Page 90 - Art In The Age Of Exploration (Great Section on Chinese Art Ming Dynasty)

TRADITION AND INNOVATION:

COLUMBUS' FIRST VOYAGE AND PORTUGUESE
NAVIGATION IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY

Francis Maddison

6 mar salgado, quanto do teu sal Pero nada que toque a Colon puede ser simple
Sao lagrimas de Portugal! y diafano.
Varela 2
Valeu a pena? Tudo vale a pena
Se a alma nao e pequena.
So viele Berichte.
Deus ao mar o perigo e o abismo deu, So viele Fragen.
Mas nele e que espelhou o ceu. Brecht 3
Pessoa 1

The Manueline architecture of Lisbon and ary, the Castilians had completed the Christian ability to return to their port of departure, and
Coimbra uses, as a motif, an armillary sphere; Reconquista of Spain by the capture of the there is little evidence that they made even
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the same instrument appears on the meia esfera Moorish city of Granada, an event Columbus occasional use of any instrumental aid. The
(half sphere), a gold coin minted for Portuguese had witnessed. He was not ill-equipped for his Islamic navigators in the Indian Ocean, when
India during the reign of King Manuel i (r. journey across a scarcely explored ocean, first encountered by Europeans at the end of the
1495-1521). It was often depicted in medieval because his career, from his childhood in Genoa fifteenth century and the beginning of the six-
and Renaissance art as a symbol of astronomy — to his present service under the Spanish crown, teenth, though equipped with a simple instru-
as for instance to identify the fine limewood encompassed training as a Portuguese seaman, ment, the kamal, relied on oral rutters. These
bust of the Hellenistic astronomer Claudius with knowledge and some application of the were long poems containing navigational
Ptolemy, set up around 1470 by Jorg Syrlin the new Portuguese astronomical navigation. In the instructions, which the navigators could learn
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Elder on a choirstall in Ulm cathedral. The journal of his first voyage, he recorded: "I have and remember because of the meter and set
armillary sphere was an appropriate device to be spent twenty-three years at sea and have not phrases, much like the epic poems recited by
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given to Dom Manuel by his uncle, King Joao n left it for any length of time worth mentioning, Homer and later rhapsodes. More recently,
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(r. 1481-1495), because it was during the and I have seen everything from east to west, there is the evidence of the extensive skills of
reigns of these two kings of Portugal that navi- [by which he means that he has been to the Pacific peoples who navigate without charts or
gation developed from almost pure seamanship, north, that is, to England] and I have been to instruments, using traditional lore concerning
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which has its limitations, into a practice that, as Guinea". Though it was not until the latter part star positions, waves, and birds. 13
Fontenelle recognized in 1699, "hath a neces- of 1575 that the master of a Spanish ship was The direction of stars rising on the horizon
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sary connection with Astronomy/' The armil- required to keep a daily log book, Columbus would hardly be of use in overcast northern
lary sphere could not have been of much direct fortunately did so. We know from his journal latitudes; and other geographical constraints
use to seamen, except as a model from which to that he took with him marine compasses, quad- would have influenced the evolution of naviga-
learn cosmology and elementary astronomy: rant, "astrolabio" and sandglass; also that most tional procedures in different regions of the
"the figure of the [celestial] sphere, because ancient of nautical instrument, the lead and world. Possible connections between naviga-
mathematicians represent [with it] the form of line; and possibly some charts of the hither oce- tional practices in the distant past are forever
the machine of the sky, and the earth, with all anic coastline, a traverse table, and some form of obscure; even the medieval contacts between
the other details/ as the sixteenth-century his- solar declination table. Columbus was, in fact, the Atlantic sailors of northern and southern
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torian Damiao de Gois described it. Rather, it participating in the second of three important Europe remain undetermined. However, this
was an appropriate device because it was an revolutions in the technology of navigation, substratum of inherited knowledge, passed on
astronomical instrument, which derived from even though his successful thirty-three-day from masters to apprentices, concerning sea-
the same conceptual, historical, and technolog- voyage to the island of Guanahani, whose iden- sonal variation of observed celestial bodies, of
ical sources as the essential instruments on tity is still debated, where he arrived on 12 winds, of the directions of bird flight, of the
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which an astronomical navigation had to rely. October, no doubt owed much more to his sea- saltiness or other flavors of areas of ocean, of
When, on 3 August 1492, Columbus sailed manship than to accurate use of instruments. 10 warm or cool currents, and of the nature of the
with a nao (the Santa Maria) and two caravelles Much fantasy has been written about the use seabed, lies at the basis of all navigational activ-
(the Pint a and the Nina) from the port of Palos of instruments (for example, the planispheric ity from antiquity to the early medieval period
de Moguer (Huelva), on the Atlantic side of astrolabe) by early navigators, and the value of and even later when charts and nautical instru-
the Pillars of Hercules, on his first voyage — a remembered observation of natural phenomena ments had become available in Europe. Naviga-
voyage westwards in order to reach the East — often ignored. It is quite clear that in early tional practice off the Atlantic coast of southern
he was aware of furthering the expansion of medieval times the Vikings traversed vast areas Europe and northwest Africa, the Maghrib, was
Castile. At the beginning of the previous Janu- of inhospitable and featureless ocean, with the no doubt a combination of the experience and

EUROPE AND THE MEDITERRANEAN WORLD 89