34
LIFE
A N D V O Y A G E S OF
CHAPTER
[BOOK
I.
III.
PROGRESS OF DISCOVERY UNDER PRINCE HENRY OF PORTUGAL.
T H E career of modern discovery had commenced shortly before the time of Columbus, and at the period of which we are treating was prosecuted with great activity by Portugal.
Some have attri
buted its origin to a romantic incident in the fourteenth century. An Englishman of the name of Macham, flying to France with a lady of whom he was enamored, was driven far out of sight of land by stress of weather, and after wandering about the high seas, arrived at an unknown and uninhabited island, covered with beautiful forests, which was afterwards called Madeira.*
Others
have treated this account as a fable, and have pronounced the Canaries to be the first fruits of modern discovery.
This famous
group, the Fortunate Islands of the ancients, in which they placed their garden of the Hesperides, and whence Ptolemy commenced to count the longitude, had been long lost to the world.
There
are vague accounts, it is true, of their having received casual visits, at wide intervals, during the obscure ages, from the wan dering bark of some Arabian, Norman, or Genoese adventurer; but all this was involved in uncertainty, and led to no beneficial result.
It was not until the fourteenth century that they were * See Illustrations, article “ Discovery of Madeira.”