responsibility in the Portuguese maritime expansion in the Atlantic Ocean and Africa during his administration. Henry promoted the colonization of the Azores during Peter's regency (1439–1448).

For most of the latter part of his life, Henry concentrated on his maritime activities, or on Portuguese court politics.

Vila do Infante and Portuguese exploration[edit]


According to João de Barros, in the Algarve he repopulated a village that he called Terçanabal (from terça nabal or tercena nabal).[6] This village was situated in a strategic position for his maritime enterprises and was later called Vila do Infante ("Estate or Town of the Prince").

It is traditionally suggested that Henry gathered at his villa on the Sagres peninsula a school of navigators and map-makers. However modern historians hold this to be a misconception. He did employ some cartographers to chart the coast of Mauritania after the voyages he sent there, but there was no center of navigation science or observatory in the modern sense of the word, nor was there an organized navigational center.[7]

Referring to Sagres, sixteenth-century Portuguese mathematician and cosmographer Pedro Nunes remarked, "from it our sailors went out well taught and provided with instruments and rules which all map makers and navigators should know."[8]

The view that Henry's court rapidly grew into the technological base for exploration, with a naval arsenal and an observatory, etc., although repeated in popular culture, has never been established.[9][10][11] Henry did possess geographical curiosity, and employed cartographers. Jehuda Cresques, a noted cartographer, has been said to have accepted an invitation to come to Portugal to make maps for the infante. This last incident probably accounts for the legend of the School of Sagres, which is now discredited.[4]

The first contacts with the African slave market were made by expeditions to ransom Portuguese subjects enslaved by pirate attacks on Portuguese ships or villages. As Sir Peter Russell remarks in his biography, "In Henryspeak, conversion and enslavement were interchangeable terms."[12]

Henry's explorers[edit]

Henry's tomb in the Monastery of Batalha

Henry sponsored voyages, collecting a 20% tax (o quinto) on the profits made by naval expeditions, which was the usual practice in the Iberian states of that time. The nearby port of Lagos provided a convenient harbor from which these expeditions left. The voyages were made in very small ships, mostly the caravel, a light and maneuverable vessel. The caravel used the lateen sail, the prevailing rig in Christian Mediterranean navigation since late antiquity.[13] Most of the voyages sent out by Henry consisted of one or two ships that navigated by following the coast, stopping at night to tie up along some shore.

During Prince Henry's time and after, the Portuguese navigators discovered and perfected the North Atlantic Volta do Mar (the "turn of the sea" or "return from the sea"). This was a major step in the history of navigation, when an understanding of oceanic wind patterns was crucial to Atlantic navigation, from Africa and the open ocean to Europe, and enabling the main route between the New World and Europe in the North Atlantic, in future voyages of discovery. Understanding the Atlantic gyre and the volta do mar enabled Portuguese mariners who sailed south and southwest towards the Canary Islands and West Africa to beat upwind to the Strait of Gibraltar and home. To do this, they first had to sail far to the west — that is, away from continental Portugal, and seemingly in the wrong direction. They could then turn northeast, to the area around the Azores islands, and finally east to Europe. This route would catch usable following winds. Christopher Columbus used it on his transatlantic voyages.


The first explorations followed not long after the capture of Ceuta in 1415. Henry was interested in locating the source of the caravans that brought gold to the city. During the reign of his father, John I, João Gonçalves Zarco and Tristão Vaz Teixeira were sent to explore along the African coast. Zarco, a knight in service to Prince Henry, had commanded the caravels guarding the coast of Algarve from the incursions of the Moors. He had also been at Ceuta.

In 1418, Zarco and Teixeira were blown off-course by a storm while making the volta do mar westward swing to return to Portugal. They found shelter at an island they named Porto Santo. Henry directed that Porto Santo be colonized. The move to claim the Madeiran islands was probably a response to Castile's efforts to claim the Canary Islands.[14] In 1420, settlers then moved to the nearby island of Madeira.

The Azores[edit]

A chart drawn by the Catalan cartographer, Gabriel de Vallseca of Mallorca, has been interpreted to indicate that the Azores were first discovered by Diogo de Silves in 1427. In 1431, Gonçalo Velho was dispatched with orders to determine the location of "islands" first identified by de Silves. Velho apparently got a far as the Formigas, in the eastern archipelago, before having to return to Sagres, probably due to bad weather.

By this time the Portuguese navigators had also reached the Sargasso Sea (western North Atlantic region), naming it after the Sargassum seaweed growing there (sargaço / sargasso in Portuguese).[15][16]

West African coast[edit]

Until Henry's time, Cape Bojador remained the most southerly point known to Europeans on the desert coast of Africa. Superstitious seafarers held that beyond the cape lay sea monsters and the edge of the world. In 1434, Gil Eanes, the commander of one of Henry's expeditions, became the first European known to pass Cape Bojador.

Henry the Navigator bronze by Léon-Joseph Chavalliaud (1899), outside the Palm House at Sefton Park, Liverpool (in appearance similar to the sculpture of the beginning of the 16th century, in the Jerónimos Monastery, Lisbon, possibly close to the true likeness of Prince Henry)

Using the new ship type, the expeditions then pushed onwards. Nuno Tristão and Antão Gonçalves reached Cape Blanco in 1441. The Portuguese sighted the Bay of Arguin in 1443 and built an important fort there around the year 1448. Dinis Dias soon came across the Senegal River and rounded the peninsula of Cap-Vert in 1444. By this stage the explorers had passed the southern boundary of the desert, and from then on Henry had one of his wishes fulfilled: the Portuguese had circumvented the Muslim land-based trade routes across the western Sahara Desert, and slaves and gold began arriving in Portugal. By 1452, the influx of gold permitted the minting of Portugal's first gold cruzado coins. A cruzado was equal to 400 reis at the time. From 1444 to 1446, as many as forty vessels sailed from Lagos on Henry's behalf, and the first private mercantile expeditions began.

Alvise Cadamosto explored the Atlantic coast of Africa and discovered several islands of the Cape Verde archipelago between 1455 and 1456. In his first voyage, which started on 22 March 1455, he visited the Madeira Islands and the Canary Islands. On the second voyage, in 1456, Cadamosto became the first European to reach the Cape Verde Islands. António Noli later claimed the credit. By 1462, the Portuguese had explored the coast of Africa as far as present-day Sierra Leone. Twenty-eight years later, Bartolomeu Dias proved that Africa could be circumnavigated when he reached the southern tip of the continent, now known as the "Cape of Good Hope." In 1498, Vasco da Gama became the first European sailor to reach India by sea.

Origin of the 'Navigator' nickname[edit]

No one used the nickname 'Navigator' to refer to prince Henry during his lifetime or in the following three centuries. The term was coined by two nineteenth-century German historians: Heinrich Schaefer and Gustave de Veer. Later on it was made popular by two British authors who included it in the titles of their biographies of the prince: Henry Major in 1868 and Raymond Beazley in 1895.[7] In Portuguese, even in modern times, it is uncommon to call him by this epithet; the preferred use is "Infante D. Henrique".[citation needed]



See also[edit]


  1. ^ The traditional image of the Prince presented in this page, and coming from the Saint Vincent Panels, is still under dispute.
  1. ^ Bulliet, Richard W. The Earth and Its Peoples: A Global History. Boston: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2011. Print.
  2. ^ "Prince Henry the Navigator", The Mariners' Museum
  4. ^ a b Prestage, Edgar. "Prince Henry the Navigator." The Catholic Encyclopedia Vol. 7. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1910. 23 May 2015
  5. ^ Rush, Timothy. "Prince Henry the Navigator and the Apollo Project that Launched Columbus", 21st Century, summer, 1992
  6. ^ Bluteau, Rafael (1721). Vocabulario portuguez & latino ... Lisbon: na officina de Pascoal da Sylva. p. 109. 
  7. ^ a b Randles, W.G.L. "The alleged nautical school founded in the fifteenth century at Sagres by Prince Henry of Portugal called the 'Navigator'". Imago Mundi, vol. 45 (1993), pp 20–28.
  8. ^ Mark, Hans. "Henry the Navigator and the Early Days of Exploration", American Association for the Advancement of Science, Annual meeting, February 1992
  9. ^ Marques, Alfredo Pinheiro (2005). "Os Descobrimentos e o 'Atlas Miller'" (in Portuguese). Universidade de Coimbra. , p.52
  10. ^ Rocha, Daniel (8 February 2009). "Brasil: historiador nega existência da Escola de Sagres". Público. Retrieved 16 October 2013. 
  11. ^ de Albuquerque, Luís (1990). Dúvidas e Certezas na História dos Descobrimentos Portugueses. Lisboa. pp. 15–27. 
  12. ^ Russell, P. E (2000-01-01). Prince Henry "the Navigator": a life. New Haven: Yale University Press. p. 84. ISBN 0300082339. 
  13. ^ Castro et al. 2008, p. 2
  14. ^ Fernandez-Armesto, Felipe. 1492: The Year Our World Began. ISBN 1-4088-0950-8
  15. ^
  16. ^ "The Sargasso Sea". BBC – Homepage. BBC. Retrieved 6 June 2011. 


Henry the Navigator
Cadet branch of the House of Burgundy
Born: 4 March 1394 Died: 13 November 1460
Portuguese royalty
New title Duke of Viseu
Succeeded by
Military offices
Preceded by
Nuno Rodrigues
Grand Master of the Order of Christ
Title next held by