Page:History of India Vol 6.djvu/84

 44 THE QUEST FOE INDIA BY SEA of Pope Nicholas V it seems likely that he definitely commenced this work after his exploit at Ceuta (1415), when he had just attained manhood. In 1418, while still only twenty-four, he made his Great Renunciation and, turning his back upon the world, retired to the wind-swept promontory of Sagres at the southern ex- tremity of Portugal. On that barren spur of rocks and shifting sands and stunted juniper, with the roar of the ocean for- ever in his ears, and the wide Atlantic before him inviting discovery -from sunrise to sunset, he spent his remaining forty-two years, a man of one high aim, without wife or child. Amid its solitudes he built the first observatory in Portugal, established a naval arse- nal, and founded a school for navigation, marine mathe- matics, and chart-making. Thither he invited the most skilful pilots and scientific sailors of Christendom, from Bruges near the North Sea to Genoa and Venice on the Mediterranean. Thence, too, he sent forth at brief intervals exploring expeditions into the unknown South: expeditions often unfruitful, sometimes calam- itous, even denounced as folly and waste, but which won the African coast as an outlying empire for Portugal. He died at Cape St. Vincent in 1460, having ex- pended his own fortune together with his splendid rev- enues as Grand Master of the military Order of Christ on the task, and pledged his credit for loans which he left as a debt of honour to his nation. His tomb, in the same beautiful chapel where his English mother