Nuño Tristão

d. c. 1447

Portuguese Sailing Captain and Explorer

Nuño Tristão is known for his travels to Cape Blanco, Sénégal, and Gambia in Africa from 1441-1446 under the command of Prince Henry of Portugal (1394-1460). These and other voyages of Prince Henry opened the West African coast to exploration, provided new geographical information for mapmakers, and helped confirm Portugal's place as a navigational power. They also, however, marked the beginning of the slave trade.

History first records Tristão for his involvement with Prince Henry. Although known as Prince Henry the Navigator, the prince never actually joined any of the expeditions associated with his name. Instead, this son of Portuguese King John I opted to plan and fund the trips while remaining onshore. In particular, Prince Henry focused on the exploration of Africa, developing an overall strategy and establishing a navigational school to ensure its success. He invited cartographers, astronomers and other experts to share their knowledge at this navigational school. As a result, navigational skills improved greatly and the boundaries of naval exploration widened.

Over the next four decades, the prince over-saw and funded some two dozen expeditions, three of which were captained by Tristão. On his first voyage under the prince, Tristão set sail in 1441 for Cape Blanco, which now falls within Mauritania below Western Sahara on Africa's west coast. Concurrently, another voyage led by captain Antão Gonçalves, left for the same location. Gonçalves landed just south of Cape Blanco. While there, he captured a dozen African men and returned with them to Portugal to show Prince Henry. One of the 12 men was the chieftain Adahu, who exchanged freedom for himself and a young male relative for the slavery of other men in Africa. Adahu also told Henry about the central and southern reaches of Africa that had yet been unexplored by Europeans.

Within two years, Gonçalves had set up a fort on Arguim, an African island. The fort became a slave-trading center. Over time, the trade grew and within a decade, thousands of African people had been captured and sent to Portugal as slaves.

In the meantime, Tristão was making additional trips by caravel, a commonly used fifteenth-century sailing ship with triangular sails, broad bows and a high raised deck (poop) at the stern. He ventured about a third of the way down Africa's west coast to Senegal in 1444, and to Gambia, a narrow slice of land within present-day Senegal, in 1446. While in Gambia, he died at the hands of the native people in 1446 or 1447. Luiz de Cadamosto and Antoniotto Usidimare followed in the footsteps of Tristão, and led the second voyage to Gambia in 1455. During this excursion, the two men conducted a more thorough exploration of this recently discovered land.

Prince Henry continued to fund and to plan expeditions to Africa until the time of his death in 1460. By then, Portuguese sailors had made landfall along Africa's coast all the way to Sierra Leone, which lies more than 400 miles (644 km) south of Gambia. In addition to introducing Europe to western Africa, Tristão and Prince Henry's other captains applied the knowledge gained at Henry's navigational school and allowed the Portuguese to maintain and to build upon their dominion over the seas.

About two decades after Prince Henry's death, Portugal established an outpost, named São Jorge da Mina on the Guinea coast in Africa. This armed outpost became the first permanent slave-trading center constructed along the continent's western edge. Although the center changed owners, it remained in business for three centuries. As the Americas developed, they became some of the center's best customers, trading for about 30,000 slaves by the eighteenth century.

LESLIE A. MERTZ