Henry the Navigator was a prince of the House of Aviz and, as governor of the Order of Christ, the great patron of the first Portuguese voyages of discovery down the Atlantic coast of Africa.
Henry the Navigator was a Portuguese prince who, from the revenues of the Order of Christ, sponsored the systematic exploration of the Atlantic islands and the west coast of Africa — the opening of the European age of discovery.
Born at Porto in 1394, Henry was the third surviving son of King John I of Portugal, founder of the House of Aviz, and Philippa of Lancaster. He first won fame in 1415 at the capture of Ceuta in North Africa, a crusading enterprise that turned his attention to the lands beyond.
Henry was an austere, intensely pious, and single-minded man, closer in temperament to a crusading monk than to a Renaissance prince. He never married, wore a hair shirt in later life according to his chroniclers, and folded his maritime ambitions into the religious mission of the Order of Christ, whose cross flew on the sails of his ships.
He was also patient, methodical, and stubborn: for years his captains failed to round the feared Cape Bojador before one finally passed it in 1434, and Henry kept sending them until the barrier of fear was broken. That persistence, more than any technical genius, is his real achievement.
The romantic image of Henry presiding over a great "school of navigation" at Sagres, teaching cartography and astronomy, is largely a later invention. The historical Henry was a driven, devout organiser and financier of exploration — a crusader who turned the ocean into his frontier — rather than a scientist or a sailor; he rarely went to sea himself.
In 1420 Henry became governor of the Order of Christ, the Portuguese successor to the Knights Templar. He directed its considerable wealth to fitting out expeditions, and the order’s red cross became the emblem of Portuguese expansion.
Under his patronage Portuguese captains colonised Madeira and the Azores and pushed down the African coast past Cape Bojador, opening the sea route that would eventually lead, after his death, to India and Brazil.
Henry died at Sagres in the Algarve in 1460, his voyages having reached the coast of Sierra Leone. He was buried in the monastery of Batalha among the kings of his house.
Henry did not sail the ocean he opened, but the machinery of exploration he built — the money of the Order of Christ, the accumulated charts and experience of his captains — carried Portugal to the front rank of the discoveries within a generation of his death.
He remains the figure who bound the crusading orders to the age of discovery, and the cross of the order he governed sailed on Portuguese ships across three oceans.