ABSTRACT
IN one respect, at least, my assignment today is an easy one. I suppose that no name from Portuguese history is so well-known in this country as that of Prince Henry the Navigator, unless it be that of Vasco da Gama. I do not, therefore, need to begin this lecture by seeking to persuade you of the importance of its subject. Indeed, some of the most important scholarly works about Prince Henry and the discovery of West Africa have been written by Englishmen. One thinks, in this connection, of names like R. H. Major, in the nineteenth century, and of C. R. Beazley and Edgar Prestage earlier in this century. It seems, indeed, to have been British historians and geographers who first applied the slightly misleading epithet of "the Navigator" to the prince. In our own time, too, at least one very important contribution to our understanding of Prince Henry has been made here. I have in mind E. W. Bovill's book The Golden Trade of the Moors, a work which not only describes in detail the working of the overland caravan trade between Guinea and North Africa in Prince Henry's time, but also brings out of the shadows the political history and organisation of the great Saharan and Senegambian kingdoms whose Atlantic perimeter was discovered by the Portuguese. 1
