THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE 609 secure new territory for the Order and for Portugal in the Atlantic islands and on the Guinea coast. The economic accompaniment of these pious and political motives was a profitable trade in gold, ivory, and negro slaves, in cap- turing whom the Portuguese became very proficient. It is doubtful if Prince Henry was aiming especially at the cir- cumnavigation of Africa or a sea route to the Indies. Nor did he personally participate in these voyages, but remained in his astronomical observatory on a sea-girt promontory conning works of history and mathematics. It has never- theless become customary to speak of him as " Prince Henry the Navigator." Before his death the Cape Verde Islands had been discovered and the African coast explored almost to Sierra Leone. After Prince Henry's death the voyages went on just the same. The equator was crossed in 1472-73, the mouth of the Congo was reached in 1484, and two or three Further years later Bartholomew Diaz rounded the Cape Portuguese of Good Hope and sailed far enough beyond it to exp ° make sure that the southernmost extremity of the continent had at last been reached. At the same time that Diaz was rounding the Cape, King John II of Portugal sent forth three other expeditions : one to Abyssinia by way of Egypt and the Red Sea, one to endeavor to cross Africa overland from the Senegal, and one to try to sail northeast around Europe to China and India. During the second half of the fifteenth century, too, as records in Portuguese archives show, various individuals were granted rights to islands in the Western ocean which they had discovered or hoped to find. English seamen from Bristol also had been sailing westward into the Atlantic. But the scheme which was destined to prove most fruit- ful was that in which a Genoese sailor, named Christopher Columbus, finally succeeded in enlisting the Christopher support of the Spanish court after unsuccessful Columbus overtures to other governments. In 1474 Columbus had gone to the Madeira Islands, had married there, and then embarked on a voyage to the north which took him beyond
