How to Save a Life in a 16th Century Ship

Alonso de Chaves' book, Quatri partitu en cosmographia (c. 1528), provides an insightful look into the art of sailing during this period. Chaves’ writing style is so detailed and vivid that it easily transports the reader to the described context. One notable section of the book (II.3,4) warns of potential dangers that can occur onboard, such as someone falling overboard, and provides solutions. Chaves gives precise and practical instructions on how to respond in such a situation.

The first step was to alert the crew by screaming “man at sea!” and throwing a rope into the water for the person to grab onto. The person who fell should also yell and make a commotion, and strike the water to indicate to those on board the side of the ship from which he had fallen, and deter sharks and other large fish from approaching him with the noise. If the individual was unable to climb the rope himself, the ship should launch a lifeboat to rescue them. However, adverse sea conditions could make this process difficult, requiring the ship to reposition itself for optimal conditions.

It was crucial to follow all of these procedures to save a life. It was such an important matter that failing to do so could result in legal consequences for the crew, who would be held responsible for the person’s death. But this would be the worst-case scenario. Chaves also outlines steps to take after a successful rescue. The person should be placed in a safe, ventilated area and turned upside down while feathers or fingers were placed in their mouth to remove any swallowed water. He should then be given a soup fortified with pure wine and washed with vinegar, and given preserves to eat, to regain strength. They should also apply oil to their belly and breast to aid the recovery.

After reading such a passage, with such clear and detailed instructions, even the 21st century landlubber feels prepared to save a man who has fallen overboard! [Carmo Lacerda]

The Winds in Western Tradition

The month of February in the French republican calendar was Ventôse. Since the beginning of time, winds have accompanied the daily lives of human communities. Symbol of life (are we not “dust in the wind”?), they scatter seeds in all directions, winds can also bring storms and death; what is certain is that they are generally unstable. Guiding yourself by the winds has become a habit, especially for sea voyages. Eastern Mediterranean navigators identified the prevailing winds and aligned them with the sun, the east wind where the sun rises, the south wind from the highest sun side, the west wind from where the sun sets, and the north wind blowing from the mountains over which the North Star is visible. In Homer’s times we find winds from four directions: Boreas from the north, Euros from the east, Notos from the south and Zephyr from the west.

In the Tower of the Winds in Athens, 8 winds are fixed: Boreas [N], Cecias [NE], Apeliotes [E], Euros [SE], Notos [S], Argestes [SO], Zephyrus [O], Sciron [NO]. This simple design of four main directions as perpendicular regions was easy to understand and transmit. But as pilots move onto new lands and new islands, new winds and new directions are identified. The directions are not necessarily exact points on the horizon, sometimes they are just somewhat undefined zones: there are six directions when distinguishing between east and west intermediate winds: Boreas [N], Euros [NE], Apeliotes [SE], Notos [S ], Argestes [SO], Zephyrus [NO]. The Romans speak of 12 directions that will combine intermediate winds by combining the names of adjacent ones… Sometimes the main directions are multiplied by two –2, 4, 8, 16, 32—, other times they are multiplied by three –2, 6, 12—, with increasingly smaller angles.

In Portugal, facing the Atlantic Ocean, it was the west wind that was best known: the Greek Zephyr, sweet and bringing rain, who lives where the sun sets, in the house of the evening star, became Favónio with the Romans, a soft and pleasant wind that heralds spring and melts the snow (Pliny the Elder remembers that in the lands of the Lusitanians he was the one who fertilized the mares). In the times of Charlemagne it was the Vuestroni. In the humble speech of sailors from Iberia, it became Ponente (“the setting-sun direction”) (Catalan Atlas, 1375). With more demanding navigations in the 15th and 16th centuries, the Portuguese and Spaniards expanded the “wind-wheel” to 32 wind and compass directions, and navigation books recorded variants such as “ponente” or “poente” or “oeste”. These smaller angles, of 11º and 15', are 32 in the wind rose. Each one receives the name of “quarta” (a fourth), and each one, in the identification of the tides throughout the lunar month, corresponds to the interval of 48 minutes of the moon’s position from one day to the next. [José Madruga Carvalho]

Encompassing the Universe

Shades of blue tinted everything that met the eyes of the crew of Vasco da Gama’s first voyage to India (8th of July 1497 – 20th of May 1498) while sailing South of Sierra Leone into the open Atlantic waters. During three full moons, the beholders of such caerulean desert crossed the Equator and the Tropic of Capricorn, searching for the westerlies to blow their ships to the African shore. By performing the volta do mar maneuver and arriving in Saint Helena Bay (4th of November 1497), the fleet completed the longest maritime voyage in open ocean made until then. One may wonder what the crew would do when setting foot on land. Luís Vaz de Camões gives us a hint in The Lusiads (Canto 5, stanza 26), in a Da Gama monologue that literarily recreates the Portuguese arrival to this South-African beach:

We came ashore on to wide open land,
Where our men quickly scattered,
Wishful to see the strange things of this land
Where no one seemed to have ventured before;
But I, willing to know where I was, stayed
Among the pilots on the sandy beach,
Pausing to measure the height of the Sun,
And to encompass the universal painting.

Despite the wonders of a new nature seducing the mariners towards its exploration, Da Gama’s first act when they arrive at the shore is a scientific one. Alongside the pilots, the captain is portrayed measuring the meridian height of the Sun with an astrolabe to calculate the latitude of Saint Helena Bay, to then “encompass the universal painting”. A rhetorical device worth noticing, which encapsulates an intricate metaphor and a surprising image. The very specialized usage of the verb “to encompass” (Port. compasso > compassar) and its double meaning –both for the magnetic needle and for the drawing tool used to mark out distances on maps– denotes the gesture of cartographically registering the latitude of this unknown location on a map carried on the ships. The image of doing so on a “universal painting”, a map portraying the entire world, attached to this gesture the idea of geographical expansion of the world, and a notion of globality, since it encompasses the known universe. While the globe had not yet been circum-navigated by the end of the fifteenth-century, the power to grasp the universe in the palm of one’s hand, by inscribing it, must have already felt palpable during the life of Camões (c.~1524–1580). [Joana Lima]

Chess Break!

A moment of great tension: The Portuguese captain Diogo Lopes de Sequeira arrives in Malacca in 1509 with five large ships and leaves the local king and his advisors in great suspicion. The Portuguese captain receives a message then, saying that he has been offered clove and other spices, to be made available for collection ashore on a specific date. And so it happened. Forty days later, thirty Portuguese men were sent to the beach while the son of Utimutiraja, the richest and most powerful person in town, approached with his boats to start the attack. The Javanese men climbed onto the captain’s ship only to find Diogo Lopes de Sequeira playing a board game and stopping to welcome his visitors. The son of Utimutiraja asked him not to. Watching the different pieces and the way they moved, he concluded that the same game was also played in Malacca but with less pieces. The game in question was chess.

The story was told by João de Barros, who believes that the son of Utimutiraja was only trying to save time before the attack. But that moment when the two actors pause, right before the battle, to discuss the pieces and rules of chess inspires even the sixteenth-century chronist to pause his narrative in order to reflect on the invention of the game, according to a Persian source he had read.

Barros mentions how a book written in Farsi called Tarīgh tells the story of the philosopher Acuz Farlu, who had brought the game to a great ancient Persian king, having as many pieces as the number of magistrates that used to rule those lands: “as he wanted to represent, through these pieces, the political government of the kingdom where the game was played. Time, then, decreased and increased the [number of] pieces, forgetting the theory that this philosopher wanted to place in the spirit behind those who rule.” Eventually the game passed on from the Persians to the Arabs, and the latter –according to Barros– were so industrious in it that they even played with no board or pieces, because the movements were known to them by heart.

Time passed and the pause finished. The lookout standing at the top of the ship raises his look away from the game and towards the beach to find the Portuguese men being attacked. “Treason!”, he shouts. Diogo Lopes de Sequeira stands up, the chess board falls and the battle begins. [Inês Bénard]