Page 36 - Art In The Age Of Exploration (Great Section on Chinese Art Ming Dynasty)

PORTUGUESE NAVIGATION: ITS HISTORICAL

DEVELOPMENT

Luis de Albuquerque

H I avigation made spectacular progress in which remained coastal. This is demonstrated and provide no commentary beyond the nauti-
Europe during the fifteenth century. In the by the fact that ships, especially Italian vessels, cal information for which they were used.
course of that period, it became a technique would often stop on the way to and from I believe that the idea of representing mari-
rather than an art. This change was brought Flanders at Portuguese ports, principally Lis- time information graphically can be traced back
about not through any conscious decisions made bon. The Portuguese ports were practically en to the written portolans. They gave rise to
by its leading practitioners, but rather by their route, and stopping there enabled captains and nautical charts, which in the nineteenth cen-
responses to the external conditions with which merchants to open up additional opportunities tury came to be called portolan charts. The
they had to contend. for trade. The continued increase of these visits oldest known portolan chart is the anonymous
At the beginning of the fifteenth century, led to the enactment of legislation in Lisbon to Carta Pisana of the late thirteenth or early
the European navigators who sailed the longest regulate the life of foreigners, their rights, their fourteenth century, so called because it was
routes were exclusively Mediterranean peoples, trade, and the taxes they were required to pay. found in Pisa. It is in the collection of the
the Genoese and Venetians in particular, and There was some conflict with locals who were Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, but is not well-
also the Aragonese. Their vessels followed the interested in the same activities, but the royal preserved. Motzo related it to the particular
existing trade routes, from termini in the Near government knew how to handle these difficulties portolan he published; however, a portolan can
East all the way to the coast of Flanders, the so as not to frighten away the foreigners; they always be related to a chart, since the chart is
location of the large European spice fairs which provided a good income for the royal coffers. simply the graphic equivalent of the written text.
were the main incentive for this trade. This Not all the ships in the Mediterranean sailed What is certain, however, is that the nautical
maritime traffic had taken a major step forward from Genoa, Venice, or Aragon; there were of charts inevitably improved in tandem with the
at the end of the thirteenth century, when the course others engaging in maritime trade, in- improvement of the textual portolans. We even
ships plying the route had begun regularly to cluding the Portuguese. However, the routes have written proof that there were nautical
sail around the Iberian Peninsula and to unload sailed by these other vessels were not as long, charts before the familiar portolan chart; the
their goods at the ports of Flanders, rather than and they knew the art of navigation only by pilots were able to mark their location when
ending their voyage in southern France and adoption. The Genoese, the Venetians, the they were in open sea. The gradual improve-
consigning their cargoes to overland transport Aragonese and perhaps navigators from other ment of the nautical charts is particularly obvi-
to their final destination. This change had dra- Italian provinces had created the art of naviga- ous when one examines the progress of the
matic economic consequences, for it brought tion to suit the requirements of their own representation of northern Europe or the
irremediable decline to the principal crossroads shipping; the others applied the techniques as Canary Islands on the portolan charts. These
of the land route, such as Cahors, which had best as they could. eventually emerged fully indicated, with their
previously been an important financial center. A primary tool for navigation was the portolan, relative positions very accurately depicted. The
It had little effect on methods of navigation, a written description of the course along which Canaries, along with Cape Bojador on the Afri-
however, since the ships still kept as close as the ships sailed, indicating bays, capes, coves, can coast, virtually to their east, marked the
possible to the coastline from the point they ports, magnetic rhumb-lines, and the distances southern limit of the area of the Atlantic which
entered the Atlantic until they reached the between these places. These writings had their was represented. Some charts continued the
English Channel. antecedents in the so-called peripli of classical African coast to the south of that cape, some-
Sailing conditions in the Mediterranean had antiquity, some of which are still known, the times giving it a different name ("river of
made it possible to use coastal routes, and this is principal one being the periplus of the Red Sea. gold/' for example), but the coastline is shown
what had been done in most cases. There were One essential difference between the classical as being so even that it soon becomes obvious
clearly some navigators who did not hesitate to periplus and the medieval portolan is that the that no navigator had ever seen it. So when
sail in a north-south direction—the frequency information in the former was mainly commer- Gomes Eanes de Zurara wrote in his Chronicle
with which ships traveled to Cyprus and to cial whereas in the latter it was primarily nauti- of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea,
Malta proves this—but one could almost say cal. Today more than ten portolans survive, all dated 1453, of the addition beyond Cape Bojador
that the Mediterranean was a landlocked sea written in Italian. Motzo published and studied made to the traditional nautical chart by order
"especially navigated lengthwise/' In fact the the most important, which circulated under the of Prince Henry the Navigator (1394-1460), he
difference in latitude between any two points name of // Compasso daNavigare (The Navi- indicated specifically that this addition corres-
on the Mediterranean coast never exceeds six gational Compass), Kretschner analyzed and ponded to the truth as "something that had
degrees. edited the rest, almost all of which are known been seen."
It is clear that the new practice of sailing now by reference to the collection or library to Even before the nautical chart, however, the
around the Iberian Peninsula to Flanders did which the particular manuscript belongs. The so-called mariner's needle (the magnetic needle
not significantly change the art of navigation, texts employ a direct and little-varied language or compass) had been introduced into naviga-

EUROPE AND THE MEDITERRANEAN WORLD 35