[Sidenote: Portuguese adventurers] And there can be no doubt about the adventurous spirit of the Portuguese sailors of that day. They were inspired by the spirit of adventure, but also--for {7} human motives are generally mixed--the adventure attracted them by the profits to be gained in it, the gold and the slaves. Further, we have to credit them with a more noble and spiritual motive, for they were inspired with a fervent conviction that it was a work most pleasing to God to induce the natives of new-found lands to become Christians. The means employed to this end were often cruel, but we ought to realise that it was a very real motive, both with the Spaniard and the Portugee. It is a motive which gives dignity to their conquests. They were not undertaken solely for material gain. Even if the means were cruel by which they converted a savage, whether of Africa or of America, they believed that it was in the truest sense a kindness to be thus cruel, if by so dealing with his body his soul might be saved. Such motives as the above had their influence not only with the adventurers themselves, but also with the Governments of their countries. A member of the Royal family of Portugal, known in story as Prince Henry the Navigator (1394-1460), especially favoured and helped to equip these expeditions. He was grandson of our own John of Gaunt. Perhaps his title of "Navigator" was cheaply earned, for there is no evidence that he ventured far oversea himself, but the distant voyages owed very much of their success to his assistance. Thus the Portuguese crept farther and farther down the African coast until at length they rounded it, and in the last years of the fifteenth century da Gama achieved the great adventure. He must have deemed himself uncommonly fortunate to come home, with those three "caravels," to his native land, and that he was considered to have been favoured by fortune we may gather from Portugal's later conduct. Her rulers were far from trusting that it would be always so--that her trading ships might always go {8} safely voyaging in those seas which the Moslems had hitherto deemed to be their own. One fleet, more powerful and more numerous than da Gama's poor three ships, was sent out, and again another, greater still, until the Portuguese had taken all the chief ports--Mozambique, on the eastern shore of Africa itself, the ports commanding the entries of the Red Sea and of the Persian Gulf--had penetrated farther east and captured the great trading port of Malacca, had even landed in China, and had established their headquarters at Goa, in the Indian peninsula.