Prince Henry "The Navigator": a life
Peter Russell Yale University Press, 448pp, £20
ISBN 0300082339
The myth of Henry the Navigator (1394-1460) can be stated briefly. He was a Portuguese prince (the third son of King John I) dedicated to science and the promotion of knowledge, who sent out expedition after expedition to the west coast of Africa, doing the preliminary work that opened the way for the great voyages of Bartholome Dias, Vasco da Gama and Magellan. He had a school for navigators at his private domain on Cape Sangres, which was dedicated to rediscovering the wisdom of the classical and Arabic worlds, and he was the harbinger of the oceanic expansion we know as the Age of Discovery. Consequently, he was idolised by the Victorians as an early colonial administrator and by the corrupt Salazar regime of more recent times as all that was best about Portugal.
In this iconoclastic biography - the first full-length book by an 87-year-old scholar who has dedicated his life to the study of Henry (the author likes to put "the Navigator" in quotation marks) - Peter Russell exposes all this as arrant nonsense. Far from being an intrepid sailor, Henry never ventured out of sight of the Portuguese coast. He was not the forerunner of da Gama and Magellan, there was no school of navigation, and the expansion down the west coast of Africa was a by-product of quite different activities - principally, slave trading. Henry was an entirely medieval figure in whom the doctrines of the Crusades and the ideology of chivalry combined to produce the unintended consequences of a breakthrough to modernity through a series of haphazard, freebooting voyages.
The historical Henry was a cold, calculating imperialist. He was also a liar, cheat, murderer and incompetent general. Liar? When under fire from a growing body of opinion in international law that Christians had no right to wage wars of conquest against pagan kingdoms simply because they were pagan, Henry lied to Pope Eugenius IV about the level of civilisation achieved by the native people of the Canary Islands. (Henry had an obsession about the Canaries and spent most of his life trying to bring the islands under his sway.) Cheat? Russell's research reveals that Henry systematically diverted to his own coffers monies raised by the Cortes that were supposed to pay for the military garrison at Ceuta, in Morocco, established there in 1415 after one of Henry's ruthless and unprovoked wars of conquest.
Murderer? Well, let us leave aside the tens of thousands of African slaves who perished to enrich this singular Portuguese prince. But the unspeakable Henry was prepared to be his own brother's killer by sin of omission. Henry's attempts to further his aggression in Morocco, in the 1430s, by taking Tangier, backfired because the enterprise was so badly planned. After a grave defeat, Henry and his forces escaped annihilation when he surrendered Ceuta to the Moroccans in return for safe conduct. His brother Fernando was left as surety. Once he was safely back in Portugal, Henry refused to abandon Ceuta, leaving Fernando to be executed by his enemies. Worse, Henry cynically suggested that Fernando had willingly chosen a martyr's death. In the aftermath, when all Portugal seethed with the desire to avenge his death, Henry's duplicity and military incompetence were conveniently forgotten.
For a man who believed in waging aggressive and undeclared war for gold or slaves or to enhance his own prestige, Henry was singularly inept as a captain. There were several military debacles in the Canaries, as well as Morocco, many involving the rival armies of Castile (not yet united with Aragon as modern Spain). Nor could Henry ever explain, either to the Portuguese court or to the papacy, how he came to be making savage war against the Castilians when he claimed that all his campaigns of expansion were directed against the pagan infidel.
The voyages of discovery, ably narrated here by Russell, were achievements that had nothing to do with Henry, although, naturally, he claimed all the credit. His hagiographers then claimed that they were all part of the master plan for Portuguese global hegemony, which reached its apotheosis with Magellan's circumnavigation of the globe. Russell's iconoclasm on this point is both devastating and unanswerable, although he allows that the caravels, developed during Henry's period of restless external aggression, did represent a breakthrough in seaborne technology. One often envies the capacity of academics to stay with the same subject for 50 years without getting bored; but, in Russell's case, such focused concentration has produced an outstanding volume that will take decades to supersede.
Frank McLynn's Villa and Zapata: a biography of the Mexican revolution, will be reviewed next week by Robin Blackburn
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