While these things were occurring at Madeira and at Porto Santo, Prince Henry had been prosecuting his general scheme of discovery, sending out two or three vessels each year, with orders to go down the coast from Cape Nam, and make what discoveries they could; but these did not amount to much, for the captains never advanced beyond Cape Bojador, which is situated seventy leagues to the south of Cape Nam. This Cape Bojador was formidable in itself, being terminated by a ridge of rocks with fierce currents running round them, but was much more formidable from the fancies which the mariners had formed of the sea and land beyond it. "It is clear," they were wont to say, "that beyond this cape there is no people whatever; the land is as bare as Libya--no water, no trees, no grass in it; the sea so shallow that at a league from the land it is only a fathom deep; the currents so fierce that the ship which passes that cape will never return;" and thus their theories were brought in to justify their fears. This outstretcher--for such is the meaning of the word _bojador_--was, therefore, as a bar drawn across that advance in maritime discovery which had for so long a time been the first object of Prince Henry's life. The Prince had now been working at his discoveries for twelve years, with little approbation from the generality of persons; the discovery of these islands, Porto Santo and Madeira, serving to whet his appetite for further enterprise, but not winning the common voice in favor of prosecuting discoveries on the coast of Africa. The people at home, improving upon the reports of the sailors, said that "the land which the Prince sought after was merely some sandy place like the deserts of Libya; that princes had possessed the empires of the world, and yet had not undertaken such designs as his, nor shown such anxiety to find new kingdoms; that the men who arrived in those foreign parts--if they did arrive--turned from white into black men; that the King Don John, the Prince's father, had endowed foreigners with land in his kingdom, to break it up and cultivate it--a thing very different from taking the people out of Portugal, which had need of them, to bring them among savages to be eaten, and to place them upon lands of which the mother country had no need; that the Author of the world had provided these islands solely for the habitation of wild beasts, of which an additional proof was that those rabbits the discoverers themselves had introduced were now dispossessing them of the island."