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. With a coarse African red pepper malagueta the Portuguese made their first incursion into the Italian monopoly of the spice trade. However, the most important long-range economic development was the beginnings of the African slave trade, which became significant after The Portuguese obtained slaves through raids on coastal villages and trade with the inhabitants of Gambia and Upper Guinea.
In this way the Portuguese, at the very beginning of Europe's overseas expansion, provided the "woeful solution" for the problem of colonial labor power. Equally important for future patterns of colonization were developments in economic, religious, and political policy.
At this time the papacy commenced to issue its long series of bulls defining the rights of the colonizing powers. Some Portuguese even believed that the objects came from a "River of Gold. To the south of the Cape they came across a market run by black Muslims dressed in white robes and turbans. There they received a small amount of gold dust. The Portuguese crew also seized twelve black Africans to take back to Portugal, not as slaves, but as exhibits to show Prince Henry. These would not be Portugal's first African slaves.
The new captives included a local chief who spoke Arabic. The chief negotiated his own release, the terms of which were that if he and a boy from his family were taken back to their homeland and released, they would provide other black slaves in exchange.
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