03 March 2008

Henry the Navigator

He's an interesting character in our story, although Mr. Menzies doesn't go into a great deal of detail about him until the end of the book, he does mention him in the introduction, which I am still laboring through. I, of course, wanted to know a little more.

But you know what I found out? There seems to be a lot of disagreement online about what is actually factual in this guy's life. But at least I found a nice picture.

2 comments:

misskate said...

Isn't history facinating? All we know is what the most loud-spoken people have written down. Hehe.

How do we know who anyone really was and what they actually accomplished? Hooray for artists who capture the various faces of the past..that at least gives us something to go on :)

Ritsumei said...

Yep, yay for the artists. But even then you have to wonder... this guy was a royal. Did the artist feel the need to flatter him? How "honest" is the portrait?

I really only looked at online sources, and not a really exhaustive search at that, but it seems like there was an unusual amount of controversy about what Henry's contribution was. It's just all so messy. You see these nice timelines & they're usually so tidy: George in 1836, Marco in 1843, Christian in 1859. Ya know? But then you get to looking a little deeper and it turns out that there's a whole lot of ambiguity and maybe it went down this way, but the folks that lost the war insist that not only was it an entirely different story, but the winners are nothing but war criminals... After all, history is typically written by the winners!