What was henry the navigator famous for

With the help of the Caravel, the Portuguese explored shallow waters, rivers, and open Oceans with extensive autonomy. Prince Henry was made the governor of the Algarve Province in by his father. He spent the last decades of his life from to sending expeditions. Henry rarely went on an expedition, but he was the patron of explorers, cartographers, and navigators.

Some of his significant contributions include the voyages he sponsored. These expeditions enabled the Portuguese merchants to establish trading posts at Sao Jorge de Mina. He made a naval observatory in to teach cartography, navigation, and astronomy.

Progress was hard and slow for Henry. He experienced setbacks such as slow progress due to ignorance of his men and technological setbacks. It was from Lagos, near Sagres, that many of his sponsored trips began. Henry has the dubious distinction of being a founder of the Atlantic enslaved people trade. The two men captured several Africans and brought them back to Portugal.

One of the captured men, a chief, negotiated his own return to Africa, promising in exchange to provide the Portuguese with more Africans. Within a few years, Portugal was deeply involved in the enslaved people trade.

Henry died in in Sagres, Portugal. By the time of his death, Portuguese explorers and traders had advanced as far as the region of modern-day Sierra Leone. It would be another 28 years before Vasco de Gama , under the Portuguese flag, would sail clear around Africa and complete an expedition to India.

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Gold hunger had been growing in late medieval Europe in response to the growth of commerce, but Portugal had lacked gold coinage since Prince Henry may thus have sought to tap the supply at its source by venturing down the West African coast. Henry's first sponsored voyages of exploration were to the Atlantic islands of Madeira and Porto Santo ; colonization followed.

These islands, as well as the Azores and Canaries, had been known to the earlier Middle Ages; they were now rediscovered and exploited by the Portuguese the Azores ca. The Cape Verde Islands, much farther to the south, were discovered and settled in Colonization of these islands was important for the entire subsequent history of Iberian expansion: they provided bases for voyages to the New World and for the development of practices used later in American colonization.

More immediately, they brought in returns on capital loans extended by Prince Henry to island settlers. Meanwhile, the Portuguese involvement in North Africa was proving to be a costly and dangerous undertaking. During Henry's disastrous attempt in to conquer Tangier, the Moslems roundly defeated the Portuguese and took Prince Henry's younger brother, Fernando, as a hostage against the return of Ceuta.

Over the objections of Henry and his eldest brother, Duarte then king , the royal council refused to make the trade, and Fernando lived out the rest of his days in a dungeon at Fez. The repeated probes made down the West African coast at Henry's behest constitute the most significant achievement of his career. Only the most important of these expeditions will be mentioned here.

This point was the southernmost limit of previous European exploration, and Eannes's feat in sailing beyond it—and returning—constitutes the most important navigational achievement of the early Portuguese maritime enterprise. Cape Verde was attained by Dinas Dias in , and the islands of that name were first visited by Alvise da Cadamosto in A total of about 1, miles of African coast had been explored by these expeditions. The economic and political consequences of African "discovery" were momentous.

The Portuguese obtained an ever-increasing flow of gold through trade with inhabitants of the coastal regions and in resumed minting gold coins.