Prince Henry the Navigator embodied his family and class’s expansionist drive

Evidence

Dom Henrique (the Navigator), who is credited with marshalling the energies of Portugal, the resources of the Order of Christ, the skills and instruments of Europe’s most developed seamanship, and the navigational wisdom of Muslim and Italian mathematicians, cartographers, astronomers, and geographers for the purpose of exploring Africa and its coastline for a route to the Indies and to Prester John, was of course the ascetic, celibate, and reclusive son of the newly royal Joao and Philippa. Following the Portuguese capture of Ceuta in 1415, for more than forty years, Dom Henrique dedicated himself to the achievement of his parents’ dream. Henrique, however, was not distinctive in this regard. He was in reality simply a more psychologically severe version of his family and the class with whose destiny it was intimately linked. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 485