The British National Maritime Museum in Greenwich houses an important Portuguese nautical treatise from the late 16th century under the shelfmark NVT/7. It was acquired in 1933, as the final page indicates, but before its coming to the Museum it went through the hands of other owners. As the first page indicates, it was in the possession of the British historian Charles Boxer (1904-2000), who devoted several works to the Portuguese overseas empire in the early modern period. Prior to its acquisition by the Museum and by Boxer, the Portuguese historian Francisco Marques de Sousa Viterbo (1845-1910) had already described this manuscript in his famous work Trabalhos Naúticos dos Portugueses nos Séculos XV e XVI (The Nautical Works of the Portuguese in the 15th and 16th centuries). But, why is this particular manuscript worth mentioning?
The manuscript is believed to be a copy of one of the most important works by the Jesuit Father Francisco da Costa (1567-1604), a highly influential figure in Portugal’s transition to the 17th century in terms of nautical matters. He was born in central Portugal in 1567 and studied at the Jesuit colleges of Coimbra and Lisbon in the 1580s. At the start of the 1590s, Costa’s scientific and intellectual skills in teaching nautical science were recognised, leading to his appointment as assistant professor to Father João Delgado, who held the influential “Aula da Esfera” (Chair of the Sphere) at the Jesuit college of Santo Antão in Lisbon. In 1602, two years before his death, Costa succeeded Father Delgado as the chair holder.
Perfectly aware of the need to train and teach Portuguese pilots in oceanic routes, especially in a challenging period when the Dutch, the English and the French started to launch serious overseas enterprises against the Portuguese Mare Clausum, Father Costa did more than simply give classes. Thinking on his students, he composed works on astrology, cosmology, cosmography, nautical science and mathematics. His Tratado da Hydrografia e Arte de Navegar (Treatise on Hydrography and Art of Navigation) written in the last years of the 16th century, is considered one of the most significant works of Portuguese nautical science. For the first time, Father Costa described, in Portuguese, how to build nautical charts and globes. It is precisely a copy of this original text that any researcher can check in the manuscript at Greenwich. Although, the manuscript’s elegant hand-writing suggests that it was commissioned by someone and copied during the 17th century from an original, it is still a very important version. It is worth comparing it with extant versions of Costa’s works held at the British Library and at the Portuguese Library of Ajuda. The Greenwich manuscript also includes in the end Costa’s translation of the Dutch Adriaen Veen’s treatise published just some years before Costa wrote his own work.
Thus, Costa’s manuscript is a lively testimony of the intensity of nautical knowledge exchanges between Portugal and England, but also between Portugal and the Dutch Republic in the transition to the 17th century. [Nuno Vila-Santa]
