The Captain’s Ship, a Light in the Night

In the darkness of the night, the stars guide oceanic navigation, mapping in the deep blue heavens a maritime route that glimmers in the pilot’s mind, sailing down below. While celestial navigation may be enough for one ship to follow a route, with the Iberian Maritime Expansion came larger fleets and more complex routes. Thus, the need of seamanship techniques that allowed several ships to follow the same path without getting lost in nocturnal waters.

These techniques included light-signaling practices between the captain’s ship, where the pilot travelled, and the rest of the fleet, where response signals in the form of fire were given to the leading vessel. A previously agreed symbolic code enabled the ships to remain together at night. It became common for long-distance travelling, and it ignited in the Early Modern imaginary an idea of what it was to sail in the gloom of the ocean.

While these amazing images of ships communicating in the dark by means of light captured European readers’ imagination in mid-sixteenth century thanks to travel narratives such as Pigafetta’s Relazione (7–17), they can be found much earlier. Specifically, in fifteenth-century Portuguese courtier poems like this one, by Duarte de Brito:

Like fleets trying to know
where they are going,
those that at night, to avoid going astray,
follow the captain’s torch,
we pursued meaninglessly
through our fate,
as if following a fire,
but being lost in the night
without a route.

Probably written during the reign of King John II of Portugal (1481–1495), when transoceanic navigation was yet to be achieved, it shows how familiar the Portuguese court already was with the importance of seamanship techniques and organizational skills in successfully following a route. This existentialist comparison of two people feeling lost on their life paths with fleets lost in the darkness of the night ocean portrays a society where the experience of maritime life was so pervasive that the despair of feeling lost could only be expressed by such a situation, distant in space and yet so relatable to a courtier audience. While total despair is expressed by this extreme circumstance of finding no guiding light at sea, the nautical metaphor of the route conveys feeling safe and following a meaningful life path. An example of the literary topos of the route, this small poetic jewel shines some light on a constellation of documents centered around this nautical metaphor, one yet to be drawn in mind of the historian of science.
[Joana Lima]

Iberian Nautical Knowledge in the Renaissance: a Connected History

Portuguese and Spanish navigations and discoveries aroused huge curiosity through Europe at the beginning of the 16th century. The case of France and its maritime awakening provides a striking example of this Iberian impact.

The expeditions by Giovanni da Verrazano, the Parmentier brothers, Jacques Cartier and Jean-François de Roberval, all taking place during the reign of Francis I (1515-1547), are intimately connected with previous Iberian nautical achievements. Verrazano’s and Cartier’s expeditions to North America during the 1520s and 1530s, in search of the Northern Passage to Asia, were decisively influenced by the impact of the first circumnavigation of the world (led by the Portuguese Ferdinand Magellan and the Spanish Juan Sebastian Elcano). The French attempts to reach the Indian Ocean in the 1520s and 1530s, like the Parmentier brothers’ expeditions, were also connected with the previous impact of Portuguese navigations to Asia and the hiring of Portuguese pilots in France.

Portuguese pilot Jean Alphonse played a critical role in the transmission of Portuguese nautical knowledge to France. In the service of France during Cartier’s and Roberval’s expeditions to Canada, Jean Alphonse made contributions to the cartographical school of Dieppe, created to support the onset of French maritime expansion. Based on his personal experiences with the Portuguese and French, Alphonse wrote the report of his voyages and a cosmography, both in French. Alphonse’s case alarmed the Portuguese authorities, who tried to convince him, without success, to return to Portugal.

Worried with the circulation of Iberian cosmographical knowledge to France, the Spanish and Portuguese ambassadors in France were tasked with preventing any Iberian pilot or cartographer to work for France. They resorted to private negotiations, bribery, espionage at Court. Throughout the 16th century, Iberian ambassadors also had spies in several ports and they tried to block the departure of any significant French fleet. This story was later repeated with Elizabethan England. In order to prepare successfully any oceanic expedition, knowledge was crucial. Both Portugal and Spain built the first global maritime empires by learning how to master nautical knowledge. Analysis of the Iberian nautical rutters circulating to France, England and the Netherlands during the Renaissance, and studies on the impact they had for the preparation of French, English and Dutch expeditions are goals of the RUTTER project. [Nuno Vila-Santa]

How to Establish a Maritime Route: the Case of the Strait of Magellan (3/3)

Previously on the Trilogy of the Strait of Magellan… Richard Hawkins had crossed the Strait with considerable difficulty in 1594, after which England put on the back burner its interest in the Fuegian channel. Meanwhile, in the Netherlands, the idea of using the Strait as a stable communication path with the East Indies was gaining momentum. To make such a project come true, two “Magellanic companies” were created, one in Rotterdam and another one in Amsterdam, which gathered the money and resources needed to send two expeditions to the Strait in 1599. The Rotterdam one, which departed first, was commanded by Jacob Mahu first, and after his death, by Simon de Cordes; he managed to cross the channel between April and September of the said year. As a result of this expedition, one of the most important technical documents on the navigation of the Strait was produced, which continued to be used for two centuries: the rutter compiled by the pilot Jan Outghersz.

Fig.1. Jan Outghersz’s rutter

The fleet defrayed by the Company of Amsterdam was led by Olivier van Noort, who struggled to cross the Strait on a long journey between November 1599 and February 1600. It was the most violent expedition to the Strait so far, with several episodes of aggression against the natives. The difficulties suffered by both fleets in crossing the channel deterred other companies from sending expeditions down the same route until 1615, when Joris van Spielbergen succeeded in running through the Strait in less than two months, between March and May of that year. The Dutch incursions in the Fuegian passage ended up arousing the concern of Philip III of Spain and II of Portugal, who in 1618 sent a small squadron of two vessels to explore the Strait. In command of the fleet were the brothers Bartolomé García de Nodal y Gonzalo García de Nodal, accompanied by the cosmographer Diego Ramírez de Arellano. The expedition was a resounding success, returning to Lisbon in July 1619 after circumnavigating for the first time the Tierra del Fuego and carrying new and important technical information on the navigation of those waters. Besides, it became the first expedition to the Strait that did not record any casualties.

Fig.2. Map made by Diego Ramírez de Arellano after the expedition

This voyage marked the end of the first century of navigation in the Strait of Magellan, completing a fascinating story of accumulation and circulation of technical nautical knowledge that made the feared Fuegian channel a much more accessible passage for the navigators of the time.

And if you still want to know more about this story, don’t miss the book Atravessando a Porta do Pacifico. Roteiros e Relatos da Travessia do Estreito de Magalhães, 1520-1620 (José María Moreno Madrid & Henrique Leitão, ByTheBook, 2020)! [José María Moreno Madrid]