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By his marriage with Dona Isabella Sodré, daughter of Juan de Resende, proveditore of the fortifications of Santarem, he had several children, and amongst them Vasco, who first reached India by doubling the Cape of Good Hope, and Paul, who accompanied him in that memorable expedition.
They are in the house of Garcia de Resende, a man of many accomplishments whose services were much valued both by Dom João and by Dom Manoel. He seems too to have been an architect of some distinction, if, as is said, he designed the Torre de São Vicente at Belem. This second window in his house is one of the best examples of the complete union between Gothic and Moorish.
Here, then, on a sandbank washed once by every high tide, but now joined to the mainland by so unromantic a feature as the gasworks, a tower begun by Dom João II., and designed, it is said, by Garcia de Resende, was finished by Dom Manoel about 1520 and dedicated to São Vicente, the patron of Lisbon. The tower is not of very great size, perhaps some forty feet square by about one hundred high.
Confimatio treugarum inter Regem Angliæ Eduardum quartum, et Ioannem secundum Regem Portugalliæ, datarum in oppido montis Maioris 8 Februarij, et apud Westmonasterium 12 Septembris, 1482, anno regni 22 Regis Eduardi quarti, lingua Lusitanica ex opere sequenti excerpta. Libro das obras de Garcia de Resende, que tracta da vida è feitos del Rey dom Ioham secundo.
On the following day search was made for his body, Don Nuno Mascarcuhas, his personal attendant, having stated that he saw him put to death with his own eyes. At the spot which the Portuguese noble indicated, a body was found, which, though naked, Resende, a valet of Sebastian, recognised as that of his master.
This is an authentic testimony of the early attempts of the English, which is related at length by Garcia de Resende, in the life of Joam II. Ch. 33 . To this, or some similar circumstance, it may have been owing that the English desisted so long from sailing to the southwards, and turned their endeavours to the discovery of a passage to India by some other way. Astl.
The original plan for the tower is said to have been furnished by Garcia de Resende, whose house we have seen at Evora, and if this screen, which is built up of heart-shaped curves, is older than the cloister windows at Batalha, he may have suggested to Matheus Fernandes the tracery which has a more or less reticulated form, though on the other hand it may be later and have been suggested by them.
A much fuller account is given in the life of king John II of Portugal, by Garcia de Resende, who likewise records it as happening in 1485. He says the Venetian galleys were taken and robbed by the French, and the captains and crews, wounded, plundered, and maltreated, were turned on shore at Cascoes. Here they were succored by Dona Maria de Meneses, countess of Monsanto.
It might further be urged that Garcia de Resende who designed the tower, if he was never in India himself, formed part of Dom Manoel's great embassy to Rome in 1514, when the wonders of the East were displayed before the Pope, that he might easily be familiar with Indian carvings or paintings, and that finally there are no such balconies elsewhere in Portugal.
The Ambassage which king Iohn the second, king of Portugall, sent to Edward the fourth king of England, which in part was to stay one Iohn Tintam, and one William Fabian English men, from proceeding in a voyage which they were preparing fot Guinea, 1481, taken out of the booke of the workes of Garcias de Resende, which intreateth of the life and acts of Don Iohn the second, king of Portugall.
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