HENRY, surnamed Trim NAVIGATOR, a famous Portuguese prince, the fourth son of John I., king of Portugal, was b. at Oporto in 1394, and first distinguished himself at the conquest of Ceuta in 1415. After the death of Ids father he took up his residence at the t. of Sagres, in Algarve, not far from cape St. Vincent; and while prosecuting the war against the Moors of Africa, his sailors reached parts of the ocean which the navigation of the time had long supposed to be inaccessible. The grand ambition of Henry was the discovery of unknown regions of the world. At Sagres he erected an observatory, to which he attached a school for the instruction of youthful scions of the nobility in the sciences necessary to navigation. Subsequently, he despatched some of his pupils on voyages of discovery, which resulted at last in the discovery of the Madeira islands iu 1418. Henry's thoughts were now directed towards the auriferous coasts of Guinea, of which be had heard from the Moors; and in 1433 one of his mariners sailed round cape Nun, unil then regarded as the furthest point of the earth, and took posses sion of the coasts as far s. as cape Bojador. Next year Henry sent out a larger ship,
which reached a point 120 m. beyond cape Bojador; and at last, in 1440, cape Blanco was reached. lip to this period Henry had borne all the expense of these vcyages himself ; henceforth, self-supporting societies were formed under his patronage anti guidance, and what had formerly been the affair of a single individual, now became the passion of a whole nation. But Henry did not slack personally in his efforts. In 1446 his captain, Nuno Tristan, doubled cape Verd in Senegambia, and in 1448 Gonzalez Vallo discovered three of the Azores. Henry died in 1463, after he had the satisfac tion of learning that his mariners lied reached as far south as Sierra Leone. See Wap• pans, Untersuchungen fiber die Geogr. Entdeckungen der Portuglesen ?infer Henry, dem Seefahrer (G6tt. 1842). See also Burros and Candid° Lusitano; Major's Life of Prince Henry of Portugal (Lond. 1868); and the same author's Discoveries of Prince Henry the Navigator (1877).