Even the
lines upon which the national expansion and exploration went on were so
strictly and exclusively the same as he had followed, that when a
different route to the Indies was suggested after his death by
Christopher Columbus, the Court of John II. refused to treat it
seriously. And this brings us to the other, the indirect side of Henry's
influence.
"It was in Portugal," (says Ferdinand Columbus, in his _Life of the
Admiral_, his father,) "that the Admiral began to think, that if men
could sail so far south, one might also sail west and find lands in that
quarter." The second great stream of modern discovery can thus be traced
to the "generous Henry" of Camoens' _Lusiads_ no less plainly, though
more indirectly, than the first; the Western path was suggested by his
success in the Eastern.
But that success had turned the heads of his own people. When Columbus,
the son of the Genoese wool-comber, who had been a resident in Lisbon
since 1470, submitted to the Court of John II. some time before 1484 a
proposal to find Marco Polo's Cipangu by a few weeks' sail west, from
the Azores, he was treated as a dreamer. John, as Henry's disciple and
successor, was, like other disciples, narrower than his master in the
master's own way.
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