In the summer of 1415, when Henry was twenty-one, he accompanied his father to Ceuta, on the north coast of Morocco, which stood at the mouth of the Strait of Gibraltar: the gateway between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, once famed as the location of the Pillars of Hercules. Ceuta was ruled by sultan of Morocco, but it held enormous economic allure to the Portuguese, not least because it was a coastal terminus for the camel caravans that crisscrossed northern Africa, bringing tons of gold every year across the Sahara from mines in the region known as west Sudan.
