'T is certain at least, he adds, that their custom is to eat
the livers of their victims and to drink their blood, when they are
avenging the death of parents or brothers or children, as they do it to
have full vengeance on such as have so greatly injured them.
CHAPTER XIII.
THE ARMADA OF 1445.
While Gonsalo Pacheco had been wasting time and men and the good name of
Europe and Christendom in his plunderings between C. Bojador and C.
Blanco, the memory of the death of Gonsalo de Cintra was kept alive in
Lagos, and the men of the town came in solemn deputation to the Prince,
before the summer of this same year (1445) was out, to beg him for
permission to take full, perfect, and sufficient vengeance. In other
words, they offered to equip the largest fleet that had ever sailed on
an ocean voyage--as it now began to be called, a Guinea voyage--since
the Prince began his work. As far as we know, this was also one of the
greatest armadas that had been sent out into the new-discovered or
re-discovered or undiscovered seas and lands since the European nations
had begun to look at all beyond their own narrow limits.
Neither the fleet of 1341, which found the Canaries, and of which
Boccaccio tells us, nor the Genoese expedition of 1291, nor the Catalan
venture of 1346, nor De Bethencourt's armament of 1402, for the
conquest of the Fortunate Isles, was anything like this armada of 1445.
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