History and Legend.

Besides Christopher Columbus, Prince Henry the Navigator of Portugal has been the subject of more mythmaking than any other historical figure of Europe's age of exploration and expansion. Portuguese historians since the 1400s have exalted him as a national hero and credited him with many of the key technological, intellectual, and navigational innovations that during his lifetime made Portugal a leading maritime power. According to the traditional heroic accounts of his life, Henry supposedly attracted to Sagres on Portugal's southwestern tip the leading navigators and thinkers of his day. From Sagres, Henry directed a grand imperial scheme, dispatching his mariners into the unknown waters of the African coast and the islands of the Atlantic. In so doing he laid the foundations for the later 1497-1499 voyage of Vasco da Gama to India and the growth of a global...