The First Wise Traveler to the West - The Wise World Traveler: Becoming a Part of All that You Meet - page 14

WHY THE PORTUGUESE?
As Ralph Waldo Emerson famously said, “An Institution is the lengthened shadow of but
one man.” [21] The institution was Sagres, and the man was Prince Henry, known to his-
tory as Henry the Navigator. Henry was a younger son of the King of Portugal. His mother
was English, Philippa of Gaunt. Pious and humorless, he wore a hair shirt as a reminder of
man's obligation to foreswear frivolity and sin. As a young man, Henry fought against the
Moors of North Africa. Later, he aimed to outflank Islam in North Africa, sail south down
the West African coast, use whatever riches he found there to wage war on Muslims, and
perhaps ally Portugal to the legendary Christian kingdom of Prester John.
To pursue these ends, Henry established an observatory and Europe's first school for
navigators at Sagres (meaning sacred) near Cape St. Vincent on a promontory jutting into
the Atlantic. All incoming Portuguese sea captains were required to report to Sagres and
share charts and sailing information. A ship for inshore sailing (the caravel) was designed
at Sagres. About seventy foot at keel and twenty-five foot at beam, the caravel had a trian-
gular sail at its foremast (a lateen sail) that could be pulled quickly from starboard to port
to starboard to take advantage of offshore breezes and sail close to the wind. The caravel
was so efficient in design that it became the favored ship for 200 years of exploration. (In
1492, two of Columbus's ships were caravels.)
Henry's navigators discovered Madeira in 1420. In 1434 they rounded the forbidding
Cape Bojador, and in 1446 they reached the mouth of the Gambia River. Henry died in
1460, but the Sagres navigators pressed on. Africa's Gold Coast and Ivory Coast began to
make Portugal rich (and finance further expeditions). In 1488 the resolute Bartolomeu Di-
as rounded southernmost Africa, calling it (for understandable reasons) The Cape of Good
Hope. Ten years later, Vasco da Gamma gave Portugal its greatest triumph of discovery,
East Africa, and from there, across the Indian Ocean to Calicut, India, still home to the
finest pepper in the world (and home to the cloth called calico).
HOW DID MARCO POLO HELP COLUMBUS?
To reward Portugal for its attempt to outflank and outfight Islam, the Pope gave Portugal
authority to colonize and otherwise rule all non-Christian nations that lay on its seaward
path to the Indies. On at least two occasions Columbus tried to convince the Portuguese
king that a faster route to the Indies lay across the Western Sea to China. Columbus built
his case by relying on the travels of Marco Polo, who went overland to China in 1273 and
stayed twenty-five years in the service of the Great Khan. Columbus also fudged his geo-
graphic calculations in order to place China (or better still, Cipango/Japan) within sailing
range of Iberian ships. As fate would have it, Columbus was alongside the River Tagus
when Dias returned to Lisbon; he had brought news of the likely African route to the In-
dies. Secure in his belief in his own great destiny, Columbus then traveled north to the court