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]