Note Back to Main Text — Chapter IV · THE SEARCH FOR THE INDIES. EASTWARD OR PORTUGUESE ROUTE.

The first work in hand was the rediscovery of coasts and islands that had ceased to be visited even before the breaking up of the Roman Empire. The Madeira and Canary islands. For more than a thousand years the Madeiras and Canaries had been well-nigh forgotten, and upon the coast of the African continent no ship ventured beyond Cape Non, the headland so named because it said "No!" to the wistful mariner.[382] There had been some re-awakening of maritime activity in the course of the fourteenth century, chiefly due, no doubt, to the use of the compass. Between 1317 and 1351 certain Portuguese ships, with Genoese pilots, had visited not only the Madeiras and Canaries, but even the Azores, a thousand miles out in the Atlantic; and these groups of islands are duly laid down upon the so-called Medici map of 1351, preserved in the Laurentian library at Florence.[383] The voyage to the Azores was probably the greatest feat of ocean navigation that had been performed down to that time, but it was not followed by colonization. Again, somewhere about 1377 Madeira seems to have been visited by Robert Machin, an Englishman, whose adventures make a most romantic story; and in 1402 the Norman knight, Jean de Béthencourt, had begun to found a colony in the Canaries, for which, in return for aid and supplies, he did homage to the King of Castile.[384] As for the African coast, Cape Non had also been passed at some time during the fourteenth century, for Cape Bojador is laid down on the Catalan map of 1375; but beyond that point no one had dared take the risks of the unknown sea.