The Discoverers (Knowledge Series Book 2)

by Daniel J. Boorstin

UNLIKE Columbus, who would aim straight for the Indies, Prince Henry the Navigator had a larger, a vaguer, and more modern destination—true to his horoscope. “The noble spirit of this Prince,” the admiring reporter Gomes Eanes de Zurara explained, “was ever urging him both to begin and to carry out very great deeds.… he had also a wish to know the land that lay beyond the isles of Canary and that Cape called Bojador, for that up to his time, neither by writings, nor by the memory of man, was known with any certainty the nature of the land beyond that Cape.… it seemed to him that if he or some other lord did not endeavour to gain that knowledge, no mariners or merchants would ever dare to attempt it, for it is clear that none of them ever trouble themselves to sail to a place where there is not a sure and certain hope of profit.”