The chemistry of the Portuguese Empire III: Ascorbic Acid

This is the third post inspired by the book “Napoleon’s Buttons – 17 Molecules that Changed History” by Penny Le Couteur & Jay Burreson. While in the first two posts of the series we talked about piperine and eugenol, two molecules that inspired, so to speak, the Age of Discoveries, here we consider ascorbic acid which, or rather the absence of which, almost prevented it.

The functions that ascorbic acid, commonly known as vitamin C, performs in our body are several and important: it is in fact an antioxidant, the precursor of enzymes involved in the immune system and the production of neurotransmitters, and it is essential in the production of collagen and in tissue healing.

Molecule of ascorbic acid

But how is this related to oceanic navigation? Humans, as many other animals, are incapable of synthesizing vitamin C and can only acquire it from dietary sources, mainly from fresh fruits and vegetables. If sailors’ eating habits on land were not ideal, they became terrifying onboard, already after a few weeks of navigation. Preserving food in reasonable conditions was practically impossible and the crew had to rely on salty, dried meat and on hardtacks, biscuits made of water and flour and baked to become rock hard. Considering that voyages used to last for months, sailors very soon after their departure started to show symptoms of scurvy, a disease that is caused by vitamin C deficiency.

Not at all a pretty sight, since early symptoms are malaise and lethargy (that made some people think that lazy sailors got sick) then progressing to shortness of breath, but later symptoms are bleeding gums, loss of teeth, susceptibility to bruising, hemorrhaging from mouth and noise, poor wound healing, foul breath, and diarrhea, to finally evolve into fever, convulsions and eventual death. The scarce hygiene, the co-occurrence of other diseases and the general poor health conditions of the sailors, mainly recruited among the lowest social classes, were confounding factors that prevented a serious study of scurvy for a long time. The search for a cure lead to a series of proposals, including bloodletting, an ‘elixir of vitriol’ (a mixture of sulphuric acid and alcohol), salty water, and a number of other ineffective, when not harmful, alternatives.

Scurvy represented an issue until the 18th century.

Today we know that any citrus juice would be enough to avoid scurvy, but in the Age of Discoveries more people died of scurvy than those who died of war, other diseases and shipwrecks combined. [Silvana Munzi]

Holy Intersections!

Working on a lengthy transcription project, a rather technical, cosmographical document of 16th-century Spain, it is marvellous at every turn how different subjects of research converge on every page. I wanted to show an example that spans widely and into the history of early Christianity.

In this document, Alonso de Chaves’ Quatri Partitu en cosmografía práctica, also called Espejo de navegantes (ca. 1528), we have at the beginning a calendar which at first sight is simply a Catholic calendar, with the saints, feasts and observances of the day. The relation between nautical and calendrical sciences is very intimate, and especially so when it is a question of oceanic navigation, because our solar calendar is directly related to the daily position of the sun through the ecliptic. Moreover, because life on board was liturgically a continuation of life on land, the saints calendar, the santoral, provided a temporal reference for everyone on board.

When we are transcribing these pages we very often need to refer to not just any Catholic calendar, which has a hugely complicated history, but very specifically to the Catholic calendar of the Church of Seville in the early 16th century—and you don’t find this around the corner! Each day has a saint or feast, and saints have attributes, like “bishop” or “martyr” or “virgin”, and sometimes to identify one or other you need to know something about the life of the saint, so you go looking into early medieval collections like the super-popular Legenda aurea. Some lovely paleographic eureka moments happen when you realise that a certain story of a thousand years early in Capadocia is determining the “colour” of the day in early modern Seville.

Then, as you can see in the picture, they still kept in this calendar, as a neo-Classical feature, a column with the Roman calendar dates, complete with their kalends, nones and ides; so you need to know your Roman calendar to make sense of it. On another column, we have the dominical or Sunday letters, useful to determine the day of the week for each particular dates, and crucial for the determination of moveable feasts, like Easter.

And suddenly, when you least expect it, instead of a saint, one cell will contain an astrological/astronomical piece of information, like the ingress of a planet into a sign. So you need to keep on your toes and refresh your astronomical signs as well.

It is these ever-unexpected conjunctions of apparently disparate fields of knowledge which make working with early sources so much fun and always a new challenge, or rather a constant invitation to go beyond. No page is the same when you are reading an early modern manuscript. You literally do not know what to expect before turning the page—Here be marvels! [J. Acevedo]

François de Dainville S.J. and the Teaching of Early Modern Geography

The French historian François de Dainville S.J. (1909-1971), published in 1940 a book entitled La Géographie des humanistes. This work, despite its age, is still a reference in Jesuit historiography, at least in some aspects. Dainville argued that the vocation of the Society of Jesus, oriented as much to the moral, disciplinary and religious education of European societies as to the missionary enterprises in the distant lands of Asia and America, led to its assigning an important role to geography as a discipline for educating young people. Dainville’s thinking conceived the geographic discipline in a rather broad way. This approach, perhaps objectionable to the modern historian of science, nevertheless allows us a glimpse into the heterogeneity of the practices and contents of geographic knowledge in the early modern age.

What was stated by Dainville remains valid in more than one aspect. The slow rise of geography as an autonomous scholastic discipline from the embers of the medieval Quadrivium, despite the apparent natural vocation of the Society of Jesus to give to it a privileged role, did not experience an immediate acceleration within the Jesuit educational network. During the sixteenth century, this teaching remained hidden in the lessons of physics, mathematics, natural history, and astronomy. The texts that were used, at least until the publication of the Ratio Studiorum, remained mainly the classics of ancient science and erudition: Aristotle, Ptolemy, Pliny, Pomponius Mela, to which was added Sacrobosco’s De Sphaera, in a variety of commentaries and reprints.

Nevertheless, even through the use of these texts, geographic disciplines were increasingly identified with historical disciplines, and less and less with mathematics. This aspect is important in understanding the epistemological shift that led to modern geography as a subject of study. In this sense, Fr. Dainville’s book remains a classic founder of a strand of study, that of the teaching of geography in Jesuit schools. La Géographie des Humanistes thus deserves to be reread and appreciated by new generations of historians of science, culture, and of the Jesuits. [David Salomoni]

Reflections on the Red Sea: Part 2

The first part of this story introduced a question made by some Portuguese sailors: what was the reason behind the name of the Red Sea? At the end, it was mentioned that Afonso de Albuquerque had provided King Manuel with an explanation, after passing through the strait of Aden. “The riddle was solved” – or so it seemed.

In 1541, it was João de Castro who joined another expedition, this time going all the way to the Gulf of Suez. Castro wrote a comment about the name of the Red Sea, refuting all the ideas that were mentioned previously: the water was not red; the storms did not seem to carry any red dust; and the sand was brownish, rather dark. This was not to say that the color red was entirely missing in this region. João de Castro continues to explain that it was only north of Sawakin (where Albuquerque’s expedition had not reached) that coral reefs started to appear: some were red, some were green and some were white. “Now, we should have in mind that the water of this sea, especially north of Sawakin, is the clearest that has ever been seen.” Whenever the coral or the algae around it were red, the red colour showed through the crystal-clear waters. Given that most reefs seemed to be red, Castro believes that it should be the reason why the sea gained the name red, instead of green or white.

Like Albuquerque, João de Castro also enquired Muslim pilots about the name of this sea. They were surprised by the question – Castro writes – for they themselves used the name Sea of Mecca, and none had ever seen or heard of red dust being brought by the wind. “Despite all this, I do not disapprove of the opinion of the Portuguese, but I do state that – having gone through this sea longer than they have gone, and knowing all of its length when they only knew a fragment – I have not seen in the whole of it what they claim to have seen in a little part.” [Inês Bénard]

Reflections on the Red Sea: Part 1

One of the most immediate effects that 16th-century oceanic voyages had on the European population was the emergence of new kinds of questions. Long-distance expeditions exposed sailors to completely new information and, apart from that, it also enabled many of them to confront theories and descriptions which had been hitherto known only through ancient authorities.

One of the many examples of these questions was the reason for the name of the Red Sea. João de Castro mentioned in his rutter that Pliny provided two explanations: the first was that it used to be called Erythraean Sea after a king called Erythras – a name akin to the classical Greek term for red; the second explanation was that the sun in that sea was so strong, that it made it turn reddish. João de Castro added that some people also held that its name “was due to the color of the sand and the earth that went through it”; while others claimed that the water itself was red.

https://medea.fc.ul.pt/view/chart/1/viewer

In 1513, Afonso de Albuquerque organized an expedition to the south of the Red Sea, going as far as the Dahlak Islands. The Portuguese governor wrote to King Manuel I claiming to have seen big red spots on the water, right at the strait of Aden. According to Albuquerque, some of his sailors enquired Muslim pilots about such phenomenon and were told that the earth on the mainland was red. Strong winds would bring dust into the sea, and then heavy currents would generate the spots. The riddle was solved – or so it seemed... (to be continued) [Inês Bénard]

Negotiating a Cosmographer for a King: the case of Bartolomeu Velho

Following our previous blog posts on the circulation of maritime experts in Europe (Travelling Cosmographical Knowledge between Elizabethan England and Valois France and Fernão de Oliveira: a Globalization Agent of Iberian Maritime Knowledge), it is impossible not to mention the case of Portuguese cosmographer Bartolomeu Velho.

A renowned cartographer and mathematician, Bartolomeu Velho designed in 1561, for King Sebastian of Portugal (1557-1578), a world map known as the Carta Geral da Orbe. His works caught soon the attention of Valois France. Raymond de Forqueveaux, the French ambassador to Philip  II’s court between 1565 and 1572, used a contact in France to negotiate Velho’s entry into the service of French King Charles IX (1560-1574). Through the commercial networks that Francesco d’Albagno, an Italian merchant from Luca, had in Lisbon, Velho was offered conditions to come to France. Velho would provide the French monarchy with cosmographical information relating to an unoccupied land (by the Portuguese and the Spanish) that France was likely to explore in South America. In exchange, he was offered valuable conditions to pass to Valois France in 1566, including the possibility of bringing all his family.

Almost at the same time, a deal was struck to have Father Fernão de Oliveira, who at that time was also completing his Ars Nautica, the first European treatise on nautical construction, enter Valois service too. The maneuver was avoided by the Spanish ambassador in Lisbon, who managed to hire Oliveira for Spain’s service (although there is no sign that Oliveira ever left Portugal). In the meantime, owing to Velho’s arrival in France, Portugal asked Philip II to imprison Velho, who was already in Spain on his way to France. This effort, however, did not succeed.

Velho arrived in France in 1567 and soon finished his famous Cosmographia (preserved today at the Bibliothéque Nationale de France), dedicated to King Charles IX. He also brought with him a new instrument that was to help France in the preparation for a French expedition to explore unknown lands. A full inventory of all the goods that Velho brought to France is also known. Still, Charles IX did not have much time to profit from the Portuguese cosmographer’s work and expertise, as he died in 1568 at Nantes, and it is unknown if Velho had time to make further contributions to that planned French expedition.

Velho’s story was not a unique case, even in his time. However, it is an enlightening example of the key role played by information networks used by ambassadors, to successfully acquire the rival’s maritime knowledge. The consequent globalization of cosmographical knowledge in sixteenth-century Europe, as Velho’s case illustrates, was, thus, an unstoppable process, and ambassadors played a pivotal role in this reality. [Nuno Vila-Santa]

Sailing in Green Waters

The experience of long-distance voyages made pilots develop new skills, including training their eyes to read the different colors of the waters. Why were colors so important?

Vicente Rodrigues’ first rutter (c. 1575), first published by Linschoten, informed that near the Bay of Arguin, the pilots could see “water of green color”. If the green water was seen “twice”, it was a clear sign of proximity to the continent, otherwise, the ships were closer to Cape Verde’s Islands. This information was crucial to the safe continuation of the journey.

We can find the description of green waters also in connection with the Brazilian Run. In fact, the chief cosmographer Manuel Pimentel (1650-1719), in his collection of sailing directions, wrote that in the Maranhão basin there were many dangerous sandbanks of different sizes. The biggest ones were typically introduced by green water. The same author describing the sea route from Tobago Island to Cartagena de Indias noted that the pilot might see “very green water at high sea”. In any case, the pilot should not be afraid, because this water should be interpreted as a good sign (“não tema nada [o piloto], esta agua é certa”).

According to this rutter, the color of water could be very different in a certain place, depending on the season of the year. In the proximity of the Andaman Archipelago, in September, the surface of the sea was like a patchwork, full of spots, while in May, when rainfall was insufficient, the water was fully blue.

The nuances of water helped pilots not only to identify the location of the ship, but also to understand atmospherical phenomena which were previously unknown. [Luana Giurgevich]