Iberian Conquest : 135 



bars placed on corks, floating in a small basin of water. They were 

 often referred to as "Genoese Needles" or "Mariners' Needles." Alex- 

 ander Necham of St. Albans provides the first description in English 

 of a compass. He lived between 1157 and 1217 and by his time the 

 magnetized bars were embedded in a floating card that carried the 

 design of a directional rose or wind rose. A recognizable form of our 

 modern compass was beginning to take shape and navigation by 

 instrument was being developed. These were very considerable advan- 

 tages and one might expect that the Iberian sailors would have made 

 a fuller use of them and commenced their ocean voyages at an ear- 

 lier time. There were, however, a number of factors to account for 

 the delays, such as a lingering fear of the Moors and the Islamic peo- 

 ples in general. Another factor was that of local political struggles 

 and the time required to achieve a sense of national unity. On top of 

 all was the matter of geographic knowledge and belief. The learned 

 men were still bound by too great a deference to the classical geogra- 

 phers and the common sailors were full of natural superstition and 

 folklore surviving from the Middle Ages. 



Despite these common attitudes, some groups of courageous sailors 

 from southern Europe did venture into the Atlantic. As we have 

 already seen in the chapters dealing with north European navigation, 

 the Basque whalers were on the Grand Banks by the end of the 

 fourteenth century and later were in Greenland waters. The Portu- 

 guese, in the fifteenth century, were involved in trade with Iceland 

 and also utilized Bristol voyagers and traders as middlemen. This 

 contact of Portugal with the northern fisheries appears to have been 

 old and well-established. While the historians do not comment on the 

 matter, it seems quite possible that such contacts may have exerted a 

 considerable influence on Portuguese navigation and helped to build 

 a tradition of seamanship. 



History, however, credits one man with being the principal agent 

 in preparing Portugal for her voyage into greatness. Later he was 

 called Henry the Navigator but in the early years of the fifteenth cen- 

 tury he was only the third son of King John. He was not likely to 

 reach the throne and was, in fact, only the unimportant son of an 

 unimportant ruler of a not very important state. As a young man 

 Henry seems to have had one strong emotion — hate; and one strong 

 ambition — to beat the Arabs and the Moors. 



There was no chance that Henry could command a national army 

 so he decided to create one. He revived an old crusading order. Under 

 its white cross banner he assembled an army. In 1514 he took his 



