It’s not hard to imagine how a resident of the 14th century would feel looking west from Cape Saint Vincent on Portugal’s southwest coast. This was land’s end, as far as you could go. Europe ended here, and there was not yet a “New World.”

The Portuguese prince known as Henry the Navigator sought to change that. He taught sailing and navigation skills, provided funds for expeditions to Africa and Madeira, and influenced generations of explorers. 

Henry’s inspiration in part was Marco Polo’s Il Milione, a travel book that was also a source for Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, which we studied last semester. Such is the power of imagination that even today, hundreds of years later, standing on the windswept heights of Henry’s fortress, I could glimpse the danger and the curiosity these views provoked.