History
Portuguese Maritime Technology
Portuguese maritime technology refers to the advancements and innovations in shipbuilding, navigation, and maritime exploration developed by Portugal during its Age of Discovery. This period saw the development of caravels, improved navigational instruments, and the establishment of trade routes to Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Portuguese maritime technology played a crucial role in shaping global exploration and trade during the 15th and 16th centuries.
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4 Key excerpts on "Portuguese Maritime Technology"
- Daniela Bleichmar, Paula De Vos, Kristin Huffine, Kevin Sheehan(Authors)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- Stanford University Press(Publisher)
3 Historians interested in the study of Portuguese impe-rial science must therefore collect their information from the myriad of studies that have inspected partial aspects of this story. In other words, one can only hope that sometime in the near future, from the variety of approaches to history of the Portuguese empire, a picture of Portuguese imperial science will emerge. science, technology, and the maritime expansion For more than one century, the designation “Portuguese imperial sci-ence” simply meant “Portuguese nautical science.” Either pressed by external demands or pursuing the discovery of a specific Portuguese contribution to science, historians have turned to the period of maritime expansion and concentrated on the technical and scientific innovations that gave Portuguese sailors advantage over their European (and non-European) competitors. Thus, historians have analyzed many different topics that include navigation techniques (manuals, teaching, and in-struments), ship-building techniques, gunnery, cartography, literature of voyages and geographical descriptions, and more. The field is thus very broad and has frequently been shaped by the desire to ascertain The Role of Iberia in Early Modern Science 38 Portuguese priority or novelty in scientific and technical matters. Need-less to say, it has been deeply influenced by the vagaries of the politics of each time. This historiographic trend can be discerned from the early nineteenth century and has been maintained until today, making it one of the most constant and durable topics of investigation in Portugal. 4 In fact, for a country that has been slow to engage in studies of the history of science, the history of Portuguese nautical science is a happy exception.
- Malyn Newitt(Author)
- 2004(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
1 Supporting these epic events were innovations in shipbuilding, cartography and navigation. The understanding of these events has almost always relied on the assumption that the Portuguese were lone pioneers and that their achievement was due to the vision and the careful planning of princes of the Portuguese royal family, chief among them Henry ‘the Navigator’.It is the intention of the first chapter of this book to look at Portuguese expansion in a wider context. Portuguese enterprise can only be understood when seen in the context of Europe’s commercial relations with the East, the adverse balance of trade and the search for bullion to cover the payments gap; the decline of the economies of the Middle East and the shift of sugar production to the western Mediterranean with the consequent rise in the demand for land and slave labour; the expansion of the Genoese commercial empire in western and northern Europe and the development of map making, shipping and commercial infrastructure that accompanied it; and finally in terms of political and social struggles within Portugal itself which generated the first impulse towards emigration— always a powerful undercurrent and often one of the principal driving forces of expansion.By the early fifteenth century when overseas expansion began, Portuguese institutions had not undergone any of the changes associated with the emergence of the early modern state. Government still meant personal rule by the monarch; the country and most of the towns were controlled by the church, the Military Orders and the great nobles; financial institutions consisted of the private transactions of money-lenders; armed forces were still levies of service nobility and their retainers. During the process of overseas expansion the Portuguese state attempted to enlarge and develop its capacity to manage a vast, worldwide enterprise, but it is a key to understanding the story of Portuguese imperialism that this transition to a modern, professional, bureaucratic state failed. That the Portuguese empire endured so long was due not Portugal’s ability to mobilise state resources or private capital but to the activities of mixed race Portuguese-Africans and Portuguese-Asians who created a whole new Portuguese identity in remote parts of the world and held together an enterprise that, if it had relied on metropolitan effort alone, would have collapsed at an early stage.
eBook - ePub- Jeremy Black(Author)
- 2005(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
Initially, the most impressive naval power was Portugal. Her naval strength was based on sailing ships which were strong enough to carry cannon capable of sinking the lightly-built vessels of the Indian Ocean. Their heavier armament was crucial in the face of the numerical advantage of their opponents. Drawing on late fourteenth and fifteenth-century developments in ship construction and navigation, specifically the fusion of Atlantic and Mediterranean techniques of hull construction and lateen and square-rigging, and advances in location-finding at sea, the Portuguese enjoyed advantages over other vessels, whether they carried cannon or not. Developments in rigging permitted greater speed, improved manoeuvrability and a better ability to sail close to the wind. Information played a major role. Thanks to the use of the compass and other developments in navigation, such as the solution in 1484 to the problem of measuring latitude south of the Equator, it was possible to chart the sea and to assemble knowledge about it, and therefore to have greater control over the relationship between the enormity of the ocean and the transience of man than ever before.Portuguese naval strength was based on full-rigged sailing ships which were strong enough to carry heavy wrought-iron guns capable of sinking lightly-built vessels. The Portuguese fleet was a state-owned and controlled body.The ships were built in the royal dockyards at Lisbon and Oporto, but, as with the Spaniards at Havana, the Portuguese also discovered the value of developing colonial dockyard facilities. This was useful both for constructing vessels from durable tropical hardwoods, like western Indian teak, and for repairing warships locally. The Portuguese built a large 800-tonne ship at Cochin in 1511–12, established a major dockyard at Goa in 1515, and developed ship-building facilities at Damao and Macao. A key element in the Portuguese expansion along the coast of Africa and into the Indian Ocean was its string of fortified naval bases.They replicated the role of the ports that were so indispensable to Mediterranean galley operations, but over a vastly greater distance. Portuguese sailors knew that they could replenish in safety at a series of ‘way stations’ on their long voyages to and from Asia.Their ‘sea lines of communication’ rested on their bases, a policy that the Dutch and English copied in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Cape Town was developed by the Dutch as an area to grow green vegetables to replenish their ships sailing to and from Asia.
- Ronald S. Love(Author)
- 2006(Publication Date)
- Greenwood(Publisher)
Thus equipped, they rapidly defeated all local naval opposition, where any could be mustered, asserted their con- trol over Asian commerce, and forged a seaborne empire secured by their warships and a system of factories built at strategic points along the coasts from Mozambique to China. As a result, within a decade of their arrival and for most of the sixteenth century that followed, Portugal held the dominant position in maritime Asia. Initially, however, the Portuguese were peaceful and concerned only with trade, not conquest. When Vasco da Gama sailed from Lisbon in July 1497, he had been provided not just with maps and reports from other navigators, including Bartolomeu Dias, about what he might expect to find on the unexplored littoral of east Africa, but also with letters of introduction from the new king, Manuel I (r. 1495–1521), as well as a cargo of gold, pearls, woolen textiles, bronzeware, iron utensils, and additional merchandise that he hoped to exchange for pepper and other spices in Indian markets. Nor was this all. According to sixteenth-century chronicler Gaspar Correa, before his departure Da Gama had ‘‘asked the king to give 22 MARITIME EXPLORATION IN THE AGE OF DISCOVERY him a few prisoners who were condemned to death, in order to adventure them, or leave them in desolate countries, where, if they lived, they might be of great advantage when he returned,’’ by reason of the languages they might learn and the geographic knowledge they might acquire. 11 This was clearly a trade mission, in other words, not a naval expedition to discover and claim unknown terri- tories for the Portuguese Crown. The voyage lasted for more than ten months, during which the ships encountered such difficulties, wrote Correa, that the crews grew ‘‘sick with fear and hardship .
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