Page:History of India Vol 6.djvu/87

 THE EXPEDITIONS OF PRINCE HENRY 47 rests at Batalha, bears by the side of his own arms as a royal prince of Portugal, the motto and device of the Garter conferred on him by our Henry VI, and the cross of the Portuguese Order of Christ. On the frieze, entwined with evergreen oak, runs the motto which he solemnly adopted in young manhood Talent de bien faireihe resolve to do greatly. The king, wrote Diogo Gomez, " together with all his people mourned greatly over the death of so great a prince, when they considered all the expeditions which he had set on foot " in the words of his monument on the gateway of Fort Sagres " to lay open the regions of West Africa across the sea, hitherto not traversed by man, that thence a passage might be made round Africa to the most distant parts of the East." The maps of the two preceding centuries, and espe- cially the Laurentian portulan, or chart, of 1351, to- gether with notices by the Christian and Arabic geog- raphers of the same period, enable us to understand exactly what Prince Henry achieved. A tradition, for which the Revival of Learning was destined to supply a historical basis, came down through the dark ages that ships had sailed round Africa in very ancient times. The three years' voyage from the Eed Sea to the Med- iterranean, sent forth by Pharaoh Necho (617 - 601 B. c.), seemed discredited to Herodotus on the ground that now forms its best evidence of authenticity. For who could then believe the mariners ' tale that the sun which rose on their left hand during one part of their voyage rose on their right during the remainder?