Can Portugal now recruit explorers and conquistadors as a tradition? If not, it would be an important and historically accurate addition.
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A world on the Move" Prof. Russel-Wood, John Hopkins Univ.
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it is not my purpose here to retell the story of the explorations and haven-finding skills of the Portuguese.
For my immediate purpose a succinct chronological listing
of how the Portuguese inexorably pushed forward the frontiers of European knowledge and established a permanent European presence in Africa, Asia, and the Americas, will suffice.
The Portuguese made the first recorded landfalls on the uninhabited Atlantic islands of Madeira (c1419) , the Azores (c1427) the cape verdes (1456-60) St Helena ans Ascension (1501-1502)Tristão de Cunha (c 1506) By 1500, they had probably voyaged to Greenland, Labrador, and Newfoundland. By the 1520s they attempted settlement on Cape Breton island, and on Nova Scotia bu the mid-sixteenth century. But their major achievements were in more southterly latitudes. It was the Portuguese who overcame the physical and psychological barriers of two capes: Gil Eanes who rounded the promontory of Cape Bojador in 1434, thereby opening the way to the upper Niger, Senegal, and Guinea; and the better known Bartolomeu Dias, whose rounding of the Cape of Good Hope in 1488 demonstrated that entry could be made into the Ptolemaic land-locked waters of the Indian ocean.
The Portuguese made extraordinary exploratory progress in the intervening half century, averaging slightly more than one degree southwards each year. 1435,crossed the Tropic of Cancer;1460s, Gulf of Guinea; 1473,crossed the Equator;1482, Congo river;1485-6, 1 degree 17´North of the Tropic of Capricorn. In his outward voyage of 1497, Gama followed in the wake of his precessors to Santiago in Cape Verdes, then pioneered his own route south and southwest before catching the westerlies which carried him east to make his landfall as St Helena Bay on the west coast of Africa. The landfall in Brazil of Alvares Cabral in 1500 was a minor diversion in the move toward the consolidation of a Portuguese presence in India and beyond in the first quarter of the sixteenth century.
The first commercial expedition by Europeans to the Clove Islands was Portuguese, and arrived in the Bandas and Moluccas in 1512. Two years later, Jorge Alvares headed the first European sea-based mission to Canton. Portuguese were the first Europeans to sail to New Guinea in 1525. A Portuguese was the first European to see the coast of Chosen in 1578, and Portuguese were the first Europeans to visit Korea.
The case has been argued for the Portuguese made a short hop from Timor and to have been the first Europeans to visit the east coast of Australia two and half centuries before Captain Cook. Three Portuguese were probably the first Europeans to enter remote areas from the Zambezi to Tibet and from the Atlantic coast to the Andes.
This bare-bone chronology of Portuguese achievement underlines the following.
First, this was a protracted effort sustained over more than a century.
Secondly, it touched all continents with the exception of Antarctica and possibly Australia, and Portuguese vessels left wakes on all the oceans and major seas of the world.
Thirdly,the Portuguese were exposed to a diversity of political regimes and commercial practices, as well to a all major "encounters" (as it now fashionable to call them)
over more than a century in Africa, Asia, as well in America, whose complexity and variety makes the Spanish experience in the Americas and the Philippines pale by comparison.
If I appear to over-emphasize the time span of more than a century which may legitimately be regarded as a Portuguese age of Discovery (and by this I mean the first sightings by Portuguese of what, to them, were new lands), it is to assert how important it is to consider the Portuguese global endeavour as an entity and to discourage fragmentation. The history of Portugal beyond Europe is vulnerable on this score for two reasons which have more to do with the nature of historical studies than with the Portuguese. The first has been the tendency on the part of scholars to specialize in research into the history of the Portuguese experience in a single continent or region.
The reader can learn much from monographs with such titles as Portugal in Africa, Portuguese in South-East Africa, Portuguese Brazil, Portugal in China, The Portuguese in India, and Portuguese Rule in Ceylon. But the price paid is loss of sight of the whole and diminished appreciation of the global scope of the Portuguese enterprise. The second results of over-zealous attempts at periodization..."
To see the Portuguese experience solelely in terms of a maritime chronology is to diminish the importance of Portuguese terrestrial initiatives...not only in Africa, but in Persia, India, and Asia, Portuguese travelled extensively by land, even entering Tibet and Nepal. In the western hemisphere, as early as 1524 the Portuguese Aleixo Garcia, who had accompanied the ill-fated expedition of João Solis, sent back silver samples from the Incan Empire eight years before the arrival of Francisco Pizarro and his 168 men in the valley of Cajamarca.
Later the bandeirantes, or pioneers from São Paulo, carried a Portuguese presence to the Spanish viceroyalty of Peru and to the altiplano of what is now Bolivia and Colombia....Discoveries are not measured by landfalls alone...The Portuguese must be credit with diplomatic, commercial and religious initiatives in West and East Africa, India, Asia, and Indonesia, in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Such initiatives were fruit of knowledge and experience acquired in several continents over a proctated span of time.
The depth, breath and richness of intelligence- gathering by the Portuguese was a notable characteristic in the formation of their world...such information was topographical, cartographic, navigational, political, cultural, religious, social, and ethnographic...the quality of the intelligence, and the richness and diversity of information, are manifested in chronicles, narratives of voyages, accounts of embassies, Jesuitical letters, diaries, and official correspondence. Dignitaries of church and state, priests, missionaries, soldiers, sailors, men of science, pilots, merchants, physicians, adventurers, miners, and agriculturalists, felt compelled to write - or have written for them- accounts of their experiences...this brings to me an important characteristic of the Portuguese in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. This was their ability to put in good use the enormous data bank they had accumulated; this often took the form of diplomacy…
This Lusitanean world in motion was to have an ineradicable impact on Europe, Asia, Africa, and America"
STOP! COOKIE TIME