CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTORY REMARKS.-DISCOVERY OF THE CANARY ISLANDS. -BÉTHENCOURT.-PORTUGUESE DISCOVERIES IN AFRICA UNDER PRINCE HENRY OF PORTUGAL. CHAPTER II. CA DA MOSTO's VOYAGE.-PRINCE HENRY'S DEATH.-HIS CHARACTER.-FARTHER DISCOVERIES OF THE KINGS OF PORTUGAL. ISLANDS.—BÉTHENCOURT.-PORTUGUESE DISCOVERIES IN AFRICA UNDER PRINCE HENRY OF PORTUGAL. THE HE history of almost every nation tells of some great transaction peculiar to that nation, something which aptly illustrates the particular characteristics of the people, and proclaims, as we may say, the part in human nature which that nation was to explain and render visible. In English history, the contest between the Crown and the Parliament; in that of France, the French Revolution; in that of Germany, the religious wars, are such transactions. All nations of the same standing have portions of their several histories much alike. There are border wars, intestine divisions, contests about the succession to the throne, uprisings against favorites, in respect of which, if only different names be applied to the account of one and the same transaction, it will serve very well for the history of various nations, and nobody would feel any strangeness or irrelevancy in the story, whether it were told of France, England, Germany, or Spain. Carrying on this idea to the history of our system, if the other worlds around us are peopled with beings not essentially unlike ourselves, there may be among them many Alexanders, Cæsars, and Napoleons: the ordinary routine of conquest may be commonplace enough in many planets; and thus the thing most worthy to be noticed in the records of our Earth may be its commercial slavery and its slave-trade; for we may hope, though the difference be to our shame, that they have not had these calamities elsewhere. The peculiar phase of slavery that will be brought forward in this history is not the first and most natural one, in which the slave was merely the captive in war, “the fruit of the spear," as he has figuratively been called, who lived in the house of his conqueror, and labored at his lands. This system culminated among the Romans; partook of the fortunes of the Empire; was gradually modified by Christianity and advancing civilization; declined by slow and almost imperceptible degrees into serfage and vassalage; and was extinct, or nearly so, when the second great period of slavery suddenly uprose. This second period was marked by a commercial character. The slavę was no longer an accident of war. He had become the object of war. He was no longer a mere accidental subject of barter. He was to be sought for, to be hunted out, to be produced; and this change accordingly gave rise to a new branch of commerce. Slavery became at once a much more momentous question than it ever had been, and thenceforth, indeed, claims for itself a history of its own. Black against mankind, and almost unaccountably mean and cruel as much of this history is, still it is |