A 16th-century Run for Gold and for… an Accurate Nautical Rutter?

In March 1569, King Sebastian ordered Francisco Barreto to head his fleet from Lisbon to Eastern Africa to conquer the famous Mutapian gold mines (a goal that was not achieved). However, the Portuguese King also wanted Barreto’s expedition to solve another problem: the previous Portuguese shipwrecks in the East African coast.

After arriving to Mozambique in 1570-71, Barreto sent a nobleman to “discover” the coast between Mozambique and the Cape of Good Hope. The unfortunate nobleman prepared a nautical rutter, but perished in the area due to its several dangers. King Sebastian did not receive his rutter, and some years later he ordered Manuel Mesquita Perestrelo to produce a nautical rutter of the area. This time the King’s choice felt upon a nobleman that had been a victim of a famous shipwreck in the region during the 1550s and who had even written a report about it. As a result, Perestrelo wrote an important nautical rutter dedicated to King Sebastian. In this rutter, Perestrelo detailed all the coastal signs and explained how to anchor with success in good and bad places. He also described all the occasions in which he was about to die, in spite of all his experience. His rutter was so technically accurate that even during the 17th and 18th centuries, French, English and Dutch seafarers used it as the reference for the dangerous navigation on the region.

Perestrelo’s rutter is, thus, a testimony that good nautical rutters were always required to avoid the many dangers of an Oceanic voyage. King Sebastian also knew that good nautical rutters could help to prevent shipwrecks and guarantee the financial revenues of his Crown. Perestrelo’s story also shows that in the 16th century, nautical science was far from being a fixed matter; it always required adaptions. The multiple global impacts of maritime expansion explain how a document that today seems to us of a boring technicality (a nautical rutter) could become the focus of attention of different society echelons: from the pilot, the merchant, the missionary, the nobleman, the ambassador, to a King. This raises an intriguing question: Is it possible that nautical rutters made a very particular and unique contribution to the scientific development of Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries? [Nuno Vila-Santa]

Hail, Practical Knowledge!

When Cristopher Columbus first saw American land, a New World was gazed and composed. An autoptic re-creation of the sailors who experienced these unknown territories, sixteenth-century European literature allowed its readers to see the globe without their eyes, by reading the travel reports of those who had observed it in person.

With this came a change in the way that knowledge was validated. If intellectual and scholarly knowledge about the Earth had been set in stone for centuries, after these first encounters the experience of those that directly observed a new reality became ever more credible and relevant in the understanding of the natural world. A conflict between scholarly knowledge and practical knowledge thus arose in Iberia, one that can be read in Diálogos (1589), by Portuguese Friar Amador Arrais:

[The Portuguese] revealed to the wise men of the earth many secrets of nature. (...) They found new stars, sailed unknown seas and climates, discovered the ignorance of the ancient Geographers, which the world had as masters of hidden truths. They found the correct measurements of the coastlines, reduced and increased latitude degrees, amended the heights of the Sun, and, without other speculative Letters than those that are practiced on the deck of a ship, they devalued many who in famous universities had wasted their time.

The lived experience of the Earth unveiled the book of nature. Its writers, according to Friar Amador Arrais, are no longer the canonical authors of Ancient Antiquity and the Middle Ages, but people with no scholarly education, such as pilots, sailors, and the artisans who made the instruments that measured this new world. Its source is no longer the Ptolemaic geography that had been taught at the University, but the experiential practical and artisanal knowledge created at sea, on the deck of a ship crossing the ocean. Its pages, a realistic new narrative about the planet we are still eager to read. [Joana Lima]

Hanc Freti Magvalanici descriptionem nouam. From the Low Countries to Spain via Brazil.

As regular readers of this blog will have noticed, our team is very interested in the circulation of nautical knowledge throughout the Early Modern period. Following in the footsteps of the posts recently published by my colleagues Nuno Vila-Santa and Silvana Munzi, today I bring you the story of a map based on Dutch information, but drawn by a native of Antwerp in Brazil at the service of Philip III of Spain. Let us start by getting to know the author better. As I was saying, Gaspar de Mere was born in Antwerp sometime in the sixteenth century. Also at an uncertain date he moved to Pernambuco, where he stayed for at least two decades working on the sugar business; indeed, he managed to set himself up as a Senhor de Engenho in Cabo de Santo Agostinho. But his luck changed at the beginning of the seventeenth century, due to the conflicts between the Hispanic Monarchy and the United Provinces and suspicions of illegalities in his sugar dealings. This led to an order being issued for De Mere to be arrested and taken to Lisbon. Such an order would never have been executed, as the accused remained in Brazil throughout the 1610s decade.

Fig.1. Fretum Magalanicus. Aº 1617. Real Academia de la Historia (Madrid). Call Number: C-003-085.

Meanwhile, the expeditions led by Joris van Spielbergen and Jacob Le Maire had crossed with impunity the Strait of Magellan and the waters south of Cape Horn, prompting Philip III to collect updated information about the Fuegian channel. To this end he turned to Luís de Sousa, governador-geral of Brazil, ordering him to send an expedition to the Strait of which, if it ever took place, no records have survived. But the governador did not leave his monarch empty handed. Somehow, he had managed to obtain the invaluable rutter compiled by Jan Outghersz, but he still needed someone to translate it… And here enters the picture again Gaspar de Mere, holding the linguistic skills needed to produce a Portuguese translation of the Dutch pilot’s work. Fruit of such an unusual collaboration is the real protagonist of our story: this spectacular map of the Strait of Magellan, signed in 1617. [José María Moreno Madrid]

The Incredible Modernity of Orbis Terrarum Maps

When we look at a medieval planisphere, like the beautiful Mappa Mundi kept at Hereford in England or Ebstorf in Germany, or even the more sophisticated Fra’ Mauro’s map, the first thing that strikes us about it is the very archaic and imprecise appearance, not respectful of what for us is familiarly the image of the continents and seas that make up the earth’s surface. What makes these globes even more eccentric is their sometimes exaggeratedly geometric shape, made of half and quarter circles, which are often populated by mysterious animals and mythological monsters, and represented on a kind of plate that strongly recalls our mistaken belief that men of the Middle Ages believed in a flat earth.

However, if we look more carefully at these kinds of representations of the world, we might perhaps notice some features of surprising modernity. Among the most paradoxical aspects of the world we live in today, in fact, which we habitually call global, is the difficulty we still have in considering the world as a unity. In the medieval Orbis-Terrarum maps the most striking thing is their conceptual effort in representing and conceptualizing the earth globally. In most of these representations the observer is given a universal and unitary conception of the earth. The physiognomy of this is obviously very different from how we know it today, but the lucidity of its global representation, which like every planisphere is a conceptual abstraction, remains surprising.

Certainly their representation of the world reflects a theological vision of reality, for these instruments responded to different needs from those we have today, but they certainly share with modern planispheres the fact that they wanted to embrace the entire surface of the earth, while at the same time trying to respond to the needs of their time, which were essentially of eschatological nature. When we look at one of these representations of the earth’s surface in the future, let us remember that it is precisely in their theological universalism that are the foundations of the modern concept of a global world. [David Salomoni]