As we know, our world is a small piece of land, shaped like a round pancake with its centre in Jerusalem and all engirdled by the ocean. At the Occident, the edge of the Earth is formed by Calpe and Abila—the Pillars of Hercules—with the Strait of Gades between them.

And to the south, as I have just said, the ocean extends beyond Africa. In the south-east, the end of the mainland is marked by India inferior, which belongs to Prester John, as well as the lands of Gog and Magog. In the septentrional of the Earth is Ultima Thule, and there, ubi oriens iungitur aquiloni, lies the land of the Mongols, or Tartary, while to the east the world ends some way beyond Kiev, with the Caucasus.

And now we come to the crux of the matter. By which I mean the Portuguese. But more specifically the Infante Dom Henrique, Duke of Viseu, the son of King John. Portugal, it can’t be denied, is by no means a large kingdom, and the king’s infant was his third son in a row. So, unsurprisingly, Henry gazed more often and with greater hope from his palace in Sagres towards the sea than at Lisbon. He invited to Sagres astronomers and cartographers, wise Jews, navigators, sea captains and master boatbuilders. And thus it began.

In the Year of Our Lord 1418, the explorer João Gonçalves Zarco reached some islands called the Insulae Canariae, so called because of the vast multitudes of dogs found there. Soon afterwards, in 1420, the same Gonçalves Zarco and Tristão Vaz Teixeira sailed to the island christened Madeira. In 1427, the caravels of Diogo de Silves reached some islands which were named the Azores—only God and Diogo know why. But a few years ago, in 1434, another Portuguese, Gil Eanes, rounded Cape Bojador. And rumour has it that Infante Dom Henrique—who some are now beginning to call El Navegador or “the Navigator”—is planning his next expedition.